Ben's Randomness

Author: Ben

  • Ghetto negative/slide scanning method

    So after rummaging around at my Grans house looking for pictures one boring afternoon, I found an envelope of old negatives. Really old. After some  discussion me and my dad estimated about 1963. Anyways, I thought I’d take them home and try and scan them to see if I could make anything of them. After my first attempts at scanning them, most of them turned out…badly. This was the best of them, after much playing about in various programmes:

    Pretty awful. Now my negative scanning attachment for my scanner only really does 35mm (although I have managed to do other, more exotic formats in there). However these negatives were much larger, almost the same size as some of the medium format stuff my brother had done for college, so they wouldn’t fit in the attachment:

    Now all this negative attachment seems to do, at least from what I could see if back light the negatives so they appear better to the scanner. So in the shower (of all places), I had a thought of using my laptop to display a pure white screen and then putting this backwards onto the scanner so it’d work. Then the light bulb moment. My phone.

    I remembered that my old phone had an app available that made the screen go completely white to use a sort of torch. Genius. So  I went onto the appstore and found the iphone version, and then put the screen brightness to 100%, and used it to scan the negative:

    So I ended up with this image:

    And after some messing about in Paint.net, inverting colours and such not even putting much effort into it, I ended up with a pretty decent picture. I could probably improve this a lot more, though:

    Seems to work pretty well, at least with black and white stuff, I’m not too sure if it’ll work too well with anything else.

  • Let The Awful Commence

    So after sorting out the shit hole that is the attic in my house (One Day I’ll make an entire post about THAT), I unearthed many boxes of old cassette tapes; some of which were mine, some of my Brother’s and a few of my Dad’s. They probably range from late 70s to late 90s, and even some as late as 2003 (Done for the car most likely). Now after discovering these, I only had one way to “play” them; the cassette deck in my car (I’m not THAT old-school, there is a CD changer connected to it :D).

    So since this was both impractical (Sitting in my car outside the house looks stupid) and didn’t allow me to save any of it to another format (providing I found anything that was bearable enough to warrant it), I needed to acquire a cheapass Cassette deck.  One visit to eBay later and I’d spent the princely sum of £10 + Shipping for a Technics Deck:

    Now to listen through several boxes of:

    Joy.

  • The Devil makes work for idle hands

    So I’ve pretty much finished transferring all the old content from my old websites database to this one.

    I’ve stuck it all in a new section with different sub-pages for each thing. There’s still a few things I need to fix, namely some of the HTML on the quote page which stops the pate from validating properly, then I’m off to make an archives page so I can take that section off the main page so the index looks a lot cleaner.

    Should look pretty decent here when I’m done, then I can restart my WordPress theme I had going.

    When I find it :\

  • Welcome to the last 6 years of my…anger/rage/uselessness/whatever?

    So after much discovery on many, many backup discs, I have imported posts from about 5 different revisions/versions/whatever of my site from over the years.

    Even as I post this I’m still finding old shit that I can import into here, so far I’m back as far as August 2005, although I’m sure I can go back further than that.

    Cheers?

  • The Archives are now open?

    So after 6 billion hours of writing shitty code at silly o’clock in the morning, I have now successfully imported all my old posts and comments into wordpress.

    This means I can now finally realise how much crap us lot talked back in 2005 :D.

    I’m not sure if this is a good thing.