chuma.org

Author: chuma

  • stupid stupid stupid!

    Whenever I go out to get lunch and don’t bring my camera, I always see cool things that I want to take photos of! GRRR! Today in two minutes I saw a van parked outside the CBC building with “BREATHE” stenciled on the side, and also a guy driving down John St. on a Honda Elite scooter just like mine (but white)!!!

  • Gollum vs. Regis Philbin

    Gollum vs. Regis Philbin@Everything2.com – THE REGIS CHEATS! It only asks riddles and not answers! UNFAIR! CRUEL REGIS! Perhaps we EATS the Regis soon? Yesss…. EATS HIM!

  • bits and bites (or, meli-melo)

    I wrote this up as part of a discussion from boingboing, but I should post it here. These are the gadgets I carry around regularly.

    On the belt, a Motorola V101. Sure, it’s ugly as sin, bulky as hell, and sucks for actual voice calls. But it has a screen that you can actually read some text on and it’s beautiful for sending SMSes and using the ICQMobile integration just kicks ass. I think this phone is only available in Canada.

    In my bag:

    • Apple Newton MessagePad 2100. Still the most usable PDA ever created. I organize my life and my work tasks on this puppy, and wouldn’t change that for the world. Of course, I’m a little biased since I happen to also run a very large Newton mailing list… This is actually kept in a BurroPak padded sleeve inside the bag. If you were a Newton user and you remember the BurroPak from Landware, you get a gold star.
    • Game Boy Advance with a 128 megabit flash cartridge. Real games on the go, and even Classic Nintendo games to boot.
    • AVC Soul Player CD/MP3 player. Coupled with some Sony MDR-V150 headphones. I don’t need an iPod; CDRs are still cheap. If I scratch one, I just re-burn it from my hard disk at home.
    • Canon PowerShot S230 camera. Man, I love this camera. It’s tiny, it’s 3.1MP, it uses CompactFlash, it shoots movie clips with sound, it has great low-light performance, and digital zoom that actually looks good. It has a Lexar 128MB CF card in it.
    • AComData USB CompactFlash reader. It’s also nice and small. It’s mostly for using a 16MB CF card that I use to ferry files back and forth from work without exposing data to the wilds of the net. Also for showing photos from the camera on any PC, of course. For $20 minus $20 rebate, I wish I had bought two.
    • Leatherman PST II multitool. For everything from a quick nail file to cutting wire. Also has a decent phillips-head screwdriver and three sizes of slot drivers, well suited for the inside of a PC case.
    • Sanford PhD Multi. Stylus, Pen, Pencil, and only $15.

  • damn it feels good to be a gangsta

    I’m back, 100% feeling fine. Returning to broadcasting at ya.

    Sandy and I found a new apartment on Friday! It’s around the Don Mills & Sheppard area of Toronto, right across from Fairview Mall. It’s a nice building – possibly the only really nice one in that area – and it’s right on the subway, next to the mall, and 10 minutes away from Seneca, where Sandy will be starting her ECE course this summer. And it’s not in the ghetto. Ahem. I didn’t realize all the hoops you have to jump through to rent in Toronto – credit check, letter from your employer (or proof of other income), letter from your bank… but I did all that and we got it.

  • flu got me down

    Yesterday it hit me like a sack of potatoes falling on my stomach. Today I am back, but running at around 80% capacity.

    My cell phone does strange things when its battery gets really really low, like either turn on every pixel in the display, or just give a garbled display. Or the display is dying, which would suck and probably make me wish I had bought the stupid extended warranty.

  • 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