My cousin sent me a box of old photos that she had inherited from her mother. It turns out that my mother and her mother would send photo albums to one another throughout the late 1960s and into the early 1980s.

Many of these pictures are interesting to me, and I’d like to digitize them. The average online service wants between $0.65 and $1.25 to scan a print without doing touchup. I’ve used services to scan negatives in the past, but I have an old phot scanner and I have digital cameras that I could use to take photos of the prints.

The prints are degraded to various degrees and many are not really flat, so my first thought was to put them under glass and photograph them. I set up a rig to do that, but it was pretty finicky. Lighting to prevent reflections isn’t easy (I’m space-constrained by boxes of old junk in my office). The prints are many different sizes, and positioning each one took a lot longer than I wanted to spend on it. I don’t really need these in 12 or 24 megapixel detail, plus my macro lens is old and introduces some distortion.

So I decided to use my old Epson Perfection Photo 3170 from … ulp … 20 years ago. It’s USB-A and my current M1 MacBook only has USB-C ports, but I have plenty of USB-A to USB-C adapters for this kind of situation. I plugged the scanner into my M1 MacBook, but it was not recognized. I downloaded a new driver from Epson, but it wouldn’t install, giving me the helpful message “You can’t open the application “EPSON Scan Installer” because this application is not supported on this Mac.” Is that because it’s Intel code and I can’t run drivers in emulation? I have no clue.

I tried downloading VueScan, which is widely recommended for scanners where the driver is no longer provided, but it couldn’t see the scanner either. Mysterious. I’m beginning to think it’s something to do with the hardware itself. It used to work. Had the scanner died from sitting neglected?

I dug through one of those aforementioned space-constraining boxes of junk, and got out my Intel-based MacBook Pro from 2011. I powered it up, plugged the scanner in, and Image Capture immediately recognized it. So I’m scanning on the old machine.

Image Capture under old Mac OS is a little annoying, but I can scan 4 photos at a go into 32-bit TIFF files. I’m only scanning at 600dpi, so I’m getting roughly 6 megapixel scans of these photos. I considered scanning at a higher resolution, but the time and effort and storage involved didn’t seem to be worthwhile. I may regret this someday.

Anyway, here’s a birthday cake I decorated for my best friend Charlie back in March of 1978.

This guy was a great model. The hummer who’s claimed the front garden as his territory this year is not as happy in front of a camera.

There’s gotta be a better way. But after a horrible upgrade process for a horrible commercial open-source product, I need to see which sub-directories from the old installation are missing in the new one. Don’t ask. I’ve literally been having nightmares about this upgrade.

Anyway, given tree1 and tree2 under some common point, I want a list of directories that exist in tree1 and don’t exist in tree2.

Here was my clumsy way of solving the problem.

cd tree1
find . -type d -print | sort > ../dirs_old
cd ../tree2
find . -type d -print | sort > ../dirs_new
cd ..
comm -23 dirs_old dirs_new

[insert old man yelling at cloud meme here]

Everybody’s pissed off because things are crappy and they used to be better. I know I certainly am. But it’s not “regulations” or “wokeness” that forces me to buy a $56 part to fix the dishwasher because a 5¢ switch embedded in an un-openable assembly burned out.

When we first moved into this house twenty five years ago, there were plumbing problems I had to fix. The kitchen faucet was leaking. In those days, there was B&B Hardware, an old style hardware store. I brought the weird brass fitting from the faucet to B&B, took a number at the plumbing desk, and eventually talked with the guy there. He cast a sardonic eye on the fitting, and said “You’ve got a 1950s Moen. In the 60s they changed this to have an additional flange right here for an o-ring, and in the 70s they stopped making this style altogether. The good news is I have a compatible part.” He went up on his ladder and sorted through some boxes and found me a part. It was expensive — nearly 15 dollars. But it worked.

Well, the kitchen sink’s been redone in the interim, and the faucet replaced with a very low-end wall-mount double-handle bridge faucet which lasted about seven years before being replaced by the new (yet not parts-compatible) version. And the new one’s leaking. So I took it apart, grimaced at the cheapness of the thin metals and plastic fittings. I headed to Home Depot, since B&B is long gone. At the big box, I got a shrug from the worker. No, there aren’t parts for those. They don’t sell that model, but new kitchen faucets are on aisle 6, and washers and stuff are on aisle 11, bay 9.

When I finally found washers and o-rings on aisle 12 bay 15, they didn’t have a replacement for the cracked plastic compression retaining ring. So I bought new o-rings in the hope that screwing down the conical ring cap tightly would continue to work. I went through the self-checkout, where the scanner pulled up the wrong price for the item and the employee that came over sneered at my mask and low-key accused me of shoplifting when he saw the old, broken part I’d brought along.

Eventually, it worked out. The sink is not leaking, I have 8 more of the o-rings (potentially saving me from buying another $2.92+tax set next time, if the smog doesn’t degrade them in storage), and I can go on to do other chores.