Money (ish)

This is an odd find from the mid 90s. It is a fake three dollar bill. Not a good one, mind you. I would call it a twenty foot bill. If you see it from 20 feet, you might think it is possibly money. Any closer, and the illustion disappears.

I decided to go with the cropped version, showing the seal and the printing, rather than the full bill. Partly for a better look at the details. But mostly because this particular three dollar bill is a piece of political propaganda, and I have no patience for opening a 25 year old can of worms. 🙂

Here is a closer look at the printing. It’s almost laughable when you compare it to the earlier notes we photographed. But it is an interesting historical curiosity.

Blinded by the light

This is another odd random tech find from somewhere behind my monitor. It’s a bendable USB LED. Over the years I have bought a bunch of no-name and off-brand bits and pieces for the photography kit. Step up rings, speedlight mounts, extra batteries, etc. There is some weird thing with a lot of those where they include these odd accessories. I don’t remember what it was I ordered that came with the light, but as an example… I just bought a lavalier microphone, and it came with a lens cloth…

I haven’t actually found a use for the USB LED. It seems most situations where you might use it are better tackled by just pulling out your cell phone instead of finding where you left that weird USB thing.

Like new condition!

Another interesting relic from our computing past. I just turned up this old SCSI II terminator (in the middle of my ridiculous collection of other SCSI terminators) that is still new in box. I’m guessing this is round about 20 years old. SCSI II was originally published in 1990, which is somehow 30 years ago now…

It is a bit fascinating for anyone that has been in IT for a while to look back on all those technologies that we spent so much time with that are now not much more than a historical afterthought. Of course, with things like SAS, iSCSI, FCP, UAS, etc. SCSI hasn’t completely gone away. But when was the last time you found yourself wondering where you put that SCSI II terminator?

More oddities from the shelf

As we continue to do some clearing out of old storage, I stumbled upon this curious collection. It’s a small case filled with EPROMs. Based on what it was found with, my first thought is that these are for the formatter card in a 256X printer. However, the one that specifically says SCSI, gives me pause.

Amazingly, none of those part numbers appear anywhere on Google, so without diving in to the giant bookshelf of out of print manuals that never made it to pdf and the internet, I’m not sure what they are.

That is curious, but I think we can all agree that the answer is not really a pressing issue. I don’t anticipate a need for any of these at any point in the near, or far, future.

One more fun fact. Because we are looking at ridiculously old bits of kit, I dusted off the original Canon 7D (from 2009!) to take this photo. Of course, then I had to scramble to find an old USB cable that would connect to the camera, because I have no way to read a compact flash card here.

It wasn’t an elegant operation, but it does all still work!

Toss back Tuesday?

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I am of the mind for looking back at the way things were. We are in the midst of clearing out some extra shelving space right now. As you can imagine, a number of oddities have collected there over the years.

One of those things was this old soldering iron. It immediately brought back memories of a time when we used that a lot. I’ve lost count of the number of terminals I have installed new power switches on, or the model 20 backup batteries I have replaced.

One of the casualties of our march into the future for me has certainly been soldering bits on the gear. It does still make for a lovely photo though!

Technology has made the world smaller

I am constantly amazed at how technology has shrunk our world. This came to mind today because I was preparing a server for a customer. Well, technically, a customer of a customer. We built a system for our customer, who is customizing the software installation for their customer.

Rather than ship it to them to do that, adding another trip before it gets to its destination, we have our customer working remotely on the server, and once everything is complete, we’ll ship it to their customer.

I also just got a message from a friend in NY. And if I want, I can pull up a live webcam of Times Square, or the Eiffel Tower, or any of thousands of places on the planet.

The pace of change is so unending that it is easy to just roll with it and accept all of these things as our new normal. But if you do stop and think about it, so much of what we take for granted today, was unthinkable not that long ago. These are interesting times.

Skipping sun stars

This is interesting. I was on a beach last night to shoot the sunset with a dancer. As you can imagine, this involves a bit of trial and error to get exposure right for the setting sun, and get some light on the dancer. This shot is from that experimenting.

As I clicked through the images today, it stood out to me because of the trail of sun stars skipping across the waves. That’s cool! It was a fun night, and we did manage to get some great photos, despite fighting the sand fleas, balancing the light, and trying to keep a 7′ parabolic umbrella from blowing away in the sea breeze.

Jet City

Today was not a usual day. I met up with a dancer for a sunrise photoshoot before heading to the office. I happened to be there early, because I am always early for everything. That paid off as it gave me the opportunity to take a moment and get the above shot of the city.

You are looking at the Seattle skyline, as viewed from the north, looking across Lake Union. You can get a similar view looking at the skyline from the west, across Elliott Bay. This was taken at 5:02am which is the perfect time for a cityscape.

Pack it up

Things have been busy in the warehouse, so I have been remiss in getting any blog posts out. But we are back today for a quick one. Do you recognize the object in the lead photo? The artsy photo treatment is a bit of misdirection. These things don’t usually get much notice, let alone fancy photos.

Get it? No reveal picture today, but the answer is below.

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This is a pallet. Specifically, a recyclable pressed wood pallet. To bring it back around to computing, shipping equipment on pallets is always a good thing to consider. The regular package carriers have pretty high limits for what can pass through the regular system without having to go to freight.

We usually undershoot those by quite a bit and go to freight on a pallet at a much lower weight. The theory is that once you get over 80 pounds, the chances of that box getting damaged increase dramatically. The safer and more reliable bet is to strap everything to a pallet and ship it freight.

Fun with Photoshop

This is an interesting little detail. Editing some photos of a dancer, I have one super wide angle shot taken from a low vantage point. This normally causes straight lines to go all kinds of wonky. In the photo in question, you see in this crop from the side that bay door intruding into the left of the frame at a decidedly skewed angle.

It’s a small enough part of the photo that it wasn’t a huge deal, but it would be better if it wasn’t there. The 20 second solution is Content Aware Fill. Without any further work on my part, what you see below is what Photoshop created to fill that space in.

If you go back and forth between the two, you can see where the changes were made, and identify a few spots that could be better. But when viewers see it as a tiny portion on the edge of the frame, with a dancer in the middle drawing their attention, it is more than sufficient. I’d go so far as to say nobody will ever notice.