Sam Biddle's "The Slides"

Sam Biddle has collected, scanned, and curated a large number of slides. "The slides appear to be 1970s/1980s informational or training images from the United States Air Force, NORAD, Navy, and beyond." You can visit Sam's site dedicated to these slides at sambiddle.com, and download the slides themselves via his account at the Internet Archive.

This Python suite posts The Slides to Bluesky, four times a day*, at the account theslides.bsky.social.

(* Or, it will, soon! Before Dec 1, 2023, for sure.)

Dependencies

This project relies on:

• Pillow to process the original slide scans into tinier, more-uploadable sizes
• requests for communicating with BlueSky

They can be installed with these commands:

$ pip install --upgrade Pillow
$ pip install requests

Here's what the virtualenv I have on my laptop looks like overall (Nov 23, 2023):

$ pip freeze
certifi==2023.11.17
charset-normalizer==3.3.2
idna==3.5
Pillow==10.1.0
requests==2.31.0
urllib3==2.1.0

shrink_images.py: Reprocessing originals

I have downloaded, just manually, via browser, nine slide collections in JPEG format. These nine were the ones available on the Internet Archive (link above) on Nov 23, 2023, and match the galleries available on Sam's site. Altogether, they come to 291 images of total size 985 MB. Their typical resolution was around 5,550 pixels wide by 3,500 pixels tall.

I reprocess these images to a width of 600 pixels, since that seems to be just a bit wider than the photos you see in your BlueSky timeline.

I've organized these originals in directories with names corresponding to the names Sam gave the collections. The only weird part is I did some minor substitutions to make them feel more like real directory names -- no whitespace, no punctuation. This just means that '_' in a directory name means "a space" in the actual collection name, while '__' means "a comma, then a space." Capitalization & casing are kept constant. So the directory SERIES_78__AERO_SPACE_DEFENSE_COMMAND_BOX_1_OF_2_V-0092 maps to its collection name "SERIES 78, AERO SPACE DEFENSE COMMAND BOX 1 OF 2 V-0092". This matters because I want to include the original collection name in the text of the BlueSky post, and these directories are the only way I save those names.

The shrunken images are serialized as JPEGs, and their Base64-encoded bytes are stored in a SQLite table named slides with the following columns, all of type text:

• collection: The name of the slide deck the image comes from
• filename: The actual filename of the image
• jpeg_base64: Base64 encoding of the 600-pixel-wide version of the image

post_image.py: Post a processed slide to BlueSky

You supply login credentials with a text file of this wacky custom format, with these specific keys pointing to your own particular values:

ATP_HOST = [your host, very likely to be https://bsky.social]
ATP_USERNAME = [your username; like, right now, I'm using brian.gawalt.com]
ATP_PASSWORD = [an app password for this account]

To be clear: everything outside the square brackets needs to appear in this credentials file verbatim.

The script then connects to, and extracts an image and its metadata from, the SQLite file created by shrink_images.py. It reports the name of the collection the slide comes from, as well as a "slide X of Y" designation based on the sort-order of the filename of the slide within its collection.

TODO

In the order I'll do 'em:

• Deploy with a 4x daily CRON job
• Alt text: I'll have to come up with a tool to let me write descriptive text for all ~250 slides