chuma.org

Month: February 2003

  • Seen at the CBC Broadcast Centre

    I saw the following on a small unassuming sign at the north door of the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto:

    The CBC is looking for people who would like to be in the audience at a special live edition of The National to be aired on March 6, 2003. The show would start at 8pm and would be a discussion of [something to do about war in Iraq, I don’t remember exactly what it said now]. There would be some audience participation and afterwards audience comments about the show will be taped and shown on The National the next day. People who are interested and can attend are asked to call (416) 205 5029 to be put on the waiting list.

    I’ll go take a photo of the sign in a little while and post it up here.

  • Newton: five years after

    State Of The Newton Address

    by Victor Rehorst (who is the “king of NewtonTalk”, but doesn’t need to be worshipped) victoratnewtontalk.net – http://www.chuma.org/

    Today marks the five year anniversary of the cancellation of the Newton. Around this time in 2001, I wasn’t sure if the Newton and its followers would last the year: Palm and Pocket PC were making strong showings at the expense of the smaller PDA players such as Psion. It seemed like Newton software development was at a total standstill, with a small handful of exceptions. NewtonTalk was losing subscribers because of mismanagement at the hands of IdeaCast.

    Today, some key developers have joined those few and created applications that we only dreamed of: MP3 players, ATA support, desktop synchronization, and TCP/IP and IR connectivity, to name a few. NewtonTalk has grown by 60% since June 2001. The Newton still gets positive press coverage from publications such as Wired and MacAddict. There’s been an explosion of Newton-based Websites. People want to use their Newtons and seem willing to do so through any means necessary. I believe that we are in the midst of the Newton’s renaissance, five years after it all seemed like the end was nigh.

    In my opinion, the Newton platform is as healthy as a five-year-old platform can get. Used hardware is plentiful, mostly because the large number of units that were in the vertical market are now being liquidated. This drove prices on 2×00 models down from $400 US to $150 and below. Suddenly, people could purchase a PDA for less than a Palm or Win CE machine, and it had a huge screen and great battery life! This coupled with some press coverage and much evangelism by the community actually caused the number of personal Newton users to increase as business users decreased.

    This influx of users has fueled many important software developments as well. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some, but here’s a short list of new software developments for the Newton that have come about since 2001:

    • SimpleMail 4.3 with APOP/SMTP authentication, IMAP and vCard support

      • http://www.simple.dial.pipex.com/

    • WaveLAN 802.11b wireless network card driver

      • http://www.ff.iij4u.or.jp/~ngc/eng/newtwave.htm

    • Newtourage, information syncing with Entourage 2001/X

      • http://www.delcannsoftware.com/

    • NewtSync, information sync system with extensible plug-ins

      • http://www.everchanging.com/newton/

    • DIL Tester, first desktop connection app to support TCP/IP connections

      • http://www.tempel.org/newton/#DILplugin

    • MAD Max, native MP3 player (with iTunes plugin)

      • http://40hz.org/MADNewton/

    • Waba VM, bringing a whole new programming language to the Newton

      • http://www.tempel.org/newton/#DILtester

    • many updates to NPDS, the Newton’s very own open source web server

      • http://npds.free.fr/

    • Nitro, a free TinyTP / IrCOMM implementation

      • http://40hz.org/Nitro/

    • NaPalm, the forthcoming (we hope) PalmOS emulator

      • http://www.sealiecomputing.com/Napalm4.GIF

    • the Desktop Connection Library

      • (you’ll be hearing about this soon I think…)

    Many of these pieces of software wouldn’t exist without the growth of the community in the past two years.

    The Newton seems to attract a certain niche of supporters: people who have found things in the platform that haven’t been duplicated anywhere else. The screen size, the feeling of writing on paper, the intuitive OS, the unique system architecture, the dual PC Card slots even! We are people for whom Palms and PocketPCs are either flashy or underpowered. The Newton is still serving as an actually usable handheld computer five years after the last system was sold.

    I’m rambling on now, and I’m way too tired to be writing this right now. So let me say this: the Newton is alive and well. It’s pretty rare for a user community to actually grow after the cancellation of a product line, but here we are, growing and extending our Newtons, and gaining more and more dedicated users. We eep on writing software, finding and making hardware fixes, and dreaming up new things to do with our Newtons. It’s just great. Of course, you all know that already. But maybe today, you should find someone who doesn’t, and show them how useful the Newton could be for them. How after five years, the Newton is still the most intelligent handheld computer.

  • I am so bloody everywhere.

    I left my wallet at home today. Need I say more? I have $2.72 on me. Looks like a hot dog lunch for me…

    Damn I’m hungry.

  • remember when you were 4?

    Now you can, with TVO Kids Shows. I only remeber ever seeing two of these. One was “The Body Works” – gotta love those orange titles. The other was “Read All About It!” That show used to FREAK ME OUT when I was 4. Just thinking about it gives me a little twinge of fear. It was probably scary because of the villan and the fact that I probably couldn’t comprehend time travel at that tender age. I do remember that the two computers (they were supposed to be robots, but one was a computer screen and the other was a printer with eyeballs – I wasn’t THAT dumb at 4) were really neat, and that might have actually started my interest in computers. Freaky.

  • weekend snow-fest

    Weekend began with the two-hour train and bus ride up to Cannington. The family and some friends sat down for a nice dinner for Sandy’s birthday. I’d already given Sandy her birthday present from me, an AVC Soul III MP3/CD player. She got various little things from her mom.

    I spent most of the weekend sleeping, helping out in Michael’s computer store, and playing various game systems. I put some time into both Metroid Prime and Zelda: OoT, which was good as I need to finish a frickin’ game. I’m still stuck in Mario Sunshine – I need a serious few hours of gameplay to get to the last level, I’m about four or five shines away I think. Michael has so much damn used hardware lying around in the store, it would probably take me a full week to go through and test it all. I tested a bunch of stuff for him, and should have taken some more home to test…

    On Saturday night it snowed. A lot. A whole lot. Something like 10 inches where they were. The roads weren’t great, but were fine once we got down to Highway 7. Once we got home, 45 minutes of shoveling the driveway with one of those BIG snow pushers ensued… man those things are fun.

    Listening: Sleater-Kinney: You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun

  • still smoove after a month or so

    Hey, it’s been about a month since I moved this page to using MovableType, and I’ve been pretty happy so far. Looks like it’s time to upgrade to version 2.63, though. Mmm, features and bugfixes.

  • zimbaphone!

    The Advertising Artwork of Dr. Seuss – Early drawings of Dr. Seuss’ adwork before he wrote children’s books. Some pretty neat stuff.

  • oh yeah, other things from my sleep-deprived mind

    Today is Sandy’s birthday! She is 24, uh, 21! Yeah!

    And, I finally finished my homemade digital picture frame on the weekend. 5-minute epoxy is my friend. The frame is on so it looks nice, I just have to figure out how to mount the power switch nicely on the front and cover up some stuff with black paper. The software is still Linux using an SVGALIB graphics viewer and my RangeLAN2 wireless card, but I might switch this over to something based on Bart’s Network Boot Disk so I can take out the hard drive and achieve silent operation. This would mean delving back into Proxim NDIS driver hell again though.

  • gah! curse this fatigue!

    I just spend an hour trying to figure out why my script wasn’t writing any output and not producing any error messages. I left out one tiny little damn statement. Grrrr………

  • …

    I didn’t go to Sleater-Kinney on Monday. I am somewhat kicking myself for this, and if you’d like to come and give me a swift kick in the ass and yell “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING, MAN!!!!!” then be my guest. But when the friend you were going to go with informs you a hour and a half before the show that she is having serious problems, it sucks. I hope you’re alright, J. No hard feelings, seriously. It just kinda put me down for a while. And since I had driven all the way in that morning, I had to drive all the way back to Guelph, which took 2:40 during rush hour. During the first hour, I moved a total of 6.5km.

    Okay, so now that I think about it I REALLY REALLY wanted to go to that show. A lot. At least Wes went, so I can read his take. Cool. Damn, maybe if I had gone I would have found him and at least remotely known someone there. Fuck. I need more caffeine this morning. I get paid tonight, but I have less than $20 right now because my parking ticket cheque just went through. I guess it’s a good thing that it didn’t bounce. So anyways, I can’t take out cash to buy coffee and I only have green tea here at work. this. sucks. i. am. grumpy. and. i. need. to. launch. this. site. today. Maybe I should just stop listening to Rage Against the Machine and get along with my life?

    Enough griping. There have been good things too, I just need to vent. On Monday I finally got my Zelda Bonus Disc! This is given to everyone with a pre-order on the new Zelda GameCube game, and it has Zelda: Ocarina of Time and the previously-unreleased Master Quest on it, as well as movies for current and upcoming games. First thing I did was watch the movie for F-Zero, and immediately after I almost creamed my pants. WOW. If the game really actually looks like that, it will be insane. The draw distance alone… anyways. I also started playing Ocarina, which I have never played before. I’ve never played a 3D Zelda game before, so its taking some getting used to, but not as much as Metroid Prime. I’m not used to the non-linearness and the hella inflexible camera. But it’s fun. And it’s a new game, and who can beat that? I wish I had more time for games. And everything else.

    Also, yesterday Sandy got me a present that totally floored me. Thanks, Hon.

    I will write more later.