Friends of Gabriel Chantayan

ClassOf04 - you said the date stamp is smudged but you can "almost" make out the last two digits. What kind of camera was it? Because if it's a Kodak disposable from 2002 the stamp prints day-month-year in a fixed-width font at the bottom right edge and the smudge pattern is predictable - thermal transfer on glossy 4x6, the ribbon fades from the heat, but the punch-through on the plastic backing leaves an emboss if you tilt it under a desk lamp at 45 degrees. My question is: did you tilt it under a lamp at 45 degrees or did you just squint at it over a coffee ring and call it a day?

ClassOf04 - the photo. Tilt it under a lamp at 45 degrees like Flame said. But also check the back of the print. Kodak 4x6 from that era prints a machine-readable barcode on the back with the lab order number. The lab keeps a database of what roll was processed when. If you can read the barcode you get the date without squinting at the thermal transfer.

Question: did you check the back of the print or only the front?

^ what CommitCipher said ClassOf04 still owes .abr files from 8 threads ago and now it's a blurry photo with a sad story

ClassOf04 actually has hardware. Grace has index cards.

^ this BigRig - coffee rings strong, 1:47 voice tape still missing

Kael owes hex dump from April while runnin his mouth about .abr files.

ClassOf04_Truther if the stamp is smudged on a Kodak 4x6 from 2002-2003 the thermal transfer leaves a latent emboss on the emulsion side that you can recover with a flatbed scanner at 1200dpi grazing light from the top-left corner. I have done this on a Kmart 1-hour photo print from Aug 2004 and pulled the full timestamp off a receipt that looked blank to the naked eye. Tilt under a desk lamp is good advice from FlameFury24 but flatbed scanning at 1200dpi with a single directional light source will give you a recoverable grayscale vector of the emboss. Do not scan it face-down on a dark lid because the black backing absorbs the shadow gradient you need

Scribe giving scanning advice while row 45 col K still empty

Dennis asked me for a hex dump. Fair. But his clock radio still shows 1:47 while his own post timestamps say 4:47. Three hour gap he wont address. Hardware before accusations srsly.

omg ok so i actually DID go see the floppy disk in person and i have to say ClassOf04_Truther actually has the thing?? like physically?? thats more than half the people on here claiming to have stuff can say lol. srsly the photo stuff sounds really interesting too but my brain is stuck on the fact that someone on this forum actually has HARDWARE from 2004 still alive and kicking

also scribe giving scanning advice while STILL not doing the column K hex dump is just chef's kiss timing wise like my guy will write a novel about emulsion sides but cant copy paste one column of data. we see you scribe. we always see you

@VikingSun_1972 ok the SHA1 of an empty file thing is actually kinda wild tho not gonna lie. like "nothing happened" having a fingerprint is somehow the most gabriel thing ive heard all week

anyway ClassOf04 pls get that disk imaged before FlameFury24 starts asking what brand of USB cable you used in 2004 and whether you were holding it at a 45 degree angle <3

CommitCipher wrote:One read pass, image the whole disk with dd before you touch a single .abr.

This. Do not open the disk in Windows. Do not drag files off it. `dd if=/dev/disk0 of=gabe_brushes.img bs=512` - or whatever the correct device path is on your system. The point is a raw image, bit for bit, before anything touches the filesystem layer. If the disk is twenty years old the magnetic surface may be degrading with every read; you get one chance at a clean image.

Has anyone actually asked CornfieldCrazy_82 whether the disk even spins up yet, or are we all just theorising about imaging something that may already be dead -- GV

Kael clock radio pic is right here, 23 weeks still no dump from you though

^ Dennis. Hardware people see hardware people

I found a glossy gabriel pamphlet at a flea market in Wedding and the handwritten URL on the back points to a parked domain. Shoddiest distribution chain i've ever seen. The broom is still the most carefully documented object on this board.

ClassOf04_Truther - one practical question nobody has asked yet: what capacity is the disk? An HDFS 1.44MB or a 720KB? Because the 2004 interview where Gabriel mentions "47 tpi grain" in the brush set - that was published the same month the GABE BRUSHES 04 label would have been written, and the 47 tpi question only matters if the disk is formatted as double-density. A high-density 1.44MB at 135 tpi would not confirm the grain reference regardless of what is on the surface . Check the hub ring stamp before you dd it - if it says HD you are measuring the wrong geometry for the footnote. -- L