In message snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk>, John Rumm snipped-for-privacy@nowhere.null writes
Well, I would be interested in an article such as that covering music, TV recording and general cataloguing. I've tried various schemes over the years Media Monkey, Foobar and various databases and simple filing systems, but not really found anything that I felt I wanted to standardise on.
Lots of people do such things.
NT
If you want lightweight, I can fit my MP3 collection on a sliver of plastic the size of my finger nail that weighs a couple of grams.
I'm another that likes the idea of something tangible to have and hold. I've got the occasional downloaded songs, and a couple of dozen books on Kindle, but there's this nagging doubt that they're not really *mine*.
My wife uses Apple music and Spotify and that's even less tangible - a music collection that exists out there only as unicorn farts or something like that...
If its available only "on demand" then there can come a point where it ceases to be available. Either because you stopped paying for the privileged of access to it, or it was disappeared for some other reason (like a rights holder changed their mind or a bundle of tunes from one catalogue or another was added or removed from what's included in your subscription).
Rather like that famous case where some folks who had bought a copy of Orwell's 1984 on kindle found it was removed without warning one night!
So lots could help write it then :-)
Ditto slides and negatives.
You can hold them up to the light and see what they are (well negatives can be tricky).
If you have a firewire hard disk holding something and you have no recollection of what you stored on it, how are you going to read it in years to come (or even right now) ?.
Apple have even dumped firewire connectivity from Thunderbolt with V3 (AFAIK).
No PC motherboards have onboard firewire ports and Intel have now dropped PCI connectors, which only leaves PCIe firewire cards but these may not have the Texas Instruments chip which some peripherals seem to need.
In message <q2af1s$kqj$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>, Andrew snipped-for-privacy@mybtinternet.com writes
I'm keeping firewire options running here, because much of the audio stuff needs it. I did quite a bit of research into practical firewire years ago and filed much of the paperwork in the loft. That's now in the huge pile to be taken to the tip or burnt. The TI firewire chip was always recommended, but I remember usually finding that other factors were involved in the "not working" deal. I suspect that people couldn't get things to work, moved to TI, and then fiddled with other factors whereupon it suddenly worked.
I once met the chairman of TI on a coach tour of Scotland (nothing else to do on a Sunday in Edinburgh in those days). He and his wife were really friendly and interesting.
ISA, PCI, Firewire, they are all being kept alive here.
You just move it to a USB drive when its obvious that its lost out to USB.
I have to keep it alive, or a very expensive slide scanner becomes scrap.
The problem is I have a gigabyte motherboard with onboard firewire and the scanner came with a PCI firewire card.
latest motherboards don't have firewire, and the latest intel boards don't even have or support pci any longer, so expect the same with AMD boards pretty soon.
Apple gave up on firewire ages ago.
And to make things worse support for the scanner software ended when Vista 32 was current. I run it on win 7 32 bit; and some users say they have got it working with Win7 64 bit, while the scanner version for apple hasn't been supported since they used Power PC chips, so that is over 10 years ago.
There is Vuescan which is still active and supported but not very good, while Silverfast from Germany is the dogs bollocks but very confusing to learn and costs over 400 euros.
In 2020 ? I'll have to get a full retail version of Win10 so that I can install it on my existing machine. Either that or get another new computer and keep the existing one with Win7 but isolated from the internet.
I guess this should be an 'opportunity' for a RPi-based interface hardware inteface to convert firewire to something that the PC can interpret as firewire but connected as thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 2 allowed the use of an apple cable interface, but version 3 seems to be USB C which is completely different.
and lots can provide debatable criticisms of it.
NT
In message <q2ajuv$1bop$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>, Andrew snipped-for-privacy@mybtinternet.com writes
It isn't in the same league, but I'm using a thing called an NEC Petiscan here. The only way it will work is through an installation of Windows 98 on VMWare on a laptop. I've never seen another scanner like it - it's fairly small and the mechanism is between two glass windows so you can look through it to see what you are scanning. We have a huge number of very old family photo albums, and this makes it easy to scan without removing and replacing each photo. It doesn't need firewire, but usb wasn't up to much in the days of W98, so it needs extra drivers in addition to the Petiscan drivers.
On the subject of firewire, I'm fairly sure that Microsoft made changes to the way Windows 10 handles it compared with Windows 7. For this reason I'm keeping an elderly laptop with firewire and W7, whatever happens about W7 support in 2020.
nusb3.1 iirc
NT
You are an Apple fanboi and deserve everything you get.
This is why I have a system of rolling hard disc upgrades in my server. Everytime one gets full a bigger one is installed ... all my data is permanntly online sand backed up (except videos: cant be arsed to spend hundreds on backup copies)
If I wantda an offsite copy I'd get a USB drive. Or arrange cross synncing with a mate.
That's the jobbie. I couldn't remember the name - it must be nice to have a good memory!
By the time I knew win 98 backwards it was obsolete. When it was going to take over a day's work to install on relatively modern hardware with all the patches I gave up on it. Patches for hdd >128G, for RAM>500M, for usb, for just about everything.
NT
I have never owned an apple product, but there will have been people who did and may well have used extwrnal firewire disks.
The worst mistake I ever made was to try and install linux on a Windows NT machine and dual boot. Utter abortion of an operating system (linux). It ended up trashing all my data so I won't touch it with barge pole ever again.
Most of us live in the real world which means a lot of people acquire a motley collection of bits of hardware and forget what is stored where.
I still have a collection of 8 inch and 5.25 inch floppy disks, some hard-sectored some soft sectored, including 40 yo VAX VMS boot code on the 8 inch ones. They don't take up much space and I wave them at younger family members moaning about lack of space on their 'smart' phones.
There *might* be an 'irreplacable' file on one of them, but there is no way of knowing.
I tried backing up my WD MyCloud device to a USB3 memory chip, but after about 30 minutes it was nowhere near complete and the USB memory device was getting pretty hot, so I abandoned it.
Yes, Windows XP was quite a revelation. An operating system that just worked without any faffing about.
Revelation, yes. I hated it. I went linux and can't think of any reason to ever return. Well, there's android, which is fairly obnoxious.
NT
Like linux.
What's so special about the scanner ?
I've an old scanner which came with a SCSI card, but a new cheaper scanner with USB had higher resoultion and was quicker.
and RS422 or whatever and our new PCs don;t have RS232 either. So we can;t connect to our old PAD communications which we ran at 2400, then all the way up to 9600 baud, but I don't really miss them now we have Gigabyte ethernet.
I use vuescan for my scanner.
Same with most products. But are you sure you need the dogs bollocks.
You seem to have a lot of problems to overcome, perhaps it's the way you see things.
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