Linux Advocate in Western Australia
Technology can be a useful servant, however is not so safe in the rôle of master. In thinking, there is a balance between reason and emotion. If one dominates, the outcome(s) may not be so functional. When emotion dominates, the thinker tends to come to conclusion(s) they are comfortable with and trust, yet are irrational. When reason dominates, the thinker tends to omit context which has a…
repurposing — these things (from some discarded microwave ovens — another person has a specific use for the magnetron bias magnets from same) push through over 1kW, and they all seem to be functional thus far. driving them is... not quite as simple as it may appear, however, strapping in a second core may allow for magnetic leverage. for the cost... hmmm...
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…
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.
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…
There is an ancient PowerPC-based Macintosh (still working!) about 18km West of here. The chap who began using it about two decades ago has a need to access some of the CAD files on it, and to print some of those out. So I installed QEMU on an hp laptop I own (based on Lubuntu), then a PowerPC emulator module for it, Mac OS 9.2 on that (retired 17 years ago), the free CAD package, and a…
Posit a human being who claims to be Christian. They might also claim to be Atheist, or Hindu, or almost anything else. To this particular individual, the most important person is their grandiose — false — self-image. Everyone else (everything else) comes secondary to that. Regardless of their claims, the belief system they follow is Virtual Idolatry. “Virtual?” Yes. There is zero tangible…
Person T has had Person A design a one-page flyer and sent it to Person J... as a single image. Person T is two hours ahead, time-zone wise, and Person A is roughly 12 hours behind. Person J also wishes to email out the flyer with hyperlinks on each of two names in the image. Sent as a bare image, she will not fly. Embedding the image in a PDF would allow only the entire image to possess a single…
“What do you actually need it to do?” That one question can simplify a process so very much. The outcome as a whole can become simpler, when features which are not necessary for this to be able to do are discarded. The outcome can become cheaper, as less resources are required to perform fewer functions. The outcome can become untangled from ‘political’ factors such as who might have a vested…
Today, another will switch from the Borg to Kubuntu. All that was necessary was to list the things one can do without viruses, without paying the proverbial arm-and-leg, without facing six conflicting EULAs to use one application. Done. In less sanguine news, it became apparent that the heartless hypocrite has further isolated one of their emotional slaves.
Two for our gummint to think upon... ...oh, and one more for a person who can do no wrong... in their own eyes, anyhow... you do actually have a possible future, one which centres on choosing to no longer be totally self-righteous, and sticking to that choice:
battery-pack contacts Canon LP-E6 battery packs (such as those using in my 70D camera) have two fine connector wires used for charging them. These seem to be a weak point, as (if left to themselves) they eventually fail to connect well, which means that they do not charge adequately, or (in the field) do not run the equipment at all. One experimenter discovered that scrubbing them with the edge of…
In this case, it was similar to having the garbage dispose of itself... except for the kidnappees also taken and reprogrammed into psychopathy, as was done to the kidnapper when they were an infant.
Imagine a roadblock which is a wall of perfectly transparent AeroGel. Here you are, barrelling down a highway at the speed limit, when suddenly you realise that you have come to a halt, so gently that you weren’t aware of as much as having slowed down. Viola! You now have some idea of what is like to have been Gaslighted for over 5000 days by a person who is an emotional vampire: their goal is not…
Would a book entitled “I married a Psychopath” or the like sell well? One of the risks here for even a strong Empath is that there are no “red flags” in the differences between feelings and expression of them (body-language etc), for the very simple reason that there are no feelings , so there are no differences to sense. It must be a lonely, empty life for someone who consists only of an empty…
Today, as I walked into a grocery store, I spotted a person whom I know (call them ‘Pan’ as a suitable acronym/handle) at the other end of an aisle. They were dressed in a “power” colour and black, were (as always) so wrapped up in themselves that they were oblivious to everything outside their circle of interest, and were dominating a conversation with an older couple. The husband was…
A cowboy named Billy was overseeing his herd in a pasture in remote countryside one day, when suddenly a brand-new BMW drove towards him out of a cloud of dust. The driver, a young man in a Brioni® suit, Gucci® shoes, RayBan® sunglasses and YSL® tie, leaned out of the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?” Billy…
When you have a use for 4kV at up to 300mA, some of the microwave ovens so often discarded in solid-waste collection runs include these. Driving the primary of a Tesla coil through a spark-gap (or maybe an IGBT-based switch) with one of these would lead to a really fancy-looking electric fence (modulate the pulses to make the fence play Orpheus In The Underworld, or perhaps add a MIDI interface?)…
If you happen to be totally self-righteous and inwardly terrified that others might realise this and scorn you to oblivion, there is a very simple step you can take: realise that you’re not even fooling yourself, that we all make mistakes, that the huge mega-dose of shame you’re accumulating for yourself will be unbearable when it hits, and begin apologising. What? Yes, you really are a legend in…
This morning, I saw that old truism in action: “Avarice is the root of all kinds of evil.” As I drove by the ANZAC park, just before the new(ish) Entertainment Centre here, I drove past a pigeon (one of several) who had been unfortunate enough to fail in a space dispute with two tonnes of moving metal... and a Silver Gull which had been so intent on eating its part (as much as possible) of the…
“Backup regularly” has just had a new win. Behold, a letter informing a creditor that there was no reason to believe that any of half a million dollars could be collected from a debtor who had gone through a mental breakdown etc. Behold, another letter thanking a mother-in-law for providing the final payments on a house initially bought with half a million dollars “mistakenly” paid into their own…
Ingredients: avconv, ImageMagick, some images, a LibreOffice Writer doc, tiMIDIty, some shell scripting, DeVeDe. Result: A video slideshow with neat fades from image to image & background music... zero ©opyright material involved anywhere. ImageMagick scales images to 720x480 (saved as PNG for losslessness). convert -gravity center -font "Sansation-Bold" -pointsize $PS \ -draw "fill white text 0,0…
This will probably make it more difficult for Micro$oft to shamelessly swipe Android features fast enough to give the appearance of keeping up, as they evidently did prior to releasing Windows 8. Hmmm... that would be really worth my exploring in particular for one child for whom I could most definitely adjust software in order to simplify their reconciliation of an unconventional approach with…
OK, so I was a Lego® kid... Problem: a LibreOffice Writer document (pasted in from from a web page a while ago) has the original URL in every footnote link... which doesn’t make for such an enjoyable off-line reading experience after has been PDFed. If this was an MS-Word document? “Raise hands in air, exit stage left, screaming...” However, we are dealing with Free/OpenSource Software here, so...…
So... a DVD needed a prequel video by way of brief introduction... what to do? The basic problem solving process is to break a problem down & solve each smaller piece separately, so... Using GIMP , annotate a brief set of explicatory slides. Using Imagination , turn those slides into a silent video clip. Using Audacity , record a narration while the slideshow video clip is playing. Select a…