Glimpses into the past

When I came down to breakfast this morning, Clare was getting ready to be collected by taxi to be taken to the University Optometry School for a session with trainees being examined in diagnosing glaucoma. While she was out, I did the week's grocery shopping at the Co-op. I then started work on next Sunday's sermon, and when Clare got back she cooked us tuna fish steaks for lunch. I finished drafting after we'd eaten lunch, then went for a walk in Thompson's Park and Llandaff Fields.

Clare left for her meditation group as I arrived home. I had supper while she was out. Nothing seemed worth watching on telly, so curiosity kicked in and drove me to hunt for a set of photos I scanned for my sister ages ago. She had shared one with me which Google photos had randomly presented her with. She had no idea why, and I didn't recognise it was one I'd seen before, though it did look like a picture of hot volcanic lava, which meant the  photo belongs to a set taken either on Mount Etna or Mount Vesuvius forty or fifty years ago.

I fired up my 2009 Acer Windows Vista desktop workstation, the one I still use with my photo scanner, as it won't work with Windows 10 or 11 without me buying a device driver update. Initially, I couldn't get Vista to load when the Acer was connected to the higher resolution display screen I normally use. On the other hand the Linux Mint operating system also installed on the machine and produced a full sized display, and I found the relevant photo file and realised I had scanned them. The quality of the digital scans was very good, and many of my sister's photos were of superb quality and composition, considering how long ago it was since they were taken on film. 

Eventually I realised that Vista didn't work because it never had a hi-res digital display driver. When I switched over to the old Sony TV, of much the same age as the Acer, Vista displayed as it should. It's nowhere near as sharp as the Linux operating system, but that won't run the photo scanner either. I tried and failed on this years ago. It's the curse that goes with devices running on proprietary software.

I rang my sister and told her I'd tracked down the puzzle photo, and told her where she could find it on her laptop, along with all the others I scanned for her over the years. She tells me there are still more negatives and slides in need of digitization. I'm happy to do this, as they give me a window into the world of European travel ten or fifteen years before we started holidaying abroad and taking photos.