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Rescued from the clutches of obsolete proprietary file formats
(This happened three and a half months ago, but I just realised I never posted about it.)
Sixteen years ago, I took a picture of our puppy on my dad's digital camera. Dad showed me how to use the photo-editing software lying around on my computer to crop it into the shape of a heart, and I kept it in my files.
That photo-editing software was Microsoft PhotoDraw, and it saved its pictures as .mix files. For about a decade, the file sat on computers that saw it as a meaningless jumble of 1's and 0's: PhotoDraw had long since faded into obscurity, and modern computers could not parse .mix files.
I kept the file, though: I always meant to try to fix it someday, look into it and see if there was anything I could do.
When, this summer, I saw the file again and decided it was time, the rescue operation (including research) took about two hours. A long time, but short compared to the amount of time I'd spent vaguely wishing I had the knowhow to do it, so I don't regret it.
Four CD-ROM files and a virtual machine later, here it is, in its new form as a .png.
God bless the Internet Archive.
Sixteen years ago, I took a picture of our puppy on my dad's digital camera. Dad showed me how to use the photo-editing software lying around on my computer to crop it into the shape of a heart, and I kept it in my files.
That photo-editing software was Microsoft PhotoDraw, and it saved its pictures as .mix files. For about a decade, the file sat on computers that saw it as a meaningless jumble of 1's and 0's: PhotoDraw had long since faded into obscurity, and modern computers could not parse .mix files.
I kept the file, though: I always meant to try to fix it someday, look into it and see if there was anything I could do.
When, this summer, I saw the file again and decided it was time, the rescue operation (including research) took about two hours. A long time, but short compared to the amount of time I'd spent vaguely wishing I had the knowhow to do it, so I don't regret it.
Four CD-ROM files and a virtual machine later, here it is, in its new form as a .png.
God bless the Internet Archive.