Comment by ErroneousBosh

Comment by ErroneousBosh 5 days ago

5 replies

Way back when I was in high school doing history (Money for Nothing was on heavy rotation on the radio and Bob from Stranger Things was still Mikey from the Goonies), our teacher explained that there was evidence of stone tools being used by early hominids, then nothing much except maybe fragments of rock that may have been used as hammers or axe heads, and then into an era where simple bronze tools emerged. What archeologists believed, she said, was that people went from "big chunk of rock" to "small delicate bit of rock tied with strips of animal hide to a stick" to "big chunk of metal", and the wood and animal hide had simply rotted away. There would be this whole lost chunk of technology.

And she told us that would likely happen again, there would be a gap where our technology proved to be insufficiently durable to last throughout history. Unsurprisingly not everyone in the class thought this was likely, but I figured it was possible.

Anyway, I could go on about the archeology of tech all night, but I've got to figure out how to get the photos off this Kodak DC25 camera card. Something about a DLL from the original installer that you wrap in a Linux library? Can't remember.

anthk 5 days ago

EDIT: Use XSane for it, as if it were an scanner. Look up on how to edit the config files in /etc https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/k...

  • ErroneousBosh 4 days ago

    Getting serial comms to it isn't the problem I'm trying to solve because the photos are on a CF card. There are 320x240 images that are just a plain JPEG, and some larger ones, about 500-odd by whatever, that are in a funny proprietary format.

    I had this working about 25 years ago...

    • anthk 4 days ago

      The file(1) command will identify the files at least. Maybe ImageMagick can parse them somehow.

eru 5 days ago

> And she told us that would likely happen again, there would be a gap where our technology proved to be insufficiently durable to last throughout history. Unsurprisingly not everyone in the class thought this was likely, but I figured it was possible.

I heard that fear being muttered mostly about everything going digital and that's much harder for archaeologists to dig up than paper or stone tablets.

However, that's all nonsense, of course: the stuff that people bother to write down is seldom all that interesting. Who cares about who was king or whatever? The real juicy bits are all in our garbage dumps, and we are producing garbage that'll last much longer than anything the ancients could muster. What with all our metal, glass, plastic etc.

  • ErroneousBosh 4 days ago

    > we are producing garbage that'll last much longer than anything the ancients could muster. What with all our metal, glass, plastic etc.

    I'm convinced that in a not-too-distant few tens of thousand years, archeologists will be baffled at all these massive deposits of iron, copper, and aluminium - well on its way back to the oxides from whence it came, but chunks of highly refined stuff in among it, presumably at great expense - and for some reason labelled with extremely durable placards made out of ridiculously tough plastic with letters embossed in them. The precise meanings of "SJ12 YPF", "Y196 NBA", "RFS 131Y", or "R420 BRL" will remain lost to the depths of time.