May 22, 2007

• QuickTake 150

  I’ve got a picture from my QuickTake 150 that I got for $2. Warning: Mac geek stuff follows.

  Here’s the camera:

  

  It delivers a maximum resolution of 640×480, which was a Big Deal in 1995, I suppose. It has no image display. It only tells you how many pictures it’s taken and how many remain. You can tell it to give you 320×240 as well, for a maximum of 32 images in the camera at a time.

  If you want to get those images, you need software called PhotoFlash, which is easy enough to find out there on the intarwebz. You also need a serial cable, which I didn’t have, but which I obtained almost by accident at a thrift store.

  And then, after that, you need a Mac that can run PhotoFlash. It just so happens that I have a Quadra 950 that I use as furniture. I set my remote controls on it, along with beer and snacks, when I’m watching movies. But today, the Quadra 950 is a convenient docking station:

  

  This image was taken with the QuickTake 150. Note the very scientific mouse pad and convenient access to the serial cable. The whole QuickTake system says, ‘Convenience!’

  The Quadra has 16 megs of RAM, and has a 350 meg hard drive. It runs Mac System 7.5.

  First things first: Get the PhotoFlash software to the Quadra.

  Let’s try floppy disks. I have a pile of old floppies, and a USB floppy drive for just such an occasion. Except it would never work; either the files were compressed using software not available on the Quadra, or the uncompressed disk images were too big.

  So then I did what I should have done to begin with: I tried file sharing. Setting up the Quadra as the server was a no-go. But then it worked if I turned on sharing on my Mac OS X Tiger -running laptop! W00t! I could connect and get files from the laptop to the Quadra.

  I decompressed the files on the laptop and then shot the disk images over to the Quadra, which then mounted them perfectly. I could install PhotoFlash.

  Then it came time to test PhotoFlash, which worked just fine. Except for one thing: You have to run an AppleScript to get the image from the camera. I mean, that’s not a bad thing, really, but it’s less than intuitive.

  So I had the above image staring at me on the Quadra’s screen, and I saved it out as a TIFF, and then tried to drag and drop it back into the laptop shared folder….. Which killed the connection every time I tried.

  Now, for FTP, I use a piece of software called Interarchy. Back in the System 7 days, it was called Anarchie (because it was an archie client). And I feel really old now because I know that, and because I knew where to look for an old version of Anarchie to put on the Quadra. (I also remembered that you can open up Anarchie’s preferences, click the ‘I paid’ checkbox, it says “Thank you,” and never shows you the nag screen again.) Anyway, it’s a case of brand loyalty; Interarchy works like the Finder, and can do ssh with remote keys. It keeps changing hands, though. Every couple of years I get an email saying, “I’m the new owner of Interarchy!”

  So turn on the FTP server on my laptop (System Preferences -> Sharing -> click on ‘ftp’), log in using Anarchie, shoot a few files back and forth, and here we are.

  Simple as pi.

  • 8:11 pm
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