[TenTec] OT: Old QSTs, CQs, etc.

[Rick - DJ0IP / NJ0IP]

Jim,

To read the mag on my PC - and to even get the mag in electronic form, I had
to subscribe to a reader service called "Zinio".  This is part of the
process for signing up to receive CQ Magazine online.
To save it to a PDF, just proceed as if you were going to print it:
 - open the new issue as if you would read it
 - in the lower left icon, simply click on "print"
 - then choose between "page" or "entire issue"
 - then click on "OK" (or maybe it was "continue")

This procedure will open the normal print menu on your computer where you
may select which printer to print to.
In order to print to PDF, you must have either Adobe Acrobat Writer, or one
of the free, downloadable PDF Writer Clones installed on your PC.   Most of
the boys over here use the clone, but I have the original Acrobat Writer for
business reasons.

Several of the guys have confirmed just yesterday that they printed the
entire December issue OK using the free clones.  It was a discussion on the
Bavarian Contest Club forum yesterday.

NOW TO DISK DRIVES.
JIM, JIM, I ought to shake my finger at you for your comment on disks.  ;-)
   "Not much has changed significantly since the first one?"
Well you said price, but it has come down by about a factor of one billion
(not exaggerating here) since the early days.
The "Mean Time Between Failure" has gone from a few thousand hours to a
million or even a few million hours.
In fact it got so much better that the industry stopped using "MTBF" as a
measurement.
They now talk about the "Annualized Failure Rate" of drives, which is less
than 1%; in fact now days, less than 3 out of every 1000 disk drives built
will fail before they reach their design "end of life" age,  WHICH IS STILL
5 YEARS, GENTLEMEN.  5 YEARS,  NOT MORE!  Don't be fooled by the MTBF spec!

However you made up for that statement when you reminded everyone that
magnetic optical (CD or DVD) does NOT live for 25 years, like they
originally said it would!  DO NOT BUY CHEAP CDs or DVDs FOR ARCHIVING.  Even
the good ones may fail after a few years. It's rare, but they do sometimes
fail.  If you want to keep your data very safe, make two archive copies of
it, to CD or DVD, and use media from two different brands.  If you do that,
you have a 99% chance you will not lose your data before it comes time to
migrate it to a newer media.

73
Rick  

-----Original Message-----
From: tentec-bounces at contesting.com [mailto:tentec-bounces at contesting.com]
On Behalf Of Jim Lowman
Sent: Saturday, December 31, 2011 1:22 AM
To: tentec at contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TenTec] OT: Old QSTs, CQs, etc.

Okay - you reminded me of something that I need to do right away - 
switch the remaining
issues of the CQ subscription to digital.  How did you manage to do the 
conversion to PDF?
I thought that was one of the main gripes that guys had against the 
digital subscription.
If I can do that, sold!  We both have Kindles and I have a Kindle and 
Nook reader app on my
tablet and phone.  Whenever possible, we buy books in digital format to 
keep from accumulating
any more than we have already.

BTW - CDs and DVDs aren't forever.  The media has a finite life, unless 
you pay the price for
archival-quality media.  Then again, when the next great revolution in 
storage media comes
along, will we be able to have the means to access the old media?  I'm 
currently working on
converting all of my VHS tapes that were never available in DVD format 
to DVD, because who
knows how much longer VHS players will be manufactured?

I'm using redundant hard drives as my storage medium, and may look into 
some of these
cloud services for storage.  The hard drive hasn't changed significantly 
since the first one
manufactured, other than in capacity and speed of access.  And the price 
per gigabyte
is at an all-time low.

73 de Jim - AD6CW

On 12/30/2011 7:35 AM, Rick - DJ0IP / NJ0IP wrote:
> BTW, today I logged into my Zinio account and converted the entire
December
> issue of CQ Magazine to one large PDF file.  It is 124 MB in size.
Assuming
> they will all be that size, I'll be able to save 3 years of CQ Magazine to
a
> single DVD.  I sure hope the other ham rags do the same thing.  Then the
> problem described in this thread goes away.
>
> 73
> Rick, DJ0IP
>
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