Wormholes in space?

Douglas Adams once wrote about pens sneaking through wormholes in space to a planet of their own, where they built a peaceful biroid civilisation.

I think I’ve just run across a similar situation.

I recently opened my suitcase to match a loose sock against its pair-mate, & discovered — sitting more-or-less in plain view — a battery charger (& three AA cells) which I had been completely unable to find (despite disassembling the suitcase, the backback, & pretty much the entire room) at my last stop.

The charger unit is a single unit about the size of a plug-pack (~5x6x2cm), so kind of difficult to overlook in a suitcase maybe 100x60x20cm.

This find, with the recovery of my soldering iron, screwdrivers, side-cutters & solder, makes me glad that my next hop will not be on an aeroplane.

In fact, due to Metro thoughtfulness, I can be dropped in the nearest town centre (a couple of km, I could walk it easily enough... even dragging the subsequently-mentioned ’case), take a bus down to the city on any hour, take another bus (a different service to the one which did not arrive last time) across the few kilometers to the interstate railway station, & sit quietly on a train (sans endless suitcase-lugging) with plenty of hours to spare.

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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