* But nobody came.

[tonmoh]

森久保

[mostlysignssomeportents]

NASA's Lunar Orbiter pics from 1967/8 were deliberately fuzzed and downsampled to hide US spying capabilities

In 1967, the Lunar Orbiter missions sent back exciting – but grainy and low-rez – photos of the moon’s surface.

But it turns out that the Orbiters’ photos were actually super-high-rez, shot on 70mm film and robotically developed inside the orbiters, with the negs raster-scanned at 200 lines/mm and transmitted to ground stations using an undisclosed lossless analog image-compression technology. These were stored on tapes read by fridge-sized $300,000 Ampex FR-900 drives. These images were printed out at 40’ x 54’ so the Apollo astronauts could stroll over them and look for a landing spot.

But these images were not revealed to the public because NASA feared that doing so would also reveal the US’s spy satellite capabilities. Instead, NASA deliberately downrezzed and fuzzed the images that the public got to see.

Ryan Smith tells the amazing story of the preservationists who rescued the images off of disintegrating FR-900 magnetic tapes starting in 2007, under JPL’s Nancy Evans, who set up her team in an abandoned McDonald’s building and dubbed the project “McMoon.”

The McMoon team refurbished salvaged FR-900 drives, homebrewed a digitizer system, and painstaking recovered the 2GB/image files that the system generated. Evans’s team has recovered 2,000 images from 1,500 tapes, all in the public domain and available for download on Moonviews.com.

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/16/ampex-fr-900-drives.html

[noodle8]

Still making fallout 1 art in 2019 lol

[shitpostgenerator]

concept: booty shorts that says “im squid”

[she-who-erases]

[thevaultfalloutwiki]

[o6eiyrskb4hg7rix8hih-deactivate]

fuuck yeah

[thevaultfalloutwiki]

[maddoxfanx]

War Never Changes

[o6eiyrskb4hg7rix8hih-deactivate]

[bad-4chan-literature]

[kasai-yagi]

Wait, there’s physical copies of Fallout Equestria? That’d have to be massive.

[snakegirllovehandles]

The first run was five hardbacks of progressively increasing girth. The stack is hefty, but the books are comfortable. Each chapter has chapter art too, which I consider a plus in all fantasy books.

Later runs were single-book softcover monstrosities. I think I saw another five-volume hardback run recently, but I’m not deeply involved in the fandom anymore.

[gayestgen]

[silviadragoness]

The second print run was two volumes, hardback, with jackets.  Dunno about any subsequent runs.

I still think the 5-volume split was the best option.  It’s a big damn story.

(For anyone who hasn’t read it: yes, that’s a functional replica of the main character’s go-to weapon.  No, I didn’t customize it like that; I bought it from the person who did.)

[localdaturagarden]

wtf

[themysteriousmurasamecastle]

[seriousjones]

[theycallmey]

we live in the best possible version of cyberpunk

[heavenslittlemachine-deactivate]

this is how people born after 1995 hack. when i started hacking or “phreaking” in the late 80s i would get in the zone by snorting homemade amphetamines & listening to harsh noise cassettes while banging out code for 24+ hour periods on my atari. mostly i would write text-to-speech features into the operating system so the computer said swear words when you double-click. i remember when html was invented i got so frustrated because theres so many greater than and less than signs and you have to put them around everything. in early january of 2001 i changed Google’s header to a gif of a pissing orangutan and the resulting publicity turned the website into a household name 

[benepla-deactivated20200506]

never have a been more devastated to scroll over a url and see its deactivated who are you ma'am

[imremaking-sameurl-deactivated2]

[manrippedapartbydogs]

[yellingatmytv-deactivated202209]

[nbgpart-deactivated20220811]

[anoldman-deactivated20190825]

Human beings be like I must create something or i will kill myself