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The Cost of Dawdling
Loading my Tumblr's queue with old computer magazine covers on a regular schedule, I got around to Creative Computing again and headed off to the Internet Archive to save an image. On getting there, though, I found myself looking at a screenful of new files available. "Better scans" did get my attention, but I was aware my reactions were just a little more mixed than they could have been.
Efforts to chase down that particular magazine through online auctions (my family had a subscription for its last fourteen issues, enough when rediscovered and combined with a scattering of older numbers found in a classroom in high school to get a sense its early years must have been interesting) came to an end when it started appearing on the Internet Archive a few years ago. I did get the impression, though, the scanned pages looked kind of bare-bones, greyish and skewed and surrounded by considerable borders. The PDF files available for download had been compressed to an inch of their lives, too. What I did notice, though, was that "CBZ" format files of the scanned images that had been turned into those PDFs were also available; they were a lot bigger, but I had external hard drives to save them on. Eventually, I started processing the images in a photo editor to straighten, crop, and brighten them before more lightly compressing them into new PDFs (and figuring out tricks to do all of that better along the way). Uncertain whether it was right to upload "modifications of someone else's work," though, I reached out to a person involved with the previous effort and he put some of my files on the Archive. When the last few files I made available to him didn't get uploaded, though, I just focused on my hobby project, no more than daydreaming about eventually uploading that work myself. The new scans someone else got around to making available before I polished off my work (I'm closer to the end of the available images than their beginning) are certainly "better" than what was around for everyone else before (and I've made a spot-check to see that some pages that went missing from one particular previous scan are there), but there are still borders to be seen. The thought of "jumping straight on top of that," though, does leave me conscious of the cost of dawdling.
Efforts to chase down that particular magazine through online auctions (my family had a subscription for its last fourteen issues, enough when rediscovered and combined with a scattering of older numbers found in a classroom in high school to get a sense its early years must have been interesting) came to an end when it started appearing on the Internet Archive a few years ago. I did get the impression, though, the scanned pages looked kind of bare-bones, greyish and skewed and surrounded by considerable borders. The PDF files available for download had been compressed to an inch of their lives, too. What I did notice, though, was that "CBZ" format files of the scanned images that had been turned into those PDFs were also available; they were a lot bigger, but I had external hard drives to save them on. Eventually, I started processing the images in a photo editor to straighten, crop, and brighten them before more lightly compressing them into new PDFs (and figuring out tricks to do all of that better along the way). Uncertain whether it was right to upload "modifications of someone else's work," though, I reached out to a person involved with the previous effort and he put some of my files on the Archive. When the last few files I made available to him didn't get uploaded, though, I just focused on my hobby project, no more than daydreaming about eventually uploading that work myself. The new scans someone else got around to making available before I polished off my work (I'm closer to the end of the available images than their beginning) are certainly "better" than what was around for everyone else before (and I've made a spot-check to see that some pages that went missing from one particular previous scan are there), but there are still borders to be seen. The thought of "jumping straight on top of that," though, does leave me conscious of the cost of dawdling.