Skip to main content

Cable Beach (no, not in Broome!)

Varying from tech stuff a bit, still, but this was fun!

Yesterday, I carefully took some time off to exercise my visual abilities, dragged a camera down to Cable Beach, grabbed some images of amazing waves (there’s a sort of cross-wave effect from the adjacent Cave Point rocks which leads to some quite bizarre wave-shapes), & of the rock added during a stormy night in recent years (6x8x30 feet, which makes it about 100 tonnes, yes we get real waves here) &… dolphins!

They leaped occasionally, but a few were literally riding in the waves as they rolled in to break, would occasionally extend a fin out of the wave to produce a tearing surfboard-like effect. I was wishing for my zoom lens, as that would have allowed something visible to mere mortals to fit within the lens.

Beyond the lighthouse (in which no light remains, but it has a radome & plenty of Yagi antennæ & a satt dish) there is another rock effect similar to The Gap (about 100m further past the Point) with wave-surges (driven by a light on-shore breeze) powering about 25-30m up the rocks & into the air. Cool!

The time off included watching some mudbrick manufacture, camera in hand, which might turn into an ad-hoc HowTo page.

Today’s exercise was to turn & de-flash (with a rubber mallet) the 227 made bricks from yesterday, then stack maybe 60 (roughly 1¼ tonnes) onto wooden pallets. Yes, it can get quite ærobic.

Comments

sen said…
sounds awesome, don't forget to link the pics :-)
Leon RJ Brooks said…
Pix at http://cable-beach-albany.fit2.bur.st/.

Sorry for the lag... life has been both busy & complex for a while.

Popular posts from this blog

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.