Y’know, 2 days is a looooong time...

...to spend whizzing across a flat spot in a train.

Some of the eagles were impressive. I lost count of the number of thousands of concrete sleepers stacked alongside the tracks. There are a few hysterical^H^H^Hhistorical spots worth seeing. A mine-site. Oh, & looots ’n’ lots ’n’ lots of flat dirt, sometimes interspersed with saltbush.

Plus the odd freight-train or few (including one which broke down west of Kalgoorlie, clagging the line for an hour & a half). The front-end loader with a flat tyre about 500km from the nearest civilisation in SA was quite memorable.

Some of the bush in towards Perth was actually quite pretty. As was a 22yo German passenger while she self-chiropracted during reaching up to fetch her bag from a rack at about 04:00 this morning.

Some of the perambulations & gyrations undertaken by seat (not “sleeper”) passengers while they attempted to rearrange themselves for comfortable rest were also quite amazing.

The food was also quite non-rippily priced for a captive market, which was a good thing considering that I finished the trip with $1.25 spare (after buying a bus/train ticket at the East Perth station).

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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