Russell -
with the exception of the GBs
of family photos and videos. I should do something about those, I
suppose. Of course at this stage, I have no plans on digitising the
mound of hardcopy photos that existed prior to us getting a digital
camera circa 2005, so there's still a lot of history at risk. My
biggest risk at the moment is video, particularly VHS, which is fading
fast, even without the house burning down.
I call this the "aft information horizon"... not just information
redshift (which by analogy is information which is receding behind us so
quickly we don't have the context to understand it well... i.e. most of
history) but a true horizon that we can't see over unless somebody
(else?) takes care of it. Project Gutenberg, Google Books and any
number of commercial services and apparently philanthropic venture do
seem to be filling some stuff in. I am *amazed* at how easy it is to
find scanned copies of nearly every service manual I might care about,
back to and including the shop manuals for my 1949 Ford 2 1/2 ton dump
truck!
I saw recently on one of my rare visits to either WalMart or Walgreens
someone sitting at a console almost like a video-game machine or a
do-it-yourself blood-pressure kiosk, scanning photographs onto (I
assume) CD. There was a slot for sliding in photos, another for
negatives and I presume one for slides? I also saw a slot for VHS
tapes... I didn't linger, but it looked like this self-service Kiosk
(had a credit-card reader) was designed for folks with no ability or
inclination to rig/wire/mangle up the right gear to their computer to
get their family "jewels" digitized.
I didn't notice pricing, but it had to be commodity-based or who would
use it?
I know this probably doesn't help you "down under" but then again, maybe
there are similar services about in Oz?
- Steve
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