Softalk : Dec 83

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Mike

Finally!  It took a lot longer to edit and convert 420 TIFFs than I thought it would.  You know how it is – life gets in the way, your editing software gets cranky and refuses to acknowledge certain files exist.  The usual.  I’m hopeful that future issues won’t take nearly as long.  According to Margot Comstock, this was their largest issue and, “the one that did us in.”

Here’s the first of my Softalk scans.  At 300 dpi, using Adobe’s ClearScan option in Acrobat for OCR, the final file size is 222,789,632 bytes. And the quality?  Really not so bad – much better than I thought it would be, and at a significant savings in file size.  Here’s how it breaks down:

The original uncompressed, raw TIFFs at 600 dpi in color : 41,269,611,740 bytes.  Yes, that’s 41 GB! Fills up the hard drive in a hurry…

Adobe Searchable Image OCR at 600 dpi: 1,473,820,425 bytes (1.47 GB)

Adobe ClearScan OCR at 600 dpi: 890,141,883 bytes (890 MB)

Adobe Searchable Image OCR at 300 dpi: 413,442,993 bytes (413 MB)

Adobe ClearScan OCR at 300 dpi: 222,789,632 bytes (223 MB)

Acrobat also offers an option called “Searchable Image (Exact)” which doesn’t do any compression at all and is therefore not really appropriate for this project.

If I could do compression percentages in my head, I’d be able to tell you that’s … well, a bunch of percentages anyway.  Here’s the 223 MB version.  I’m going to let you guys decide.  Is this version acceptable to keep the size down (relatively speaking of course)?  Should I offer both high and low resolution versions?  Have your say in the comments, or drop me an email.

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Softalk : Dec 83 : PDF (223 MB)

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Softalk Forever!!!

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Mike

About a week ago, as part of a larger haul of magazines and books, I acquired 20+ Softalk’s in great condition. This brought my collection to nearly 40 of the 48 total issues and provided for me the impetus I needed to start scanning these things.  With Margot Comstock’s blessing, I’ve created a 50-page PDF sample of the December 1983 issue, to give you an taste of what the final products will look like. I’ll be doing probably an issue every two or three weeks and posting them here. My collection isn’t complete – I’m still missing about 12 issues – but I think this is a good place to start. I’m hopeful other people will pitch in and contribute issues or scans.  I expect to have the complete Dec 83 issue up this weekend.

Many of the later Softalk’s weigh in at a hefty 400 or more pages, and are almost entirely in color.  This presents an interesting challenge from a scanning perspective, because even in these days of 3 terabyte drives and affordable 50 Mbps internet connections, a 500+ MB PDF per issue is still a burden for many readers.  The sample is over 110 MB, for example.  I’m no fan of Adobe’s new ClearScan OCR technology – it compromises the overall scan quality and can do weird things to the appearance of text in certain fonts, for example – but I think in order to keep the file sizes manageable, I’m going to have to use it for this project.  Using the standard Adobe OCR tool results in a sample that comes in at over 200 MB.  I think I’ll try to ease the burden a bit more by making the downloads available in 50 or 100 MB chunks for those who don’t want to deal with a huge all in one download.  I’m open to suggestions on how to improve this situation, but I don’t think I’m willing to reduce the 600 dpi resolution I use for all of my scans.

In the meantime. check out the sample and let me know what you think.

Softalk forever!!!

sample
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The Apple /// Confidence Program

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Mike

In 1981, Apple released the Confidence Program for the ///.  This was a suite of hardware diagnostics utilities distributed to dealers (and later, users) intended to be run before a call was placed to technical support.  When the revised /// replaced the original units, the Confidence Program was updated to version 1.1, along with SOS and Business Basic to handle the new hardware specs.

The program itself includes five hardware diagnostic routines and a utility for making test diskettes for external drives.  It’s a fairly straight-forward and self-explanatory application, so the 13-page documentation isn’t very interesting except perhaps for historical, archival purposes.  Here it is.

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PDF (10.7 MB) – ClearScan OCR PDF (979 KB)

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The future of Apple II Scans

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Mike

For those who hadn’t already heard, this site was hit with a variant of the WP Pharma Hack.  The exploit happened back in late June, but wasn’t detected until recently.  This appears to be some new version that hides itself differently than its predecessors and the standard steps to sanitize the infected files were ineffective, so I opted instead to take the site offline, delete the compromised WordPress installation and database, and start over.  I’ve taken some of the recommended steps found around the web to harden the new install, but I can’t be sure this iteration is any more secure than the previous one, since no one seems to know how the crackers behind the Pharma hack are getting in.  Crazy right?

If you visited my site any time after June, you’re probably safe.  The Pharma Hack doesn’t attack site users, spread malicious code or even change the content you see when you view a page, and none of the scans I created were changed.  Instead, it tampers with back-end WordPress files to hijack search results and click-counts, presumably for some financial payoff.   You can read more about the exploit here and here.

Google still shows compromised results on a site:apple2scans.net search, and I don’t know how long it will take for the links to be updated, but as of today anyway, we’re free of infection.  I tried using Google’s Webmaster Tools to speed up their cache refresh, but it didn’t have an affect, so it could be a while.

Tonight, I will start to repopulate the files and rebuild the pages, but with more than 20 GB to upload, sort and organize, it will probably take a few days before everything returns to normal.  In the meantime, you can reach me by email if you need anything.

So, there it is.  Thanks everyone for your patience, and extra big thanks to Peter Neubauer, who spotted the infection and was the first to inform me.  And of course, to Ken Gagne, my WordPress therapist, site manager and occasional mentor for all his help.

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