double-booking Berne, chocolate shortbread

Had a couple of little strokes of happiness in the last few days (don’t make up for the irrecoverable king-hit of recent weeks — co-starring medical symptoms & other consequences — but...) in that when I went looking for Eric Berne TA books, the library had one of many which they are getting in for me — in a while — & book-shops “could get” for $$$ I don’t have... then in Elizabeth’s (Perth branch) I found “What do you say after you say Hello?” which is an excellent primer. To my surprise, today I found “Games People Play” in a random 2nd-hand bookshop in Warwick (one of the benefits of a push-bike over busses is the ability to dally for a while en route).

The mint-slice balls were only half-effective (paranoia saw about half given away), but I got to drop a little basket of chocolated short-breads before a random Real Estate receptionist (also very slim, concept of “fat” self-evidently ludicrous, appreciated help making tabs work right on MS-Word) today, which earned her a bunch of interested friends.

Tech micro-blurb: suspending my laptop to disk, as well as maintaining a really-fictitious uptime, also makes dodgy wireless links survive overnight.

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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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