On Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 11:44:23PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote: Until I bought my nice digital SLR last year, my digital camera was an on-topic model - an Apple QuickTake 150... AFAIK, it came out in 1994. It's typical Apple - virtually no control over image quality - the only setting you can affect is bad compression vs worse compression (i.e., always 640x480, but either 16 pictures or 32 pictures in its fixed 1MB of FlashROM). Many of the pictures on my webpage were taken with one I borrowed from the lab in 1995/1996. I think I took between 500 and 1000 pix in one year with one (enough to almost fill a CD-R, saved in both its native "QuickTime compressed PICT", and a more ordinary JPG). My one real beef with it (besides lots of compression artifacts and its fixed-focus lens) is that the only way I was able to read the pictures was to find a copy of the Apple install disks via a Mac friend - Apple apparently included some 3rd-party software on the disks that prevents them from making the disks available for free download from Apple's support website. You can't even view the pictures in their native format unless you've loaded the camera software; they are PICTs, but the data segment of the PICT file is compressed in a non-standard way, meaning that even Linux tools that know what a PICT is can only describe the contents of the picture file from a structural standpoint. Makes automating certain operations impossible. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 21-Apr-2004 23:10 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -80.2 F (-62.4 C) Windchill -98.59 F (-72.59 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 5.4 kts Grid 074 Barometer 687.1 mb (10361. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

This is something that greatly amuses me about OS X Classic: it seems the older the application, the more compatible with Classic it is. System 6 apps run happily on my 10.2.8 dual G4, and yet a 8.6+ game of Shogo which needs Apple OpenGL freezes at the title screen and requires me to force-quit Classic. I've been playing ZeroGravity, this System 6 game I played to death on my best friend's dad's Mac Plus, on this dual G4, and other than the fact the sound doesn't work (not too surprising), the game plays 100%. In fact, even though I played it on an 8MHz 68000, on twin 1.25GHz G4s, the game is still at a playable speed (a nice bonus, but seemingly paradoxical). I also use an old copy of Caere OmniPage with my dual G4, which is 6.0.8 era, simply because it's faster OCR than any other package I possess or have access to (I'm willing to put up with its finickiness about how it wants the TIFF files because it works so well). -- ---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser(a)floodgap.com -- Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. -- Gen. O. N. Bradley

Hi, Ethan Dicks <dickset(a)amanda.spole.gov> said: I have a QT100 I bought in '94 and the manual is (C) 1994 so mebbe the QT150 was 1995, I know it came out pretty soon after the 100. Portions of the software are copyright Image Software and Eastman Kodak according to the manual, so that could be the reason. Graphics Converter on the Mac is the answer... -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb(a)dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

Or snappy even :o) (caution: contains joke) w

On Wed, 2004-04-21 at 22:44, Tony Duell wrote: I sat there wondering what "TSIA" means - the only things I could come up with were rude :-)