Sorry, that’s electric history?

The ThunderBolts crew have dug up another interesting chunk of history: a hirsute Venus.

The Ringu-Ringu people of central Queensland, “call the star Venus mimungoona or big eye” & assert that “no water exists in the star, but there are ropes which hang from its surface to the earth, by means of which the dwellers visit our planet from time to time, & assuage their thirst.”

Quotes in there from Jumbapoingo & other local crew.

Needless to say, these guys didn’t exactly have a Mount Palomar kicking around to observe these kinds of things with, so it follows that in the past these effects are likely to have been more visible, such as during each ion storm.

Little pieces of history like this are socio-locally interesting, as they reveal how “unqualified” people do in fact observe “impossible” things — & sometimes reconstruct them, in various ways. A habit, it seems, inherited by y’all FOSS hackers.

Another interesting electric quote:

faint supercluster-scale radio emissions at 326 megahertz between the Coma galaxy cluster & the Abell 1367 cluster. Given that radiation of that frequency must be produced by free electrons moving at certain very high speeds, we can infer magnetic-field strengths of 0.03-0.06 nanotesla stretching for some 490 million light-years. This corresponds to a galactic current of nearly 10¹⁹ amperes

Not a spot-welder to safely ignore!

Comments

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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