So while I was snooping around with a light board and a loupe on some 35mm negatives, I ran across what appeared at first glance to be some images I did not remember having prints of. I tried to scan them, then I realized they were not 35 mm , but Kodak 126 negatives.
After Tam suggested sending them to The Darkroom, I was rewarded with this image of my Mother and Paternal Grandmother at the beach. Guessing by the cars in the parking lots, it was taken late 60's early 70's.
Fantastic, but I thought I would try out my limited Photoshop skills. I clicked on the "Fix old photo" stuff and was rewarded with this.
What a fantastic moment in time!
Way back when a TDR was expensive and huge. I had to sign for one and return the thing when I was done. Now? Pffft!
This just showed up at the house.
Heh! I love upgrading "electronally".
For the last several months my trusty Peltor ear muffs on the range have well, hurt! Then we dig a bit deeper as I don't want to wear them all day next Saturday in the condition they are in. Nor do I want to throw out some more bucks for new ones!
Guess what. The old foam ear cups are toast. I ordered some gel filled replacements and you an see the difference!
So, on the bottom we have the old foam muffs. On the headset itself, we have new spanking gel filled stuff. Supposedly, they fit ANY Peltor model. They feel wonderful!
Take care of your range gear as well as the hardware!
A really cool mashup of graphics and audio of the Apollo 11 landing.
These arrived today at stately manor in my absence. I'll run them through the paces sometime next week. Concealed Carry Handgun class tomorrow =).
It does leave wounded behind though.
See this:
AT&T home cell thingy. It does not have the strength to ring the bells on this, nor deal with pulse dial.
Nor this:
Last I heard was POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) had to present ringing voltage of at least 120 VAC over -48VDC.
Since AT&T at&t is trying to kill POTS, it makes sense.
So now, I need to figure out how to detect the ringing from the thingy and boost it to run the ringers on these phones.
Sigh....
It seems I can take "selfies" to a new level. Put the WiFi thingy in the camera and then fire up the iThingy. Remote control! Woo-hoo! I'm still left with less than entertaining subject matter though.
Here is the screen shot of the iThingy app.
And the final result!
Sigh.. I need to update my photo editing software to deal with the RAW format. This is JPEG Fine format and compressed for the Web.
So I DID NOT break the camera though! I have that going for me =)
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One of my Blog Mothers went to Grissom Air Museum and posted a lot of great pics of old hardware. She had a picture of the B-58 Hustler, one of the Strategic Air Commands aircraft designed to drop nukes on the commies during the height of the Cold War. There is another one of those at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. It was Wright Patterson Air Force base back in the day.
I had to dig a photo out from 1976 of an XB-70 Valkyrie there.
Sorry for the photo quality, the Kodak 110 Instamatic did the best it could.
So I also have to present this. The visitor map for Seymour Johnson AFB from the mid seventies. It was a SAC base. Back then it was pretty straightforward. KC-135 Stratotanker's, F-4 fighters, and B-52 bombers.
It looked like this:
Oh, thanks to her for pointing out the Douglas X-3 Stiletto behind this handsome dude!
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A friend wanted to see how his 9mm reloads were running at 3.9 grains of Titegroup powder with 124 Gn bullets. I brought this to the range:
A Competition Electronics Chronograph. Here are the results:
Last round was a Speer Personal Defense round for comparison.
Interesting spread. The pistol ran fine but occasionally would not go to slide stop. He's going to bump it up a tenth of a grain and we will repeat.
Random tech notes from the past couple of days. Although I grumble about the ministrations to make all the tech stuff work, sometimes favor can be found.
Take this for example. A fellow Blogger went to a concert last night and posted a link to a youtube video of one of the songs by the band. I listened to it at *ahem* work and heard it through the really crap speakers and monitor there.
I came home and searched for the link on my PC to send to my TV and home audio system. I was rewarded via Wi-Fi connection of the TV by this:
Although the audio was compressed, it was good enough after running through the receiver's gentle algorithms for restoration. A bit better than RIAA equalization as a matter of fact. Good enough means that. Not as good as the CD or *gasp* vinyl it did rock the house though.
Then this.
Gismo on the right is the at&t Wireless Home Phone thingy. After dealing with the local Telco last year, this was painless.
I have my problems with at&t.
They got this right though. Porting the number? Done. Two day delivery of the gismo and simple activation? Done.
Don't get me wrong. I still like old school!
Just nice to see all the happy shiny stuff work for a moment.
Because I have a deep loathing for large monopolistic entities I have decided to switch from one to the other. TWC/Comcast has my primary phone service here at stately manor with a VOIP modem. 50 bucks American a month.
AT&T at&t sent me a letter offering this:
What is it? A Cell phone disguised as home phone service. At 20 bucks American a month I thought I would give it a try. The hardware has shipped, lets see if porting the number over from TWC goes as smooth. I'm thinking not. at&t did not ask for third party verification for the port.
As with all such matters if all goes by the book, its swell. Any deviation and I stand a good chance of loosing service for a bit of time.
The repair in and of itself was not difficult. Getting to it was. The safe uses an automotive trunk unlatching solenoid for activation. After you figure out how to get into the thing, all gets better.
Solder the wire back onto the power switch. OK! I have come this far (protip for tech people it's already broke, you might as well go for it).
Find some tools and get at it.
And Ta-Dah! Safe works well!
Hey. I'm a geek and yet I still get frustrated with less than thought out tech. Check this out.
This is a ETL Secure Logic wall safe. I installed it oh, about 6 years ago. It is basically a steel box attached to interior wall studs. I would not put the family jewels in here as the easiest way to defeat this thing is a battery powered circular saw to remove it from the wall studs. It IS a steel box that would drive your average crack head crazy though and is fantastically convenient.
It is powered by one of these.
A battery (duh). So what do we keep it in it? Routine stuff. It's rather pedestrian too.
Sadly though, while attempting to replace the battery one of the leads came off the motherboard. It was not soldered, wire tied, or any other known form of stress relief for a wire known to man or child. Simply pressed on a pin on the board. So now I have to remove this thing from the wall and see if I can can repair it.
In the meantime, the company seems to have gone the way of many others. No customer service, no phone number, no Website.
Sigh.... I guess that when it comes to the stuff that matters I stick to such (low) tech:
The best I can do after a week of fummotzing around looking for any tech support for Cincinnati Dynacomp Cincinnati Electrosystems, TotalControl, GEFanuc operator workstations ended here. Plus side? Well, I get to set the wayback machine and boot a computer to DOS and whip out the RS-232 stuff. Minus? I HATE serial com.
So after receiving the proceeds of my interest free loan to .gov over the past year I decide to upgrade my TV. I'm giving the old one to Mr. Curmudgeon for the man cave to help insure domestic tranquility there for him and Mrs. Curmudgeon.
So I have to really see what the new one can do. I received this today.
After throwing away ST1 and ST5 I load of course the favorite of almost any fan, STII The Wrath of Khan.
I am greeted with this display on the A/V receiver:
Ok, I have been around the block with consumer electronics for some time. I sold Nakamichi cassette decks back in the day and they were equipped with Dolby "B" and "C" noise reduction. Then came the video stuff. Dolby 2.1, 5.1, 7.2, etc.
I have never observed this display on the receiver before. Protip, set your PS3 or anything else to "Bitstream" to send to the amp. Let it figure out what you are sending to it and decode.
Dolby TrueHD is described here.
The audio rocks. The picture is quite frankly impressive.
Although most of my age only remember Ricardo Montalbán as a dude selling some leather on a Chrysler or as the ice cream uniform from Fantasy Island, he had a storied career as an accomplished actor. He owned this movie. ILM did the effects and for the day they kept up with Mr. Montalban.
I find the tears of hippies fun. In honor of the really good conversation on FB tonight I offer this little radio .
I assume that the fact that this radio consumes more power than what is currently powering the house they will find objectionable. Perhaps want it banned. No matter. I powered it up tonight in honor of the "scientists" for global warming stranded and now the USCG is going to attempt a rescue after several failed attempts.
Irony. I do love it!
This Christmas I received a thoughtful gift! A lineman test set from back in the day. Before I go further I need to know how to take care of the leather on it. Looks like this:
Neatsfoot oil? Saddle soap? Any suggestions for this piece of history? I know the Retrotechnologist can help with the internals, but first things first!
Well I got this about 30 minutes ago from the brown truck of happiness.
I'm in the tech biz but I had to back up for a moment and be stunned. One day delivery from an Internet order. A 1 TERABYTE hard drive for my computer?!?!
Lets put this into perspective.
The Apollo 11 Lunar Landing Module had a computer that had 2K of memory. I have for under 80 bucks a TeraByte harddrive. The numbers look like this:
I continue to be amazed.Take a look at this old school pilot fly his craft even when the computer is telling him that it can't handle it.1202 Alarm.
So I'm at a loss as to what caused the PC here to take a really big dump on the floor yesterday. Either the NVIDIA video card or the 19" CRT monitor had a failure and took each other out, or the software video drivers got corrupted.
Sigh....
Run out and get a happy shiny new LCD monitor. Remove the video card and go back to the integrated video hardware. HELLO ACER! Your manual sucks and if I had to go to Google to figure out where THE POWER SWITCH is on the monitor? You are doing it wrong!
Go find the Intel motherboard drivers for the video. Yes, Intel is getting out of the MB biz and I get that. I will say this though. I was able to get the drivers from the Intel site for a Model DG31PR board. They did try to take care of the customers.
SO, Abby something indeed. This thing is a old desktop PC. Some are saying the desktop is over. We shall see, but I think corporate drones are not going to give up on them anytime soon.
So having become thoroughly fed up with my VOIP and Internet provider recently, I have chosen to kick those that shall not be named *CoughTimeWarnerCable,Cough*, to the curb. I opted for GTE, Verizon, Frontier to provide POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), high speed interwebz, and long distance service to stately manor.
There is a problem though. I was too clever by half when wiring the casa in 2006. I now need to find my notes to move back from a cable based service to CAT 5e distribution.
I still need to provide service to the old phones, backup to the alarm, and well, still make phone calls to annoy my friends occasionally (friends, you have been warned).
I accept the challenge because loosing over half the cable bill monthly is worth it!
