Two weeks ago I commented that, “Sometimes I wonder just how ‘Newton’ I could go. Clear off my desk and leave only an eMate and Color StyleWriter 2200? Would love it.” Shortly there after I discovered that RetroChallenge would be kicking off their 2010 Winter Warm-Up at the start of January. How could I resist bringing a little extra green (I’d assume there will already be many a glow from green monochrome CRTs) to the challenge?

While I’m desperately trying not to start new projects, one of the tasks I’ve been attempting during my few hours at home has been to clear off my desk. It had become a dumping ground for paid bills, receipts, gadgets and anything else without a specific home. At one point the pile actually reached the ceiling. Working in a few eMate repairs and a bit of writing during the month of January should not only be feasible, but could actually feel quite productive. Needless to say, little extra encouragement was needed for me to submit an entry.

The challenge is very open-ended, so I was content with setting a reasonable goal of repairing & updating an eMate 300 as a clean & simple environment for focused writing. It needs the hinge repaired, battery recelled, 2010 patch applied, and a few other issues addressed, so there’ll be more involved than merely clearing away desk detritus. If I manage all that with time to spare, then I’ll venture to craft a working modem script which allows me to get online with AT&T EDGE/GPRS via Bluetooth, but I’m not counting on it.

To be honest, it feels a bit deceitful to submit a Newton entry as I’m a daily user and a bit of a power user. Hell, my MessagePad 2100 travels with me everywhere and is already patched for 2010, has CompactFlash memory, BlueTooth, and WiFi. The eMate, however, has just been collecting dust in the strata on my desk, so I doubt I’ll get much push back for revitalizing it.

With less than an hour to go before the start of the challenge in my time zone, I’m very much looking forward to a clean, minimal, and usable Newton desk at the end of the month.

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.

BT-001 Bluetooth Module

Let me begin a new-ish development.

Approximately twenty days ago I approached Jake Bordens regarding his cancelled BT-001 project to create an internal Bluetooth module for the MessagePad 2100. He had ceased further development due to issues with the antenna design only being able to sustain mediocre/poor signal ranges with the Newton’s case off and failing completely when reassembled.

He was very open to letting others use and improve his design and offered to open source it. So, on February 8th, he released the Eagle PCB files under an MIT license and they can be found on his BT-001 page.

I have yet to test these files and am not likely to be building any PCBs myself, but hopefully this will give other bright Newton hardware people a head start in completing a built-in Bluetooth module.

The Hardware Guys (and Gals)

As a segue from the BT-001, Adriano Angelilis sells Pico Card Bluetooth cards (of which I’ve purchased one) as well as his own custom hardware on his Notwen site. He has numerous creations, including: a USB charging cable, PlainTalk and Bluetooth audio adapters, an serial-powered LED light, an iPod connection cable, and a USB dongle ; all of which are still fabricated one at a time.

Although quite controversial amongst the NewtonTalk members due to his propensity to reverse engineer for initial designs and what some feel are exuberant prices, KnowledgeNavigator of Newton Sales is at least keeping the hardware modifications available, including: an internal serial module, replacement backlights, and speed boost implants. More recently he has been working on a USB Dock Prototype based on the FreeDock.

The guys aren’t the only ones having fun with hardware. Although Stephanie Maksylewich discontinued her Newton use in 2005, she had a number of hardware hacks including homebrew overclocking instructions for the MessagePad 2100 and eMate 300. Definitely not for the feint hearted.

How Many Words Again?

Others yet are helping to preserve the Newton not only with soldering iron in hand, but camera as well. Sonny Hung is one of those who’s flickr photosets include everything from the tools that [he uses] when repairing Newtons, to Newton-related brochures, posters & ads, and magazine covers, to clear case models, EVTs & DVTs, and even the final MessagePad 2000 blueprints.

There’s a lot more there than I can even list here, but you get the picture (pun fully intended): he’s a veritable Newton archeologist.

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.

This is a twofold implementation so as to support as many browsers as possible, using sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) and CSS2’s @font-face (see A List Apart’s CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing for further details).

Many thanks to Thomas for implementing the latter after a brief chat via Twitter!

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.

I don’t currently own a Newton keyboard, but even if I did I would have been stuck needing to buy an internal serial port module such as the now-discontinued SER-001. That wouldn’t have been a quick solution. There might be some software that hacks the Newton OS’s software keyboard to add the additional keys, but how much time would I have spent trying to find it and probably failing?

However, the Newton’s built-in Dock¹ application offers a “Keyboard” mode wherein a desktop/laptop computer’s keyboard can be used to type on the Newton’s screen. I’ve got a Mac Color Classic that I could have set up to do this, but still would have required a that second serial port.

Fortunately, my Newton is fully equipped with a TCP/IP stack, WiFi drivers, a Melco/Buffalo WLI-PCM-L11GP 802.11b WiFi card, and the Dock TCP/IP extension for use with Simon Bell’s excellent NCX. By connecting my Newton to NCX on my MacBook Pro via WiFi I was able to simply click “Use keyboard²“ and start typing into PT100 which was running the terminal session to my new Express 530T switch.

Here you can see it all up and running on my livingroom floor during said configuration process:

While this was a quick and easy solution for me it’s really because I had already put all the work into getting it wireless. The Mac OS X side is easy (just download and run NCX), but it takes quite a bit more configuration to get the Newton side of things up and running. At this point, I’ll step aside and point those who might want to do this sort of thing in the direction of WikiWikiNewt’s Ethernet & WiFi pages as well as Mark Hoekstra’s excellent article on getting your eMate wireless (after all, he knows that the is an excellent terminal).

¹ Not to be mistaken with the button bar which looks like Mac OS X’s Dock.

² Currently it’s advised to click “Use Keyboard” from within NCX on Mac OS X as opposed to “Keyboard” in the Dock application on the Newton as you’ll get a connection error if you do the latter.

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 carry a wallet, keys, a pager for work, my cell phone, and my Newton MessagePad 2100 at all times and the most important things are really my Newton (which usually has atleast one PCMCIA slot free), my keys, and my IDs & credit card. I had remembered seeing a fake PCMCIA card years ago and was finally able to craft the correct google search terms to track it down: the Stash Card.

With such a product I could easily toss a few bucks and two keys (house & car) into it and carry just my Newton. I’d still have to figure something out for my IDs, but that wouldn’t be too bad. Since it was just under $8 (including shipping), I figured it was a worth a shot.

It came in on Monday and I immediately removed it from the packaging, opened it to see how much storage space it has (not much, but that’s what I was assuming), and then inserted it into the free PCMCIA slot in my Newton once it was closed tightly. However, upon trying to eject it, I discovered that it was completely stuck. I’m well aware that the Newtons were designed with very slim tolerances, but this was just too tight for even that to be the case.

So, after loosening the rear housing of my Newton I was able to safely extract the Stash Card with the assistance of a pair of needle-nosed pliers. Oddly, the Stash Card has two nubs/protrusions on either side that appear to be designed to cause friction to hold the card into a PCMCIA slot. I believe I could shave them off and it might help, but it’d still be too tight a fit.

My MacBook Pro has Express/34 slots not PCMCIA/CardBus slots, so I can’t test it there, but it does looks like it would fit better in a laptop (especially one with motorized eject mechanisms) than in the Newton, but I definitely would not suggest anyone buy the Stash Card for use in any Newton.

If anyone wants my Stash Card, you can have it for $6 (including shipping within the 48 contiguous States) and give it a try in a laptop.

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!

So, on with the announcements:

Open Einstein

I knew that Paul Guyot had been working on Einstein lately, but I had no idea what he had up his sleeves!

Today he announced that the Einstein source code has been released under the GNU GPL and the project will be known as Open Einstein henceforth. Slides of his presentantion and the Mac OS X binaries of Open Einstein are immediately available.

New features in this release include:

In particular, an important investment was made by rewriting the emulator part (the JIT module) to support PC-independent rewriting and decrease the memory footprint, which was the first step towards machine-specific recompilation. In other words, while the speed has not spectacularly increased, the heavy work done these past weeks allowed me to design a new experimental module where NewtonOS instructions are executed natively on ARM PDAs.

He also notes that:

Within two days, Matthias Melcher and I got a working Cygwin/X11 port running on Tablet PCs (this was on Saturday) and a working Cygwin/Native GUI (with FLTK) port running the next day. The Cygwin/X11 patches have been committed to the subversion repository (this might be a little bit tricky for I do not have any box to check the compilation works fine), and I believe that Matthias will be able to produce a version compiled with Visual C++ soon.

So those of you running Windows will likely have native Open Einstein binaries in the not too distant future.

DyneTK

I have also been peeking at Matthias Melcher’s DyneTK cross-platform, open-source replacement for the original NTK in the hopes of using it and Einstein to do a little Newton development on Mac OS X. He put on a presentation regarding DyneTK and also announced his excitement at the prospects that this year’s other announcements bring to the table with a call for Newton developers to dig out their old projects:

The WWNC was very exciting! NewtonScript, the abandon child, all of a sudden starts to live a second life! I call for all former Newton developers to find their old NTK project files on that old 1GB hard-disk or 40MB IOMega cartridge and bring them online, either via Unna, your own page, or EMail them to me and I will create a section on Robowerk.com

He also noted in a separate announcement that the latest Mac OS X binaries of DyneTK were made available this morning and other platforms’ will follow, “within an hour.”

WaveLAN Drivers

I’ve not figured out if this is actually related to WWNC or not, but Matthias also noted that Hiroshi Noguchi has released the source code to his Newton WaveLAN drivers!

This is huge news as he closed the registration to this driver (which was the sole support for WiFi cards in the Newton) back in December of 2005. I was fortunate enough to have registered it before that date, but others have been stuck without the ability to use WEP-encrypted networks as that functionality required registration after 30 days.

However, that should all change now and hopefully new features and bug fixes will be introduced by others.

I, and many others, tried contacting him on numerous occasions in the hopes of getting him to re-open registration, let us purchase the source code, or get him to open the source code. I’m ecstatic that he did the latter!

Summary

Paul also provided a summary of the developments from WWNC 2007, as follows:

Japanese hardware specialist Ken Shimoda (Shimoken) demonstrated various hardware repair including an explanation of the jaggies problem and a fix using a special cleaning pen. German developer Matthias Melcher demonstrated the latest version of DyneTK, an open source and cross-platform NTK (Newton Toolkit) replacement. Except for a bug that was quickly fixed during the coneference and the ability to cope with projects involving native code, I believe this is almost feature-complete and extremely good news.

On day Two, Japanese developer Makoto Nukui (GNUE) described what he calls the Newton DNA that lives in several project. But the biggest news was his demonstration of a cross-platform graphical toolkit (like Qt) that allow one to build NewtonScript-based applications running on MacOS X, GTK, Hildon (Nokia Internet Tablets) and of course the Newton.

Check out the conference programme to see the order of events. Paul commented that additional links to the slides and videos will likely be posted there soon.

Other Developments

Of course, this year has also seen great developments such as Simon Bell’s NCX (which I’ve mentioned before) which provides much improved desktop connectivity for Mac OS X.

Eckhart Köppen hasn’t been just sitting around either. He released Flashpoint, a task & project organization application for those who try to follow the Getting Things Done methodologies. As of late he’s also been attempting to get C++ compiling for Newton working correctly, but has been unsuccessful so far. Atleast he’s still attacking this major issue.

Here’s looking forward to another year of Newton developments!

Update: Paul mentioned he had forgotten the following in his summary (see above) of day two:

[T]he Conference Chair, Hiroyuki Saiki (Sai) presented how he is posting drawings made on his Newton on his website: http://26inch.net/

We also had several workshops where Newton users were able to exchange information and techniques. The Japanese community gathered there actually discovered Simon Bell’s NCX!

And also pointed us in the direction of the first photos from WWNC 2007

Simon Bell, developer of some excellent Newton software such as Mail V, has released a pre-beta of his previously-unannounced Newton Connection for Mac OS X software (or “NCX”, for short). It’s basically the Mac OS X functional (and visual, although modernized) equivalent of Apple’s Newton Connection Utilities which ran on Mac OS 9.x and earlier.

It appears that it’s built on the Desktop Connection Library (now hosted on SourceForge), but I’m sure Simon has included plenty of extra glue and shims, esp. considering he’s planning on using Mac OS X’s built-in Sync Services.

From my initial testing using my Newton MessagePad 2100, Buffalo WLI-PCM-L11GP WiFi card, and my MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo), it seems to be slightly more stable than DCL & Escale, but some of the instability may be due to the fact that neither NCX or DCL/Escale is Universal yet.

What works:

• Installing a package from the MacBook Pro
• Using the MacBook Pro as a keyboard

What doesn’t work:

• Synchronization (I didn’t bother testing it, since Simon says)
• Backup (It fails every time I try¹, but some have gotten it to work)

What’s untested:

• Restore²
• Import³
• Export³

I’ve had constant problems with my connection being lost between the Dock app on the Newton and Escale and not being able to get Escale to respond for long periods of time (15 minutes or more) after relaunching it, often having to resort to a reboot (my guess is the socket was being kept open even after the crash). I have not seen this problem with NCX, so I’m very happy about that.

The interface is beautiful—an excellent job modernizing the Desktop Connection Utilities icons and interface—and functions better than Escale.

It has now already replaced Escale on my system and I can’t wait to see the future updates.

Update: A fellow NewtonTalk-er provided the solution to my issues getting the backup functionality to work: although the “Documents” folder is selected as the default backup location, you need to select a destination (or reselect “Documents”) for it to function. After doing so I was able to initiate and complete a full backup from NCX, but it still seems to fail when trying to initiate the backup from the Newton.

Update #2: Simon e-mailed me, as well as the list, to inform us that he did not, in fact, use the DCL. He wrote his own custom libraries to do this, so mad props to him! I was definitely wrong on that guess.

¹ Of course, I was attempting to back up all packages, so it may have been conflicting with NIE or Hiroshi’s WaveLAN Drivers. I really need to do some additional testing. Update: I’ve gotten backups to work when initiated from NCX.

² Obviously, since I couldn’t do a backup I’m not really able to test the restore functionality. This is my day-to-day Newton, so I’m not about to test the restore functionality on it yet anyway.

³ I just haven’t had time to do this yet, partly because it’s a lower priority as I currently use BlueTooth (with a Pico card & Blunt) to transfer files between my Newton and MacBook Pro.

J. Tyler Nichols recently discussed his plans to develop a Newton Press (the not-entirely-stable-or-exactly-adhering-to-standards application used to create books for the Newton OS) replacement on the NewtonTalk mailing list. Today he’s announced that the web site is live, so Newton X Press has officially been announced to the world.

He’s also got a screenshot up, and it appears he’s making quite a bit of progress.

This is one application that I’d really like to keep my MessagePad 2100 in use.

Update: Updated the URL as the site has moved.

Thanks to a post by Giulio on the NewtonTalk mailing list, my Newton MessagePad 2100 with Blunt and a Pico Card is entirely stable. Transferring notes from the Newton to my MacBook Pro has been extremely fast and very reliable (although you can only send one note at a time).

The solution: Freeze SysPatch 0.6b.

Either I, or somebody else on the list, will investigate to see if it’s any of SysPatch’s particular features that causes the restarts or if the package is just incompatible.

Happiness. :D