Show-stopper diet

Bumped into a lady (late 30’s) on a train last night who was (against the TransPerth rules) assembling a nice non-hot curry & munching it with some rice bikkies.

Conversation landed on the curry & the ingredients for the bikkies. It turns out that she’d recently given up smoking, but was unable to stay that way. Why?

Because her husband has a variant on CJD, a nasty degenerative disease which essentially wastes away your brain cells en masse.

That sort of shook things into perspective very suddenly.

My own problems are manifold & intrusive (featuring aspects like malice, & rash (but AFAICT non-malicious) mistakes apparently made through fear) but really don’t compare with the certainty of having your loved one’s mind vanish, cell by cell, until they die a confused zombie.

On the lighter side, I was able to make the day of a lass running a perfume stand (which was driving her troppo but funded her ECU studies of forensics) by the simple expedient of buying her an ice-cream in a cup with chocolate topping & a Flake — which completely non-plussed her but was eagerly accepted & hidden away in the complexities of the stand.

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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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