After posting yesterday morning’s State of the Newton in 10 Years Ago Today, I asked my fellow NewtonTalk members if there was anything glaringly obvious that I had missed. It was pointed out that I had somehow completely missed all the hardware folks.
For an ever decreasing number of us, today is an important day: ten years ago Apple discontinued the Newton.
This morning Google went live with the Macworld Makeover of their mobile portal with a number of new updates for iPhone/iPod touch users. It’s now very much iPhone-like as well as including improvements to both Gmail & Google Calendar and adding iGoogle to the mix.
I’ve been using em-based text-sizing on this site for a number years using Richard Rutter’s methods and have done well by them. He recently expanded upon his tricks for A List Apart and proved the consistency you can achieve with them.
Thomas Brand is at it again! This time he’s announced NewtonTips, a feed of Newton-related tips powered by Twitter. Complete with Mac OS X Dashboard Widget and all.
Thomas Brand has updated [his] Newton Blog to even further emulate the Newton OS 2.1 experience by applying the Apple Casual font to his Tweets section.
Yesterday’s Daring Fireball Linked List included a link to A special ‘Where’s WALL-E’ edition of Why For? for a look at some of Pixar’s in-jokes. Emily and I are quite the pair of Pixar fans so most of these reference were known to us, but there are a few gems we hadn’t noticed yet. Tin Toy under the bed in Lifted? Incredibles Manga in Finding Nemo?!
Nullriver’s always been quick to support upgrades to Connect360 whenever Microsoft releases an update to the Xbox 360 Dashboard, and this time is no exception. On Tuesday, they released the Fall 2007 Dashboard Update, yesterday I touched on my initial impressions of said update, and sometime thereafter Nullriver released Connect360 3.2.
Yesterday marked the release of Microsoft’s Fall (2007) Dashboard Update for the Xbox 360. While it it’s not exactly, or even technically, Fall anymore, I still welcome updates to the Xbox 360 Dashboard since they only offer them up twice per year.
A friend wanted to Launch Front row by pressing the programmable button on his new LaCie D2 Quadra hard drive, but the software wasn’t letting him program a keystroke, so I whipped up the following AppleScript to press Command-Escape for him and so launch Front Row. I’m sure there are plenty of other solutions out there or maybe even this same one, but here it is anyway:
Yesterday Twitter added the ability to search for people so I set out to find out who else in Vermont is twittering away. A quick search for either "Vermont" or "VT" yields roughly 120 people (combined) which is a little better than I had expected. Oddly enough, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company is the only other twitterer that calls the Shelburne area home, but they have four different accounts that have only been updated once (and not for the past couple months, at that).
While I subscribe to the "Less is more" philosophy, I’m actually pretty poor at adhering to it. I have a major case of information overload in my digital life and junk clutters up both my digital and anolog lives. I’ve been pretty good with the RSS feeds that I subscribe to, I’ve slimmed down this site, and I’ve started attacking the piles of unused computer gear in my apartment.
I’ve got a bunch of computer gear that I’m selling, so might as well let everyone know it’s available. It’s all in really good condition, but it needs to go to make space in my apartment:
I frequently find myself whipping out my Newton MessagePad 2100, it’s mini-DIN-8-to-Interconnect dongle, and DB-9-to-mini-DIN-8 cable for quick administration of various routers, firewalls, and switches via their console ports using the excellent PT100 terminal emulation software. Last night I was faced with an interesting new hurdle while using this toolset to configure a new-to-me Intel Express 530T switch: how does one use keys that don’t exist on the Newton’s software keyboard—such as ctrl, esc, and the up/down arrows—without plugging in a Newton keyboard? Most of the devices I have dealt with have been strictly command line interfaces so I had not yet run into this issue.
John Gruber has gone and posted a discourse on bringing copy & paste functionality to the iPhone. In response to his article, I’d like to describe what I feel another good, Newton-inspired solution would be.
I’ve been thinking a lot about sliming down the “stuff” in my life recently—for years, actually—and after having included some photos in the The Items We Carry flickr pool I decided I should start with the crap in my pockets.
I use the excellent spamtrainer tool on Mac OS X Server mail servers so that I and others can more easily spamassassin what’s spam or not. Up until now I’ve been content to do the following to manually redirect the messages to the junkmail account:
I won’t yet get into why I have an Xbox 360 or what the general consensus is, but I would like to say that I’ve recently purchased a couple Xbox Live Arcade titles that I absolutely love.
The design you’re now looking at was developed in late-January/early-February and I’ve been waiting to get a chance to implement it. Unfortunately, that chance never came so decided this morning to Just Do It™.
There’s been some recent iPhone-related news that gave the impression that we were getting closer to legitimately using using iPhones in Vermont. Unfortunately, I think we lost all progress today.
I was a bit surprised today to see that the Vermont International Reggae Music Festival was cancelled earlier this month citing, “Lack of sponsorship, insufficient pre-festival ticket sales, a commitment to paying a fair wage to reggae artists, and several attempts at derailing the festival by the Rutland Town Select Board and community members,” as the primary reasons. I was trying to buy tickets at the time.
Emily and I had a blast this weekend doing something that we’re still shocked we actually pulled off. We’ve lived in the Burlington and Shelburne, Vermont, area for over four years, but we’ve never gone hiking or camping up here.
Today John Gruber posted an excellent set1 of AppleScripts that automate replying without top-posting in Apple’s Mail.app. You can read his article for the full description.
I was not fortunate enough to make it to this year’s WWNC in Tokyo, Japan, but the announcements to the NewtonTalk mailing list this morning blew me away. The entire Newton community will benefit greatly from the work that everyone put into their projects this year, so those of us unable to make the trek to Japan need not have worried that they’d miss out at all!
