It turns out that CRT monitors are still useful

I stayed at a B&B two weekends ago which has an ADSL Internet connection, an office PC & a WiFi-connected personal laptop (which I redid the config on so it actually connected, happily the WiFi router's password set was still admin/admin).

Next visit to the area, they’ll also have an Internet cafe workstation since they have room for a 19" CRT (old-style glass television) screen, since I have 13 of those sitting behind my house, plus a few “old” PCs including a couple of dual-core 3GHz to which I can fit a pair of 512MB DDR2 DIMMs & a random (80GB) IDE hard drive.

A selected PC is about to grow a copy of Maverick Meerkat Kubuntu & simple instructions for manually re-creating the default user (as in, Ctrl-Alt-F1, log in, “sudo su sh scriptname” to remove the home directory tree & unpack a new template from a .tar.bz2 file).

Said template will include a Flash plugin, a Video DownloadHelper plugin, a reasonable set of bookmarks, an “empty” Thunderbird config. Plus a default web page set to a local HTML file detailing basic instructions.

The install will include Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird, OpenOffice defaulting to MS-Office file formats, ffmpeg, GIMP, Audacity, k9copy, & a few other toys.

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

Search This Blog