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February, 2019:

How Shark Nerds Learned to Run the Projector

Feb 27th, 2019
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

8mm Movie Projector.jpg(CLASSICAL REFERENCE IN TITLE, as Glenn Reynolds says.)

Carol’s sister Kathy and her husband Bob came out to visit this past week. Their mission (among others) was to get out of Chicagoland’s frigid temps and snow. So what did we have here during their visit? Frigid (if not Chicago-frigid) temps…and snow. Not exactly where we live, but my friend Debbie said snow stuck to the ground in Fountain Hills, a Phoenix suburb a few miles east of us. And yes, the temps dipped below freezing in our neighborhood on more than one occasion. Plus, we scored an inch and a half of rain in a couple of days. The photo below shows the view from Bell and Hayden looking north, toward Skull Mesa and Continental Mountain. In all the years we’ve lived here (going on twenty, in two stretches) I’ve never seen that range go white from top to bottom. A little snow on the tops, now and then, sure, but not snow covered.

Snow Covered Mountains-500 Wide.jpg

Timing, timing. Kathy says they’ll be back when it’s in the 100s. I can’t make many promises on behalf of Phoenix weather, but I’ll confidently promise that there will not be frost in the yard here in June.

So we stayed inside a lot. One of our other missions was to evaluate Carol’s family’s home movies. There’s a place here in Scottsdale that will convert 8mm movies to digital movie files. What we wanted to figure out is what reels are worth converting (the process is not cheap) and what can be left in the box. Carol and I have had her father’s movie projector in various closets for a lot of years. We took it out and set it on the coffee table, after dropping a spare white sheet over our big-screen TV. Bob and I stared at it. And it soon dawned on us: Shark nerds we were not.

The device is a Bell & Howell Filmo Regent 122, Model L. I can’t nail down a vintage tighter than “1940s” from online searches. That’s about right: Carol’s dad had a movie camera in the late 1940s, and it stands to reason he’d buy a projector at the same time. Bob’s family had had one long ago as well, but (as with Carol’s) the dads ran the projectors, and the kids watched the movies. As for me, we got into the 8mm movie scene late, and started with the 1965-vintage Super 8. We still have that projector, but it’s self-feeding and requires almost no fussing-with. (That is, when it worked, which it doesn’t.) Reviewing Super 8 movies from my childhood will require a functional projector. I’m working on that.

No matter. What we had were 8mm movies. And we were determined to watch them.

We had a rough idea how they worked. Bob recalled that you had to form two film loops above and below the lens. There were loads of little levers, which we dutifully stared at, rubbing our chins. Then Carol spoke the obvious: “Go find a tutorial on YouTube.” Shazam! Not one but several…actually, they were legion. And once we figured out from the tutorials what all the levers did, getting the film threaded was no more than a severe nuisance. At my house back in the ’60s, we just fed the end of the film leader into a slot, and the projector did the rest. This took a lot more careful work. Some of the films were well over sixty years old, and fragile.

With practice, we got better and faster at it. And we had a lot of practice. It took two nights to go through them all, what with manual threading and manual rewind. Carol’s dad had spliced a lot of the little reels together into several larger, 25 minute reels, but the bulk of the reels were the 50′, five minute size just as they came out of the camera.

Most of the footage was of Carol and Kathy from birth to 15 or 16, at weddings, family vacations, dance recitals, and just running around in the yard. One of the first things we noticed is that once she was three or four, any time Carol was on camera, she was dancing. Carol, of course, is a spectacular dancer, as I’ve learned at various events down through the almost fifty years that we’ve been together. She started early, and went at it with manic enthusiasm and supernatural grace.

There were people in the movies whom Carol and Kathy had rarely seen, especially their grandparents, who (like mine) mostly died when we were small children. Overall, the films were well worth preserving as digital files, with only a few exceptions.

It was also yet another rubbing-of-the-nose in how far we’ve come since our childhoods. My Canon G16 camera takes brilliant, hi-res video. Heck, my phone takes perfectly fine video, if not as good as the G16’s. I have a Nikon film SLR, and my father’s medium-format Graflex. I doubt I will use either again. I suspect most young people have never experienced taking a roll of used film to Walgreen’s (or somewhere else like that) for processing, and then waiting a week for the pictures to come back. Bad shots cost the same 30c each as the good ones, so learning by trial and error was costly.

All gone, gone and mostly forgotten, except by those of us who thought we were shark nerds…but were wrong.

Slow-Mo Espresso

Feb 18th, 2019
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

I first heard about the Espresso Book Machine in 2001, back when it was called PerfectBook 080. That machine is now old enough to vote, yet…where are they? I was talking about that question in the mid-oughts, and described what I called just-in-time bookstores (which were in fact gumball machines for printed books) in 2006. A recent piece in the New York Post suggests that the machines are indeed out there, and are in fact being installed in bookstores for on-demand printing of books.

Well, it’s 2019 and ebooks have raced past the print-on-demand (POD) tortoise at about .25 C. You don’t hear a great deal about POD books anymore. I used to sell quite a few in the early-mid oughts, when I mounted several titles on Lulu and Amazon’s now-shuttered CreateSpace. As ebooks have become cheap and easy, POD books are a much harder sell. I wish Shakespeare & Co. (see the NYP link above) all the best, but whereas the concept sounds great on paper it may well be impossible to implement as more than an isolated and little-used oddity.

Why so? The bulk of it is simple copyright: Beyond public domain titles, the stores would have to have some sort of contractual agreement with publishers to print books, along with a usable print image. (These are generally but not always PDF files.) Publishers are reluctant for a number of reasons:

1. They don’t really know how to negotiate such a contract. How much should the publisher get? How much should the store get? How much would the authors get? Under what circumstances can the contract be terminated? With book publishing in the parlous state that it is, figuring this out would not be easy. Why? Once precedents of this sort are set, they become expectations and are hard to break. Publishers have no history here, and would basically have to guess. Bad guesses could be fatal over the long run.

2. Publishers want to protect conventional bookstores and chains. Publishers and big store chains have a fragile but necessary symbiotic relationship. Small booksellers with Espresso machines would nibble away at that relationship by making big-box bookstores even less necessary than they are today. If Barnes & Noble were to shut down, there would be publisher blood in the streets of Manhattan. Espresso machines in espresso shops would just hurry that apocalypse along.

3. This is probably the big one: If a book’s source file(s) escape a bookstore’s control, they’ll be all over the Internet, and anybody with a laser printer or access to a POD machine can create bootleg copies. This actually happened to me: The publisher print image file for my book Assembly Language Step By Step escaped its publisher’s control and was everywhere, just six weeks after the book was published in 2009. Bookstores are notoriously fluky operations, with lots of turnover and quirky people. One part-timer with a thumb drive in his pocket would be all it took. I’ve studied file piracy in detail over the past twenty years. This is a real fear.

4. Espresso machines are not cheap. They cost about $80,000 and up depending on speed and sophistication. Most firms rent them, with periodic maintenance included in the rental. I have no good numbers for that, but Espresso uses xerographic printers and I was a Xerox repair tech forty-odd years ago. Those machines are messy and touchy. Something gets a little out of line and the machine ceases to work. So it may not be an option for tiny storefront shops, especially if publishers aren’t on board.

5. Here’s the insight I bring to the issue: Near-term, espresso bookstores are likely to be opportunities for small, very small, and indie publishers. It would cost a bookstore very little to host a print image that might be ordered twice a year. PDF files for mostly textual works like SF novels are very compact. (Heavily illustrated books, of course, require larger files, but not that much larger.) Small/indie press would be far more likely to cut deals with the bookstores than Macmillan or Wiley. They have a lot less to lose, and a whole lot more to gain.

So where does all this leave us? Alas, I’m nowhere near as bullish on POD as I was even six or seven years ago. I attribute this to the promotion of smartphones to mini-tablets. I myself have a “phablet” (a Samsung Note 4) and I love it. I also do exponents more reading on it than I ever thought I would back when I bought it toward the end of 2015. (And this is true evenn though I have other readers with much larger screens.) Basically, almost everybody who partakes of modern life today has an ebook reader in their pocket, and some of them are actually called “ebook readers.” People have become used to reading genre fiction on small screens. It’s a tougher call for technical nonfiction containing figures, photos, or code. I have read technical books on my Lenovo Yoga convertible, and it’s…so-so.

Back in their heyday, the pulps were considered disposable books. You read them once, maybe kept them for a little while (the bathroom was possibly their final redoubt) and then threw them away. Fiction ebooks work like that: People read a novel once…and then, having done its job, it vanishes into the archives. It may never emerge from the archives again, but with terabyte drives in increasingly small devices, who cares? You’d have to read a lot of SFF to fill one of those.

POD will continue to make a certain amount of sense for science, tech, and history books, or any other genre that depends on fixed page-layout specifics. Reflowable tech books are just hideous. The big question is whether that sort of nonfiction is enough of a market to float a maintenance-hungry beast like an Espresso Book Machine in the basement of a bookstore. Given how long that question’s been hanging in the air, my guess is that the decision’s already been made.

Monthwander

Feb 3rd, 2019
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

I haven’t been darkening my own doorway here much over the last month. Part of it is an aversion to political posts. The left has made just about everything political in one dimension or another. Topics are not as common as they once were. It was also a quiet January with (thankfully) few crises to report. We spent a considerable amount of time getting ready for The Big Backyard Overhaul, which begins tomorrow. I’ll take some photos and vids of the demolition of our waterfall and our pool, which is having its deep end removed. The waterfall was nothing special: a jumble of mini-boulders in an aggregate of mortar. It looked like somebody dumped a few tons of granite in a pile and then just slopped mortar into the cracks. The boulder pile is there to prevent people from installing a diving board. At least for us, they needn’t have worried. I did all the diving I think I ever want to do in college swim class.

K7JPD is creeping back toward the air so slowly that I’d characterize it as being under the air rather than on the air. I’m still researching compact antennas. In the meantime, I’m going to run a 60-70′ longwire to one of our tall palms, and match it with my Icom AH-3 tuner. I have two very good Icom radios: an IC-729 purchased in 1991, and an IC-736, purchased in 1995. The IC-729 is an odd bird: It was designed to be a mobile HF rig, and it runs off 12VDC. Alas, although smaller than your typical HF rig, I couldn’t conveniently fit it into our minivan, so I built a 30 amp 12V supply and used it on my bench until I bought the 736. Since the 736 arrived, the 729 came out of the box only once a year, for Field Day. I assume it still works, and I’ll find out soon, if not as soon as I had hoped.

The AH-3 is a great tuner. I used it at our North Scottsdale location in the 90s, feeding a 180′ longwire out to the corner of our 2.5 acres. I had a crappy ground there and so the longwire didn’t do as well as other, shorter longwires I’ve had in the past. I really hope the AH-3 still works, because if it doesn’t, there’s a problem: The 729 and the 736 can’t connect to Icom’s newer autotuners. I have a solid manual tuner, but the way the AH3 sits there and clunks around for a few seconds assembling a match when you push the Tune button is borderline uncanny. I suppose I could get a newer radio, but newer radios are basically computers. I stare at computer screens all day. When I operate a radio, I want to handle actual dials, switches and knobs.

Switches, yes. There’s a parallel project to getting my radios back on the air here. I’m building a 12VDC system to power the IC-729, 12VDC LED light strips in the shack, and a few other things that work on 12V. The ultimate goal is to have something like a Goal Zero Yeti backup power unit, on trickle charge from the wall until I can put it on trickle charge from a couple of solar panels. In the meantime, the system will be powered by the 30 amp supply I built for the IC-729 in 1991.

The project involves a DC power control and distribution panel. I’m using PowerWerx fittings and Anderson Powerpole connectors. I’ve never used Powerpoles before. Nothing difficult about them, but it’s a new skill.

And then there’s the AH-3 tuner control cable problem. The tuner came with 16′ 4″ of control cable, and that’s not quite enough to get down off the roof of the shack and into the building far enough to reach the radios. So I have to work up an extension cable in Molex connectors and 4-conductor thermostat wire. I did a little bit of Molex work way back when I was a Xerox tech rep, but that was 40-odd years ago and I’m rusty. So I bought 15′ of 4-conductor thermostat wire at Ace, and ordered something I didn’t think was a thing: a kit of three pairs 4-pin Molex blocks and enough pins/sockets to fill them. I have a crimper, and when I get this posted I’m going out to the garage to make a 15′ extension cable.

A set of four glass dogbone insulators arrived a few days ago, and I have plenty of #18 copper wire. Nothing gets strung, however, until I see what sort of heavy equipment will be hacking up the backyard tomorrow and days following. There’s still plenty of room for things to go wrong, but with a little luck I should have the station back on the air by next weekend.

I get asked “How’s QBit doing?” a lot, and the answer is simply this: miraculously well. He was supposed to be dead five months ago, and yesterday he was still galloping around the backyard with the rest of the Pack while we played dog soccer. Carol has been keeping an eye on his lymph nodes, which seem to be back to their normal size. His appetite is certainly good, and while deaf, he’s otherwise in pretty decent shape for a dog who will be 14 this coming Friday. We don’t know how he beat cancer, if indeed he did beat it. We have our suspicions: Carol custom-makes dog food for all four of them out of ground beef or ground turkey, and vegetables. QBit likes it so much that I think he just told himself, “Like hell I’m going to die, if she’ll give me another bowl of this tomorrow morning!”

He’s just stubborn that way. Wonder who he learned that from.