I love the kid who is hamming it up at the bottom of the frame. I've been a photographer/videographer for my entire professional career and have run into this kid many, many times. Adults exhibit this behavior too but it is usually much more moderated.
This kid had to know what a camera was, which end was filming (some early film cameras appeared to be simple boxes), and wanted to make his mark on the final product.
It’s crazy to me watching this and thinking that if that kid lived to 100 he would’ve died 30+ years ago. That unknown child will be forever captured on this film.
Every time I watch old films with children in them I always think about how they’ve been dead, hopefully of old age, for a long time already.
Not to be grim, but he was the perfect age class to spend 4 years in the trenches...
The French males born in 1894 had a 92% mobilization rate (those who survived infant mortality that was still huge at the time). In 1920, only 48% of this age class was still alive (the big three killer being infant mortality, combat losses and the "Spanish" (Kansas) flu).
There's a German black-and-white comedy "Die Feuerzangenbowle" from 1944 and most of the actors knew this was going to be their last film. They were drafted into the war right after filming wrapped up and all of them died, apart from the main star.
You may be thinking of a different film, as all the cast members listed on wikipedia[0] are stated to have died after 1945.
The trivia section of the German wiki page of the same film says there's a disputed rumour that the film was prolonged to help the young extras avoid conscription.
> Every time I watch old films with children in them I always think about how they’ve been dead, hopefully of old age, for a long time already.
I've got movies (black & white, no audio) recorded on a "Pathe-Baby" camera [1] from my grand-mother and her sister, my great-aunt, in the early 1920s, where they're both little girls playing.
I knew them both very well, they lived through WWII in Europe and they both died old. My great-aunt lived until her 100th year.
Very few things are as moving as this little, short Pathe Baby vids I've got of them.
A few years ago we asked a little local shop to convert these to digital format and these files are precious treasure in the family.
I have the "Apollo Remastered" book and it is gorgeous. I'm going to buy this one too. Obviously they went back to the original film from the missions and did a full scan. NASA almost never gives access to the original film and instead we have been seeing duplicate transparencies which involves a loss of detail and dynamic range. They were good enough back then. But these first generation scans cannot be matched for detail and color.
This article keeps coming back up. I know so many people in Oregon who freaked out about this and started prepping go-bags and family emergency plans. Yet nobody really thinks about it much now. Such is human nature.
A while back on this forum I explained how I have my truck camper fully fueled, stocked with water, foo, and propane. Its electrical system is solar charged but it also has a built-in generator. It’s in this “ready mode” as an emergency shelter for my family. We don’t get much warning with an earthquake.
I was ridiculed by a few folks who seemed to suggest I was a paranoid prepper. But this article and its message have never left my mind.
I’m very curious about your setup and have a few questions.
If the big one hits, do you think you’ll be able to drive anywhere, or will the roads be so destroyed and traffic so bad you’ll just get gridlocked in?
Where do you plan to drive to?
Once you run out of food, water and gas what are your plans?
I’ve driven through some of the least developed and most dangerous countries on earth (DRC, Sudan, Mali, etc) in my personal vehicles and I’m always curious if people have really thought it through, or just surface level
i.e. everyone says gas vehicles are better than EVs in a disaster, because you don’t rely on the power grid. I’ve waited days in a line to buy gasoline because there was no power to pump it out of the ground.
I love the idea of an RV disaster escape/survival vehicle. Which we'd use regularly for recreation, but (without telling any kids) with the fun secretly doubling as improving our disaster survival skills, and refining our supplies and gear.
I'd also secretly train kids for rapid escape: "Surprise trip! Let's see how fast we can get in the van! Gogogo!" After that, secretly train for not-unlikely exceptions, like the road is blocked, between us and higher ground or our bugout location.
The older I get, the more I get more interested in the tidal flows of information
It's both misunderstood and understood.
Ex. Given a 9 year old article, we jump from "so many people freaked out" to "nobody cares about it now." --- nobody cares is easy falsified --- but then we confirm it and attribute it to "human nature". (which much like astrology, people will fill in that gap with any time they perceived others as not-caring about something they care about it)
But, we also recognize the article is reposted and on the front page again, indicating it is novel to a large subset of people. Despite the fact it has been posted no less than 25 times.
I think we need to find some ethical and sustainable alternatives to emergency communications. HAM radio is still very much around along with alternative satellite communications. There's also been some DIY efforts in using LoraWAN-based messengers and such.
I do love optical media and have a considerable CD, DVD, minidisc, and blu-ray collection. Like a Luddite, I still enjoy burning my own.
I especially like my Superscope disc copier. It completely disregards copy protection and I frequently make a backup of my favorite CDs which I store. Although much of my stock are older blanks (like those listed in this article)I’ll be sad if CD-R disappears from the market.
Do you have any advice for burning CD-Rs that will play on old players? My Sony CD changer, and the CD players in both cars won’t play CD-Rs I make. They play CDs fine. I assume it is because the lasers have gotten weaker with time and can’t read the CD-Rs which don’t have as much difference between a 1 and 0 pit compared to stamped CDs? I even ordered Verbatim ones with blue azo dye that was supposed to help but still no dice.
I have this problem as well with my 2005 Prius CD player, and my 2005 Odyssey's changer before I replaced that car. I think only the highest quality CD-Rs written at the lowest possible speed is your best bet, but I think there are more variables than that.
Could you recommend a usb CD drive for ripping audio CDs? A local library that I frequent has an extensive jazz collection and I'd like to rip it before they remove it, as I think it's just a matter of time before they do so.
If you just want to rip audio CDs, pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine. If you want a drive that can do everything up to and including UHD BD, try a Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD if you like slot loading or a Pioneer BDR-XD07B if you need a top-loader with snap-spindle for mini CDs or oddly-shaped CDs. These will cost way more than an old USB2-era drive but will be brand new.
You might be able to trawl your local thrift store and walk out with a $5 external drive from the 2000s, but a drive like that should be opened, dusted out, lens cleaned, and rails lubricated with some PTFE grease: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081JE0OO
> pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine.
This is not the case. Most of the cheap drives on Amazon sold by random capital letters people are complete shit. As an example, the "CB31005" drive doesn't fucking work. It often gets hung up on reading the TOC and won't even admit there is a CD in the drive. If it doesn't hang there, it reads fine for a while, then at some random point (possibly the first point of error) just gives up and fails to read sectors, forevermore, until you unplug and replug the drive.
Even with EAC (which is indeed very good), it just spends hours re-reading sectors up to its maximum number of retries, giving up, and inserting silence. Do not buy a CB31005.
Drat, I didn't realize the six-letter people had gotten to optical drives. The cheapest (materially and monetarily) I'd previously encountered was like a very very cost-reduced LG SATA drive which was $20 but still worked perfectly.
> Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping software
What makes it the best? I assumed that, since you're just reading digital data, any ripping software would do the same job in terms of quality, and the only differences would mostly be about having some convenient features or a better UI.
CD audio data is indeed lossless data, and has some form of spreading the data physically (CIRC), but has limited error correction. Data CDs have more error correction data than audio CDs, so are more resilient to media degradation, scratches, etc.
When CD audio has errors, more often than not, the CD drive conceals the error -- it interpolates for this unreadable data and doesn't tell the host. Some drives do report C2 errors, but many lie about their capabilities, or have poor implementations.
Secondly, when you ask for CD audio, you can't say "give me the samples from 00:01:23.567 to 00:49:20.211". You can say "seek to 00:01:23.567; start playing; give me the audio samples over ATA as you read them". You can also say "tell me where you think you are on the disc right now". CD drives do not do this reliably, or give reliable answers. Exact Audio Copy is looking to detect this and account for it.
EAC is best used with drives which reliably report wrong locations, i.e. are always wrong by a fixed amount, and EAC can learn by how much by comparing how your drive reports known discs to what's in the AccurateRip database.... but EAC can also work with drives that are unreliably wrong as well, it just has to read the same audio data multiple times over to get a good fix on where that audio really is on the CD.
Any drive will be capable of ripping just fine. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty finding a drive with well known read offsets and the ability to defeat the drive cache is a good bet so you can compare against the accuraterip database.
Not all CD-ROM drives, even those that can play audio, can be used to rip digital audio. Some only have an analogue audio output for playing CDs. I know at least some IDE CD-ROM drives can't read digital audio.
It might be true that all SATA drives can read digital audio.
Note of caution about others comments that suggests using cheap CD drive, audio CDs tracks have no redundancy checks, and production of ripping artifacts is directly related to the drive raw accuracy.
That said CD seek is so slow that drives cannot really afford to rely much on redundancy checks, so maybe this is not of concern.
Fun fact: in the G4/G5 era, the SuperDrive was a Pioneer DVR-1xx rebadged. That's how I got into them in the first place :)
This is also why the Pioneer-branded models work just perfectly in Mac OS 9 and every version of Mac OS X with no PatchBurn necessary: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/patchburn
As others said, the only thing you should be looking for is a drive that works with Accuraterip. Ripping discs from my local library is a hobby of mine and I've discovered so much music from there. I still buy CDs from thrift shops and the occasional garage sale, but having my music collection neatly organized and ripped/verified in FLAC is something I enjoy a lot.
any CD-R drive can do that, and they are dirt cheap (you should only say CD for audio which refers to audio output rather than the audio CDs themselves) CD-R drives can read audio CDs.
Yes, and even then only for Ultra HD Blu-ray. Regular BDs should still usually work unless they're uncommon enough to not have a title key known to MakeMKV.
“A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are accessed directly, without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive would never refuse to read the data from the disc or declare itself ‘revoked’. LibreDrive compatible drive is required to read UHD discs.”
Check your drive anyway. Purchased after that date does not necessarily mean manufactured after that date :)
It sucks that firmware updates used to be a thing to look forward to but now are something to be avoided at all cost. I'd rather buy a second drive if I needed some new feature.
MakeMKV will show you all the relevant drive info when you start it up, including LibreDrive status. Here's my BDR-XS07 for example: https://i.imgur.com/10CGsbm.png
With a combination of MakeMKV, DVDfab Passkey, and a LibreDrive-supporting drive I can rip pretty much anything. Passkey is a driver-level thing like AnyDVD HD. Both of them are available perpetually-licensed but AnyDVD is currently being legaled and is unavailable: https://www.dvdfab.cn/passkey.htm
You can try MakeMKV for free using the beta key posted monthly on their subreddit, but I just went ahead and bought it because it's not that expensive and then I don't have to think about it: https://old.reddit.com/r/makemkv/comments/1jolbsq/the_may_ke...
I'm currently going through and backing up my library with Passkey's “Rip to Image”. Due to the way LibreDrive works, it's common for MakeMKV to be able to make MKVs (lol) directly from a BD/UHD disc in the drive but fail to open a protected ISO of the same title. For this reason I uncheck “Keep Protection” in Passkey for anything AACS (BD, UHD, HD-DVD (yes I have an HD-DVD drive)) so I can run the image through MakeMKV later. I do check “Keep Protection” for DVDs however, because CSS is fully broken and I want to do the most untouched rip possible.
After losing power twice for over a week in the depths of winter We installed a transfer switch to allow hooking up a generator. This cost around $200 (my brother-in-law did the electrical for free). We already have a generator built-in in to the truck camper parked in the driveway. The truck camper is setup as an emergency shelter when parked - fully stocked with food, water, and fuel (I live in the PNW and we are expecting the BIG ONE any second).
The transfer switch has multiple switches that allows me to power different sections of the house. I tested everything running the generator - the furnace, the fridges, select lights - it works like a charm. The generator runs off propane and I have 8 bottles of extra in the shed in addition to the large tanks in the camper. Propane is very stable in long-term storage so it is my ideal fuel.
My point being that I don't know where the cost of a home generator is between 7k and 15k. Even if I purchased a separate generator dedicated to house back-up this would be around 2k. The transfer switch would be around 1k for the average consumer. That is 3k. What am I missing about these estimates?
A home generator capable of powering an AC system for at least part of a large home is probably going to be several thousand dollars, so that may be the source of some of the estimates that you’re seeing.
Batteries are fantastic until not and at a very expensive price on top - a generator always works and treated correctly for decades - generators are the way to go for homes.
Batteries are dirt cheap when you take in account the fuel prices over the generators lifespan. These days we can buy like 50Kwh battery's for barely 6000 Euro. That is like 1/10 what this used to cost not even 5 years ago.
And no, not the entire world lives in the US, where people get gasoline/diesel for 1/3 or less, then what we pay in Europe.
I do not understand why solar installations are so expensive in the US, where we get installations often for 1/4 to even 1/6 from the prices i see quoted in the US. There is a reason why seeing solar on every third or forth house is not uncommon here.
A generator (in Europe) is good for those days where you get no solar energy and are totally off-grid living (or do not wamt to use electricity providers anymore with their stupid fixed costs).
Trump initial 25% Tarif (30 down to 25), then Bidden up to 50%, then Trump up to 60% ... It adds up fast.
Europe had import tariffs from 2013 and those expired in September 2023. That is around the same time most countries stopped with subsidies for solar.
The ironic part is, that this flood of cheap Chinese panels, batteries, etc is a major boom to our energy independence as those installations easily last 20+ years. And given our neighbor to the easy issue, energy independence is high on the list.
The US does not have this issue with their gas/oil rich area's (and probably $$$ to politicians).
Earthquake or volcano would be my guess, with landslides being a secondary concern. Plate tectonics in that area creates some hidden (or in the case of Tahoma and others in the area, not so hidden) dangers that have struck in the recent history. The Nisqually earthquake comes to mind as well.
Every geographic region in the U.S. has a natural disaster risk factor. In Oregon we are overdue for a large quake, but I've prepared for this. In fact, taken what other regions face - wildfire, tornadoes, hurricanes,flooding - an earthquake sounds down right mild.
My preparation of a truck camper as an emergency shelter makes perfect sense to me. It is mobile, has a built-in generator but is mostly run by solar charging, provides enough space to sleep and live with heat and AC. Few people prep their RV's as an emergency shelter. I'm not sure why. Naturally, I hope my community does not have to face a major earthquake, but I do find it interesting when I get criticism for preparing. Am I coming across as paranoid, or prepared?
Earthquake hazard exists for literally the entire North American west coast.
If you move further east, you start to get other hazards: Hurricanes, tornados, flooding, forest fires. Take your pick, there's always something to worry about.
The important thing is to know what the hazards are for your area and prepare for those.
You could ask this of almost everyone living in California, and I expect their answer would be similar: the apparent benefits outweigh the perceived risk.
I have an ancient laptop with Snow Leopard running. It keeps my Nikon Film Scanner useful since Nikon abandoned the software for these scanners rather abruptly.
I've been a pro photographer since 1990 and the Kodachrome setting embedded within the Nikon scanner is fantastic for capturing the color and detail of this exceptionally sharp film.
Hi. You are talking about me. I'm involved in multiple infringement settlements and lawsuits every year. Perhaps I should point out that I have spent thousands of my own dollars, and hundreds of hours photographing subjects that are rarely seen much less captured with a camera. My images are licensed hundreds of times every month. They are also frequently stolen. If you steal one of my images you are going to get a demand letter. The price will be far higher than any licensing fee. This is because my images are registered with the copyright office at the Library of Congress which entitles me to seek punitive damages.
The writing has been on the wall for decades. Images are losing value because millions upon millions are created every hour of every day. However, some of those images are remarkable and unique. People can make a lot of money if you happen to be the copyright holder of these images.
An example I like to give is the photographs Gary Rosenquist captured of Mt. St. Helens exploding and the side of the mountain sliding away. Nobody else captured this sequence. Not even close. These images make substantial licensing fees to this day.
I've long been fascinated by the fact that a camera can capture subjects the human eye cannot properly perceive. It just so happens that this obsession has led me to create images that are hard to imitate. I feel no guilt in charging fees for my images. I feel no guilt about pursuing people who have stolen my images for their own projects.
If you are photographing bald eagles with an American flag in the background or frosty fall leaves artfully arranged on the ground - I agree with the gist of this thread - these images are worth practically nothing. But this not universally true for all images.
Kodachrome is an amazing archival color film that when stored properly will last centuries. b&w negative film is even more stable.
You make a good point about the lack of durability and instability of many types of chemical photo processes (especially color negative and print processing). I do think many digital formats will be lost to time when a color transparency or b&w negative will still be viewable without much aid into the future.
One of my favorite photo books is the re-photographic survey project by Mark Klett. He went around re-capturing the exact locations (and camera position) of notable images of the American West from the early days of the US geological survey when they had a plate photographer on the team. We are talking about a time period just after the US Civil War. So we see a landscape captured in time 10 decades or more after the original.
I've been a pro photographer for over 30 years. All my earliest digital work is archived in RAW so I have the original shooting data. It all triple backed up and I have a friend that allows me store one of my backups at his home. I've been amazed at how many photographers lost track of or throw away their older work. I'm still licensing my work hundreds of times a year and some of this older material is becoming even more valuable simply due to scarcity. The redundancy of digital is great of you take archiving seriously.
Yet, I still have drawers of original film from the late 80's - to early 2000's I'm scanning a few but will probably let many be disposed of . . .
I've been rabies vaccinated for 32 years. I get my titer checked every 2 years. I finally got a booster a few weeks ago. I do work with wild animals including bats.
Whenever I read a story like this, I wonder if more people should be vaccinated for rabies. When I spoke to the Oregon state veterinarian a few years ago he told me about a terrible case of rabies infection that happened with a child. The general scenario is - domestic cat catches rabid bat - cat becomes rabid - child in the household is bitten. As mentioned, by the time symptoms are detected it is too late. The doctor also told me a man who got bit by a rabid dog in Mexico and died in Oregon. It took some sleuthing to figure out how/when the infection occurred since the Mexico trip had been months before.
This kid had to know what a camera was, which end was filming (some early film cameras appeared to be simple boxes), and wanted to make his mark on the final product.