March 1943: Hangmen Also Die






























Huh. A British war movie directed by Fritz Lang from a script co-written with Bertolt Brecht.

I had no idea what to expect here, but they use their not-inconsiderable talents to go all-in on the anti-Nazi propaganda war effort. And it’s great!

The Nazis are evil, eeevil; mincing and brutally sadistic at the same time.

“You know we have means to make you talk!”

But it’s not a total triumph. It aims for Total Paranoid Thriller, and there’s some thrilling scenes in here. But it’s a bit… flabby in the editing? I wonder whether that’s a result of the restoration? The pre-titles said that some scenes had been restored from acetate, which might perhaps mean that this is longer than the theatrical version?

Because, really, there’s way too many character arcs in here. I feel like there’s a classic thriller hidden inside here, but the various sub-plots are smothering it.

But I’m quibbling. This is fab. Those evil Nazis. So eeevil.

And pimply.

Hangmen Also Die. Fritz Lang. 1943.

Popular movies in March 1943 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
6777.6It Ain’t Hay
32837.5Hangmen Also Die!
20467.3Cabin in the Sky
13637.1The Human Comedy
2707.1The Moon Is Down
5657.0Flesh and Fantasy
28787.0Sherlock Holmes in Washington
3256.9Hello Frisco, Hello
2936.9The Silver Fleet
4446.8They Got Me Covered

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

Useful Consumer Review

I needed a new scanner, and I wanted one that was significantly faster than the one I’ve been using until now. After some Googling, I landed on the Epson DS-50000, which is an A3+ scanner with a promise of being able to scan an A3 300DPI page in four seconds.

The web site I bought it from said that it’s a 4PPM scanner.

THOSE ARE NOT THE SAME THING!

So I was excited when I finally got it, two months after I ordered it. Was it going to be 4PPM or 4SPP?

The latter! From hitting “enter” on my USB-connected laptop to having the scanned page up in my Emacs, it takes 3.5 seconds. Very impressive, I think. It’s only USB2, and I thought that might be a bottleneck, perhaps, but apparently not. It also feels very sturdy and it doesn’t have a fan, so it’s quite silent. It’s very nice. And it makes good-quality scans, too.

But.

Yes, I connected it to a Linux laptop and you all knows what comes next: A tale of woe.

$ scanimage -d epsonds:libusb:001:019 --resolution 300dpi > /tmp/file

Worked perfectly the first time I tried it, so I thought I was in luck for once. But then I tried it again:

$ scanimage -d epsonds:libusb:001:019 --resolution 300dpi > /tmp/file
scanimage: open of device epsonds:libusb:001:019 failed: Error during device I/O

Gah! Basically, nothing helped. And it’s not just when scanning: Any command that talks to the scanner works the first time:

$ scanimage -L
device `epsonds:libusb:001:019' is a Epson DS-50000 ESC/I-2

But the second time:

$ scanimage -L

No scanners were identified. If you were expecting something different,
check that the scanner is plugged in, turned on and detected by the
sane-find-scanner tool (if appropriate). Please read the documentation
which came with this software (README, FAQ, manpages).

If I unplug it and replug it, then it works again.

After googling a bit, it seems that somebody had the same issue some years back with a different scanner, and the way to fix it was to build scanimage and friends from the current source tree, but that didn’t help.

So after some head scratching, I thought of a different approach: Obviously, something scanimage is doing is leaving the scanner in a bad state. What if I just reset the USB interface? Is that something that’s even possible?

Yes!

I added a Makefile and put it on Microsoft Github for your convenience. All the code does is basically:

ioctl(fd, USBDEVFS_RESET, 0);

And this resets just the single USB port, so nothing else wonky happens to the USB sub-subsystem. And the command is extremely fast, so it adds no delay to the scanning process.

You do get a lot of these messages in your kern.log, though:

Oct 28 21:03:06 corrigan kernel: [972003.683893] usb 1-2: reset high-speed USB device number 19 using xhci_hcd

But who cares.

It’s truly the year of Linux on the Laptop.

February 1943: Air Force












It’s a war movie!

I’ve seen some spy stuff during this blog series, but very few out-and-out war movies. And it’s by Howard Hawks, so it looks like the shots are gorgeous…

Except that the transfer I have i ridiculous. There’s digital artefacts all over the place. Not just banding and exaggerated grains, but also a harsh mp3 audio track.


It basically looks like they mastered it off of a VCD disc downloaded from a 1998 torrent site.

Very not pleasant.

Anyway, this won the Oscar for Best Film Editing, which is, I guess, a way for people to say “this movie wasn’t very good, but we appreciate the effort”.

Because this is an odd movie. We follow a crew flying around the Pacific for hours. So lots of tight shots inside a plane, and then composited above documentary footage of locations.

Ah… it had a difficult production. I guess that explains the weirdnesses.

But I don’t know whether my general dissatisfaction with this movie is due to the bad DVD or whether the movie is just kind of boring. It’s 95% character development.

Air Force. Howard Hawks. 1943.

Popular movies in February 1943 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
23407.1Air Force
4917.1Kid Dynamite
2416.9Claudia
2466.7Reveille with Beverly
2656.1The Youngest Profession
30905.5The Outlaw
9494.6Dead Men Walk

This blog post is part of the Decade series.