Month: December 2004

I ordered the wrong kind of cable for my digital image system, and the seller is shipping the right one to me — without even waiting for the other to be returned.

eBay’s feedback system needs to go to 11 for moments like this.

Now playing: You Can’t Hide by Maktub from the album “Khronos”

Let Them Eat Prose (Harpers.org):

Wanted, a reading public. This is what the publishers say is needed—that is, serious readers, those who care enough about books to buy them, own them, and really possess themselves of their contents. This is what the writers say is needed—the writers who are becoming almost more numerous than the readers. Nearly everybody writes for publication; it is impossible to provide vehicles enough for their contributions, and the reading public to sustain periodicals does not increase in proportion. Everybody agrees that this is the most intelligent, active-minded age that ever was, and in its way the most prolific and productive age. Is there a glut and overproduction in the literary world as well as in other departments? Isn’t it an odd outcome of diffused education and of cheap publications, the decline in the habit of continuous serious reading?

In my quest to build out the capacity to digitize a lot of old slides and negatives, I’m finding it to be a piecemeal affair.

A scanner I have, finally: I scored a Nikon Super Coolpix LS-2000, but at that price (US$89), it lacked cabling of any kind. So I am waiting for an UltraSCSI cable to show up before I even know if it works. I have a CD/DVD burner but the OS doesn’t believe in it: it’s so generic I have to use Toast (which freeware version shipped with the drive). But I have no DVD media so I can’t be sure how well it works (it will burn CDs and it was new, factory-sealed, so I’m optimistic).

I also got an 80Gb drive, since the old B&W this is all going into has a mere 12 Gb drive: too small to be really useful. And as luck would have it, it’s a Rev 1 Blue and White, so it can only take a single ATA drive: later releases — the Rev 2 models — could handle an additional drive.

As a result, I can either scrap the 12 Gb drive and replace it with the 80 or score an ATA card and add the 80 with room for more if I need it. A Mac-compatible one runs between US$40 and US$100. I’ll get one of those once I see some coin from my contract work (which won’t be til after the new year and school starts up). And there’s always that Google AdSense revenue rolling in . . . . (I don’t expect to see anything from there until June: if you’re familiar with AdSense’s pay schedule, you know why that is).

Judging by this, the additional controller card is the way to go: the data corruption risk and the fact that the on-board controller might not see anything with a DMA speed in excess of 33(!) don’t thrill me.
I really don’t want to sink a lot of cash into a machine this old (ca 1997) and I suppose this isn’t all that much. But let’s hope this is as bad as it gets.

A local hero is parting out some old Mac hardware (disks, RAM, etc.) and perhaps that will help stanch the flow.

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