Vandercooks are really the ideal small press. Simple to operate, none of the danger of crushing fingers that you would have with a Chandler & Price or the necessity¹ to dampen pages that you get with an old-school cast iron hand press.
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1. Although dampening pages will still improve the quality of impression. You just don’t have to do it as much as you would with a hand press where you end up squeezing buckets of water out of the pages as you print.
These things were so awesome back in the 90s. I got to use quite a few of them and even owned a couple in the early 2000s as they were being thrown away.
It always blew my mind that systems like SGI and SUN existed and yet somehow windows was allegedly cutting edge.
I once had a magical collection of chips from old Unix workstations - dec alphas and vax, dig and sun. I was responsible for cleaning out a large storage room of computers from the 70s-90s and I pulled all the processors I could because they were amazing objects to look at.
I remember throwing out handfuls of ram chips measured in the KB and thinking how much each handful originally cost.
I was like 19 when I did this and everything got lost to time in the end.
It sure was a fun time as a Unix geek playing with all this old hardware. We had a dec box running netbsd that had an absurd uptime - like 12 years or something. Labs of Sunrays running off of 8 processor mainframes. SGI’s around the edges.
But even then I was slowly replacing this stuff with Linux. There was just no competition and as much as I loved the legacy Unix stuff it wasn’t as nice or as easy to run as open source alternatives.
For me it was the diversity. Even though the machines themselves were similar, some did some things a lot better than the others. Some had ridiculously fast disk IO (the Suns, usually), some had silky smooth mouse movements (the SGIs), and so on. Also, there were the different GUIs - I loved Sun’s OpenWindows - and SGIs could use better font smoothing (but only NeXT was doing that back then).
I’m not sure it was a much considered cutting edge rather it was considered cost effective. 99.99% of office workers did not need this kind of workstation, windows systems were cheaper and became ubiquitous.
I mainly meant “to the general public” this (windows 98) was cutting edge.
Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s even apples share was tiny.
It just blew my mind then how horrible the experience of using windows was compared to Unix and that windows won.
I had a job in 2001 running a bunch of computers: 1/3 windows, 1/3 Unix and 1/3 Mac - os9 mostly. The Unix and Mac just worked.
The windows computers broke so often I set them all up to use SMB shares for user file storage. Since they were all the exact same dell systems and all had the same software on them anytime one broke I’d just boot a Linux CD and use “nc” and “dd” to rewrite a functioning disk image to the system in question and bring it right back up to usable. Then it was just a matter of logging in the right SMB shares and the user just thought I’d fixed their computer.
> Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s even apples share was tiny.
It wasn’t even very convenient to read e-mails. GUI e—mail programs were not up to the Eudora level on those machines. And heaven forbid you needing a spreadsheet.
This is funny because in the 90s I was at a similar position. I was at a university department where everybody had a Solaris 2.3 or 2.4 box as well as a PC that would dual boot into OS/2 or a 5MB MSDOS partition. Solaris, OS/2 and MSDOS would all mount the users' homedirectory from the SunOS 4.1.3 box, either via NFS or Samba.
People sadly did most of their work by booting into MSDOS and then loading Windows 3.1 from a shared readonly Sambashare that had Windows, Office and a ton of other programs ready to use. This "immutable" Windows installation worked surprisingly well as Windows no longer could destroy itself by existing and reconfiguring itself, and users could no longer run setup.exe for unneeded programs that would break everything else.
Windows NT - the OS to run on comparable computers - was cutting edge, and still is in many ways. Don't be fooled by the similarly named products made for 100x less powerful computers.
What I think they were saying was that NT and Unix workstations were peers (running on "comparable computers"), and that NT shouldn't be conflated with 9x ("similarly named products"), which had to run well on much more modest ("100x less powerful") hardware than the aforementioned.
NT and intel didn't catch up SGI/Mips and Dec/Alpha until the Pentium III, and in the case of the Alpha, even the 800MHZ one was subpar against the Alpha.
Heat buildup cause a lot of noise to appear in the image.
New cameras are overcoming this with fans. Look at the just realeased Sony fx30 or the Panasonic S5ii. Both have built in fans to aid in cooling getting them unlimited record times.
I shoot with a sigma FP that has no recording limit and no fan. It is designed as basically a giant heat sink. It also has some of the lowest amounts of noise of any camera.
I’m sure the eu thing comes into play in hitting that 30 minute mark but it’s probably a convenient choice of time limit when solving the heat buildup issue.
FWIW I’ve followed film cameras closely for years and have never heard of this EU law while all reviews etc talk about heat buildup because it is so detrimental to image quality.
Sounds crazy but I do a lot of work in the terminal and the ipad makes a great terminal when paired with a keyboard.
It's akin to the distraction free solutions such as write room or the blocking the Internet hacks out there... With the ipad you can just have a terminal and nothing else fighting for my attention. Especially as the otherwise great Promt app logs you out so quickly so I put off checking my email as long as possible.
In short, I get more work done.
I think two tablets would make a great development environment, one running the terminal and one a browser checking the results... I do mostly web work so this is easy in the current state of affairs.
I guess I'm old school in my thinking that a screen can be totally detached from its server but then again I once admined a few hundred sun rays. The tablet to me is just the end display, if I need a unix environment I login to a unix server and do my work. When I'm at a real computer 95% of my time is spent on the terminal anyways so what is the difference if I run vi locally or if it is running in the cloud?
