“What if the fetus you were going to abort would grow up to be a soldier bringing democracy to a godless dictatorship?” Merry Christmas.
I finally got around to scanning the medium-format negatives I shot in Oregon last year. Overall, I’m very pleased with the results—amazed, actually. Besides a yellow cast on the film, probably due to the flatbed scanner color-shifting negative to positive, and two examples where I double-exposed the film, I got a handful of beautiful shots on one roll. For these shots, I cheated with the light meter on my Canon, shooting the scene first digitally and then transferring the shutter speed and aperture settings to the Rolleicord. Now that I’ve got a better grasp of that relationship, I can take full advantage of the camera’s potential.
This is enough success to consider buying a flatbed scanner with a transparency adapter and shooting a lot more medium-format film. Can anyone with color developing experience tell me if it’s stupidly expensive to do at home, or more complicated than black and white?
Last week, when I took my family to see the, uh, unique display of Christmas cheer that is 34th Street, I spied a small sign in a window high above the busy street: A tombstone-style wooden radio flanked by a pair of antennas, under the title “Retro Radio/Audio-Visual Service”. Excited, I patted my pockets for a piece of paper and a pencil, then suddenly remembered I was carrying a camera. Duh.
Today, after getting my Garfunkel cut in the same neighborhood, I stopped back over to 34th Street to investigate. I was met at the door by a very friendly older man who invited me in out of the snow to a landing surrounded by radios, amplifiers, and electronic equipment of all sizes and shapes. At that moment, I knew my ten-year search was over.
Long ago, when I suddenly got into collecting old tube radios, there wasn’t a whole lot of information to be found on repair. I cleaned the cabinets up but had no idea how to fix the wiring inside. After some research, I found a guy in the phone book who did radio repair, and drove out to Lauraville to meet him. The shop was old-school to the point of time warp: rickety shelves holding dusty TVs and radios, oscilloscopes, HAM equipment, and assorted junk, old RCA and Emerson signs, and a pleasant musty smell. I remember the proprietor as a wiry old fellow who seemed surprised a skinny kid was bringing him a set to work on, but he told me to leave it with him for a couple of days and he’d see what he could do.
$30 later, I had a working set that sounded as good as it looked, and I started bringing him more as I could afford it—he rebuilt five or six of my bakelite sets, and sorted out the guts of my console (no small task). After about six months of regular visits, other financial priorities kicked in, and I had to postpone further repairs. A few years passed, and by the next time I was able to return, the storefront was completely gone, replaced with a CVS parking lot.
The fellow I met today was friendly and personable, and as I talked with him, I started mentally cataloging my collection to decide which one would get looked at first: the wooden Philco, or the wooden Emerson? Or, maybe the off-brand Everbest?
This is the sound of sweet, sweet irony sinking its razor-sharp teeth into a deserving ass: MPAA’s University wiretapping product taken down for violating copyright. In essence (the information at the end of the link is murky), the MPAA used open-source code (GNU, a flavor of the *NIX operating system) to develop a sniffer to detect copyright violations on university networks, which they offered publicly. They used the code without honoring the attached license (the GPL), which states that full attribution and disclosure of the source code must be made public, and therefore violated the terms of the DMCA (legislation their lobbyists they helped draft). Under the DMCA, a member of the Ubuntu community sent their ISP a takedown notice, which the ISP complied with under terms of the DMCA.
