Notices by Denis Warburton (artandtechnic@digipres.club)

@foone It’s surprising how long that takes! lol

We “found out” when someone in our party (accidentally illegally) brought a not-legal-to-bring-on-a-plane-battery, to <an unnamed Caribbean nation>, which the production then had to ship back by boat.

I think the rental house that owned that battery got at least an extra week’s rental for that one.

ROFL “the 4chan dating app."

Anyhoo… the “P2” version of the portable editor looks as though it was slightly smaller and cuter than the DVCPRO version that preceded it.

(from Panasonic’s April 2014 brochure)

Item number three deserves some explanation / expansion.

When this tape was being recorded, someone moved the antenna so that the signal wasn’t optimum for this channel (probably because they were watching something else on another channel). The resultant recording for this period of time has perfect sound, but the picture is … close to black.

The Line 21 captions - maxing out ~7.5 - 10 IRE - are copyable… with effort… and errors. Recapturing could improve quality, making it worth the time.

On today’s videotape digitization to-do list:

1) Finish letting the equipment warm up while I do other things. :)

2) Digitize the last home-recorded tape I picked up weeks ago. (So I can get some more. 😂)

3) Investigate whether or not I can “gain up” the ~33 minute segment of bad reception in the CBS TV Movie from 1984 that I digitized last night.

4) Plan backup of existing digitized videos, and subsequent digitization of the half-dozen or so commercial tapes we currently have piled up.

…

So… I’m presently digitizing the last home-recorded tape.

Turns out that after the home video shot at the Guggenheim (!!) … there is a recording of a TV movie that aired on the ABC television network. While the reception of WABC was poor/fuzzy/ghosty, the Line 21 caption data is coming through just fine.

Wasn’t expecting that, but a nice bonus to have more ABC network material. 😂

At the end of the day, I’m basically seeing how much I can polish a 💩. The reason why it’s worth spending time polishing this particular 💩, is because it turns out that this broadcast contains a rare example of <something> that I discuss in the 1980 Caption System series.

This discovery will require that I revise part of one of those essays, as this sample singlehandedly extends the timespan in which <something> was used… by about two years.

Which is a legitimate surprise.

I’d like to congratulate the owners of N566XL for having an aircraft which DOES NOT transmit ALTITUDE. Good work! ffs

I’m fairly certain that the big diagonal red mark isn’t supposed to be present in this disk image….

… was shocked to discover that this disk image - which is copy protected - actually booted.

Immediately - and successfully!

I made a point of making sure the software worked by thoroughly thrashing the computer player in a little over 90 seconds.

😂

Now, in an earlier-than-expected Atari floppy disk mishegoss update….

• After considerable searching, I located an ›FTP site‹ — *not under the author’s control* — which hosts multiple versions of `a8rawconv` from 2014-2015.

• I discovered that _these_ ZIP files contained source code.

• Based on the rambling-and-rarely-focused “official” discussion of the software in a forum (!!), I successfully compiled version 0.8.

• I then speed corrected a ready flux image, ran it thru a8rawconv, and…

(

Irritated Aside:

I wish it were just as easy to create working disk images of copy protected software for the Commodore 64… alas, I haven’t found a way of managing that yet.

Apparently, the cool kids making the conversion software only like working with real 1541 floppy drives… which is partially understandable (but a lengthier digression).

)

I’ll have to try this workflow with the remaining disks that we wrote with our old Atari system, not only to see if it works for those as well, but also to discover how good the disk images are. I won’t know whether or not I’ll need to redo the fluxes until I can go through this process. (Since it’s impossible to read the disks with other tools!)

Notably, I’ll also have to look up how to use a bloody Atari… because I don’t remember after all these years!! 😂

In the continuing saga of the 1986 recipe disk…

The good news is that the emulated Commodore 64 can read the reconstructed disk directory (left screengrab). The bad news is that there’s something clearly wrong with some aspect of how I did it. 😂😢

Curiously, the “attach disk” file preview for VICE shows a less problematic view of the disk directory.

With the exception of the very first file in the list, I’ve restored the original names for every file, using the directory data found in the “garbage” of various blocks. I’ve given the first file the name “unknown,” as there’s nothing on the disk that tells me what it is, and frankly I’m not sure what it’s supposed to make either. 😂

At this point, the D64 image of the disk is fully repaired. SUCCESS!! 🎉🥳

After handling a few tasks elsewhere, I came back and discovered the problem: an off-by-one error in the `snprintf` that generated the filename. Instead of generating filenames that were 16 bytes long, we were only writing 15 ASCII characters… and a null byte ($00).

Since I wasn’t padding out the filenames with $A0 bytes, like you’re supposed to do when filenames are less than 16 bytes… the C64/emulator... responded to the malformed filenames.

Much better. Now to give actual names, etc.

Listening to the local school board meeting, in which someone is having to explain to a board member the concept of depreciation.

Unfortunately, repeatedly saying “I’m struggling [to understand this]” is needlessly painful.

(It passed unanimously.)

Thankfully, the next item is significantly less ridiculous: choosing to observe Oct 20th (Diwali) as a school holiday.

We are now at the point in the proceeding at which a random member of the public eats the mic, yelling about “incorrect English” taught by “BrainPOP.”**

That stream-of-conscience scream proceeded to encompass phrases including but not limited to “CRT,” “anti-cop,” and “woke left ideology.”

In other words, a story “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

—

** Specifically, uses of the word “they” that have long been established as valid.