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.

I’ve seen this floating around the internet: “To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.” — Arthur Koestler

I haven’t been able to find the original source of the quotation.

Much more frequently, I see this similar quotation attributed to Margaret Atwood: “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”

This, however, I have found the source: “There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”

This is from Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.

So there it is. Atwood indirectly citing Koestler.

(This posting is in no way meant to diminish Atwood’s brilliance in any way or cast any aspersions on her. It’s more a comment about the Internet and the way attributions get lost and/or mangled.)

From (relatively) recent reading.

“[The prison] was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old.” — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“Most of the men seemed to have been raised in hardship by stern, desperate parents. What struck me was the good they thought it had done them (I had yet to meet an adult man with a poor opinion of himself) and their desire to impose the same broken fortunes on other people, particularly on the young -though not their own young, of course.” — Mavis Gallant, “Between Zero and One”

“In the end, the bottom line was this: everything worked. Wherever you looked, you found. That was everyone’s worst nightmare. That was the excitement of it all.” — M. John Harrison, Light

“In the same way bad money drives out good, misinformation drives out information… Unless information is stabilized by a strong evaluative filter, such as science, with its controlled experiments and repeatable results, it gets swamped by simpler, stabler misinformation. If the people who design and run the Web don’t develop reliable ways to evaluate and stabilize information, the Internet may become the agent of social chaos.” — Samuel Delany, “Future Shock,” The Village Voice, 28 Dec 1999

“One of the biases of retrospection is to believe that the moral crises of the past were clearer than our own—that, had we been alive at the time, we would have recognized them, known what to do about them, and known when the time had come to do so. That is a fantasy. Iniquity is always coercive and insidious and intimidating, and lived reality is always a muddle, and the kind of clarity that leads to action comes not from without but from within. ” — Kathryn Schulz, “The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad”, The New Yorker, August 22, 2016

The annual Venice Mardi Gras parade was on the 25th (due to scheduling issues, that’s the midst of Lent this year!), so it was time to make a costume.

As the self-appointed official unofficial photographer, I always need to be able to wield one or more cameras, so my costumes tend to focus on some kind of headgear that won’t get in the way. Past costumes have included wild structures to hide a fill-in flash, wizard hats, a big papier-mâché fish, and the like. This year, since the theme is “Magical Mystery Trip,” I figured a variant on a top-hat would hint at magicianishness. A magical geometrical figure adds to the alchemical implications, so I put a Mardi Gras themed dodecahedron on it.

The top hat itself is made of cardboard. I started by measuring my head with a piece of string, cutting out a sheet from a delivery box (the corrugations pulled over the hard edge of the table to make it flexible), and creating a cylinder. Duct tape was used inside to hold it together. A top plug was hand-drawn, cut out, and hot-glued into place. Oh, so much hot glue. It’s great for imprecise work like this: it fills gaps, is adjustable for those vital few seconds, but hardens quickly into a pretty good secure bond. The brim was then drawn onto a sheet of chipboard, cut, positioned, and glued. After that, I cut the cylinder down to the curve with a razor blade, and taped in some padding with gaffer tape to help smooth that edge.

Then the hat part got put aside for a bit while the decoration was implemented. A dodecahedron is a geometric solid made of twelve pentagons. To add interest, I used Affinity Designer to illustrate a collection of pentagonal patterns based on fleurs-de-lis. You can download the design file as a PDF.

I took the file and a pack of acid-free chipboard to CrashSpace, and zapped out a bunch of pentagons on the trusty Epilog laser cutter. The chipboard comes in sheets that are 12 by 12 inches and “medium weight” which translates to 0.057 inches (~1.47mm) thick. Because the boards are not perfectly flat, the laser cutter doesn’t cut exactly the same across the entire sheet, meaning that some of the cut-out areas aren’t completely cut out.

In the vinyl- and paper-cutting crafts world, they refer to removing the cut-out portions from a design with the delightful term “weeding.” For most of the patterns, weeding just involves popping out the loosely connected portions. But there are places where I got poor through-cut. Also, the density of the chipboard is not very uniform, so some areas took a lot of cleanup with an X-Acto knife.

If I had been wiser, I would have recut these at a slightly slower speed to make sure there was complete cut-through.

Then, out came the hot-glue again, and the pentagons were assembled into a dodecahedron. You can kind of see in the lower left corner of picture below a temporary jig I made for positioning the pentagons into groups of three for rapid gluing. It’s not very precise, but fortunately it doesn’t need to be.

Next came painting. I have a set of metallic acrylic paints that were bought for last year’s Mardi Gras mask. In retrospect, I should not have bought them as the “metallic” effect is produced by tiny plastic flakes like glitter. Ugh. Micro-plastics. We’re all full of ’em, and it’s only getting worse. But I already have the paints, so I decided to use them.

The final result didn’t end up looking half bad. I wore a not-terribly-clashing floral front-plate for my FloMask to complete the look.

In the spirit of Mardi Gras, at the end of the parade, the hat was given to a school teacher whose students had just learned about dodecahedrons.