Still Better Off with Image Editors

Years ago, I tried to clean up this damaged photo. My efforts were unsuccessful, but I think I'd do better if I tried again today. But I thought using Gemini to fix it might yield interesting results. 

 

The photo is a lot sharper now, but holy hallucinations, Batman. The Atari 400 has been replaced by an Atari 2600, and the Atari 400 games have been replaced by Atari 2600 games. And a stack of audio cassettes has replaced the CX40 joystick atop the Atari 410 program recorder. 

Further prompting fixed some of the issues. But not all. 

That's enough fiddling for now. The Atari 400 is there, but its yellow buttons are from the Atari 800 model. I also find it amusing Gemini put an audio cassette into the 8-Track player. 

Where the Magic Happens

More organized than usual. 
 

The Inevitable Compleat Star Trek Do-Over

1. Human civilization is likely to reach a level of technological maturity such that creative individuals will be capable of using generative AI and other software tools to create brand new episodes of Star Trek independently. 
2. Given the number of Star Trek fans obsessed with canon, some number of Star Trek fans will re-create selected episodes of the show(s), changing them only to correct continuity errors. 
3. A subset of these creative, technologically savvy Star Trek fans will be obsessed enough with visual continuity that they will redo visual effects and create virtual sets, costumes, props, and actors such that shows originally produced during different decades of the 20th and 21st centuries will be completely recreated so that shows produced decades apart but set within the same fictional time period (for example, Star Trek and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) will be remade to be completely visually consistent, from exterior starship shots to costume designs to actor appearances.  
4. Given the rate of advances in computing power and generative AI capabilities, we can expect to see a Compleat Star Trek free of continuity errors before the end of the 21st century, extending from prequel Star Trek: Enterprise to the upcoming Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and all the shows in between (and forthcoming). 
   

The question of whether or not this is a good thing is left as an exercise to the reader. 

The Lightning Shield

Long ago, I owned a PC with a special CD burner that could print images and text on the non-data side of certain specially-treated CDs. This is one of the handful of discs I printed, "The Lightning Shield," a mix-CD of music I liked at the time. Clearly I should have printed the title on the lower half of the disc to avoid the middle of "Lightning" blending into the UFO's tractor beam. 

Paperclip

Here's the manual for the software that got me through the first two years of university: Paperclip. Paperclip was pretty primitive compared to modern word processors, but it did precisely what I needed it to do: made it possible for me to type and print my assignments instead of writing them longhand, which would have surely doomed my chances at graduation. 

Paperclip came with a unique form of copy protection: the Paperclip Key, a small grey dongle you plugged into the Atari 130XE's joystick port. Without the dongle, the software wouldn't operate. It took me years to wonder idly if the key was just an electronic switch that made the computer think a joystick button was being held down. So I pulled out the key, plugged in a joystick, held down the fire button, and lo and behold the software worked. A determined pirate could have copied the software, plugged in a joystick, and held the button down with electrical tape. Still, they wouldn't have gotten the manual, and for all the bother why not just buy the software...

Computer Terminal

Here's a pretty slick computer terminal, if I do say so myself. I'm finally starting to develop the patience and technique necessary to create detail at this tiny scale. Colouring the buttons on the terminal took a very light touch with just a tiny droplet of each paint for each one. I drybrushed the copper plates on the rear of the terminal. 

 

Today's Little Frustration

For many months now, I've followed all the tips and tricks I can find to get my Windows 10 computer to recognize my iPhone 7 for long enough to transfer over my movies and sync my music. But noooo, I'll get one or two images across from one folder to another, or midway through a sync, and then the dreaded "lost connection to computer" appears. Man is this frustrating, especially when the recommended solutions do nothing. Yes, I'm running the latest version of Windows and the latest iOS and the latest version of iTunes, yes, I've restarted both the computer and the phone, yes, I've updated the drivers, yes, I've tried on other computers, yes, I'm using an official Apple lightning cable, yes, I've tried more than one official Apple lightning cables...sigh.

Sean's Feat of Strength

Here is Sean pretending to smash a vintage Commodore 1702 monitor, perhaps one of the finest monitors of its era. We sure got a lot of use out of it over the dozen or so years of its lifetime. 

Under the Glass

My Favourite Games (Atari ST Era)

Back in 2016, I wrote about my favourite arcade games, my favourite console games of the second generation era, and the Atari 8-bit era. Once the family retired the Atari 400/130XE, I moved on, midway through university, to the 520ST (and eventually the 1040 ST).

For the first time, I had a computer with two monitors: one black and white Atari monitor, and a colour Commodore 1702 monitor that needed an adapter to work with the ST. Most (though not all) of my favourite games were presented on the colour monitor:


This is the big one, the game whose many iterations have consumed more of my leisure time than any other: Civilization. Civilization for the ST came out during the brief time I lived in the Bleak House of Blahs, and the hours I spent in my basement bedroom playing this game of scientific progress and world conquest consumed a significant chunk of that halcyon era. With pottery you can make granary, and yes, that barbarian phalanx will indeed sink your battleship.



Dungeon Master was, perhaps, my favourite ST game before Civilization came along. It was a first-person dungeon crawl with a huge underground world to explore, a great team of adventurers to bring along, fast-paced combat, creepy monsters, tricky puzzles, and plenty of food, weapons, and treasure to collect. I remember being pretty desperate for food before I was able to compel myself to eat one of the "worm rounds" I'd scavenged from a giant caterpillar thing.



Sundog was a fantastic space trading simulator/roleplaying game in which the character you create inherits a small cargo spaceship and some starting cash. That's all you need to explore the stars and start trading, hoping to earn enough money to upgrade your ship, repair damage from pirates and other space hazards, and buy other supplies. My friend Pete loved this game so much that he brings it up once in a while, lamenting the lack of a modern-day version. 



Speedball was a fast-paced future sports game, one that reminded me a lot of the game they played on Battlestar Galactica in the 1970s. Gameplay was simple but elegant and smoothly animated; the graphics and sounds were great as well.



Falcon put me in the cockpit of an F-16 bristling with a weapons load that I put together myself for each mission! Though not as complex as today`s flight simulators, Falcon was certainly more complex than its competitors of the day, with very impressive graphics for the time. I got pretty good at blowing up bridges and tanks, not quite as good at shooting down enemy fighters.

SPECIAL BONUS GAME

Preparing today's blog brought some old memories back to the fore, including the many hours I spent on the Atari 130XE playing Star Fleet I: The War Begins. I believe I worked my way up to Lieutenant Commander before trading in the old 8-bit 130XE for my 520ST. 

Wolfenstein 3D

Here I am sometime in the early 1990s playing Wolfenstein 3d on what may have been the family's first Windows computer. Mein coupon! 

Monochrome Workstation

For a couple of years in the early 1990s, I moved back into Mom and Dad's basement. This is my computer station: an Atari ST computer with an Atari monochrome monitor and a Commodore 1702 colour monitor, an Atari 1200 baud modem for connecting to local Bulletin Board Systems, and a noisy dot-matrix printer. I still have most of the books in the bookcase, along with the second edition of the DC Heroes roleplaying game seen under the printer. Note the "Call for Submissions" ad taped to the wall just above the monitor; I wonder if I submitted anything. 

Remembering Weird Dreams on the Atari ST

For four or five years during the late 80s and early 90s, my computer of choice was the Atari 520 ST. Weird Dreams was among the most memorable and imaginative games I played on that machine. During my original playthrough, I never made it further than the desert statues. I dreaded the giant wasp, but I loved the game's creepy, surreal landscapes and its excellent (for the time) music.

And now, thanks to the wonder of YouTube, I now know how the game ends! To think I only needed to endure a few more dreams to finish...

Friday Read: The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems

In late 2016, Benj Edwards wrote a somewhat melancholy article about the few bulletin board systems (BBSes) that remain active today. Like several of my friends, I was an avid BBSer from about 1987 to 1994, that golden era before the Internet changed the world. There was a BBS for the U.S.S. Bonaventure (the Edmonton Star Trek Club, which is still around and has a Twitter account (!)), and my friend Ron hosted Freedom BBS for several years, an anarchic reaction to some of Edmonton's more button-down BBSes. Someone has compiled what seems to be a pretty authoritative list of BBSes that existed in the old, more expansive 403 area code, which back then included all of Alberta and the Northwest Territories. There were hundreds of them! I had no idea.

Benj's article covers the American BBS scene, and he relates some amusing anecdotes. It makes me a little misty; thanks to Ron, I have some of the writing I shared on BBSes in those days, but most of it has been lost. Most of it was likely garbage, but I remember a story or two that I thought was pretty good.

I can still remember the screeching noise my modem made before it connected. Ah, those were the days. 

A Woman of Science

Early Computer Art

I made this sometime between, oh, grades 8 to 11, probably on some form of Apple - a II or a IIe. I have no idea what software I used to make it, or why I kept this printout. But here it is, my homage to Colossus: The Forbin Project. 

Training is What You Make of It

Vearltual Rearlity

Thanks to the generosity of my perpetually early-adopting friend Pete, I had the opportunity to enjoy my very first Virtual Reality (VR) experience, using the Steam HTC Vive. It's not quite the holodeck from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it feels like the first step on the road to that technology. 

As seen above, stepping into VR requires a number of peripherals: in this case, a pair of hand controllers, a set of earphones, and most importantly, the VR headset itself, which places a high definition display centimetres from your eyeballs. This is the key to VR's immersiveness; your entire field of view is covered by the screen, providing very lifelike visual stimuli. 

Pete's demonstration took Steve, Mike, Jeff and me through four different worlds: the introductory orientation demo, a brief underwater vignette, a science fiction target game, and a zombie shooter. 

The first thing that jumped out at me during the demo was the weird feeling of disembodiment when I held the two hand controllers up in front of my face. The VR system knows where the controllers are and models them in stunning high fidelity, but of course it doesn't know what my hands look like, so even though I could feel the controllers and knew they were in my hands, I couldn't see my hands manipulating them. "I can't see my thumbs!" was a common cry during the demo. 

The other question that leaped immediately to mind was "How am I going to avoid smashing into something in the real world?" Sensors on the wall (you can see one behind me at the upper right) mark a virtual boundary on the floor. If you approach the boundary, a translucent wall of light springs up in front of you, warning you that you're about to leave safe territory. 

You don't use the hand controls in the underwater vignette; you're simply transported to the deck of  a shipwreck on the ocean floor. Fish and manta rays swim about, and you can walk around a bit on the deck to explore it. Then a massive blue whale swims up and casts a baleful eye on you, close enough to touch. I did, in fact, reach out to touch it, and I half expected some tactile sensation, so realistic was the visual illusion. 

Space Pirate Trainer places you in a futuristic city of neon. You're on a glowing platform, equipped with twin laser pistols, or if you prefer, a pistol and shield (controlled, naturally, by your hand controllers). Small robots swoop in from all sides, blasting you with lasers, and you do your best to shoot as many as possible before they murder you. The zombie shooter Pete showed us next uses essentially the same game mechanic, but with a horror skin. 

Describing the experience in print really doesn't capture the look and feel of being inside these virtual worlds. They are so immersive that when I took the rig off, I blinked, disoriented, because it felt like I'd just returned to the world from a long journey to another place. This really is a transportive experience. 

And this is just the beginning. Software developers have hardly begun to explore the vast potential of this technology. An exciting new world awaits. 

58,706

I just imported all of my digital (including scanned) photos into Adobe Lightroom. According to Lightroom, I have 58,706 photos to date. That's...considerably more than I expected, and I haven't even finished scanning the family archives. (I estimate I'm about halfway through.) Maybe three backups are not enough. 

From the 1940s to Yesterday

Today I am learning that it takes 13 hours to back up 1.45 terabytes of photographs. They stretch backward in time to the collections of my parents, aunts and uncles and forward to the shots I took yesterday. As Sean remarked, "That's a lot of photos." Maybe one day the'll go in the national archives or something. Actually, the photos Aunt Jean and Uncle John took of the Etsell farm in the 1960s and 1970s are certainly worthy of such preservation...