Newton Poetry

Check that out: a field ranger with his holstered Newt, courtesy of Steventon Consulting.

Gregg on the Newtontalk list pointed out the picture, and it turns out Sonny Hung has a blue version by Covertec posted on his Flickr page. This is like Last Action Hero stuff: “Bring on the bad guys, my MessagePad is armored!”

There are still sites out there, like this one with pictures of “The Divider,” featuring Newton holsters (though some of those look more like Man Bags).

MessagePads are already tough. A holstered Newt? There’s no telling what warzones they have seen. How about you Newton users out there – what do you use to protect your green machine?

Turns out you can do some blogging with your Newton and a keyboard, even these days.

Holden Scott over at This Old Mac writes:

Writing articles… well, this is a joy to do. With the Newton keyboard, it is easy to write in Newton Works’ word processor. I simply import to my computer and copy and paste the text into WordPress. It even has a spell checker. In fact, I almost prefer working in Newton Word over Apple Pages.

Holden filed that post with his Newton 2000 and keyboard. I can imagine doing the same thing with an eMate or any other MessagePad with a good keyboard. Scribbling a blog entry with a stylus? That’s a little trickier…

After an eBay auction went sour and I was awarded a refund, I reminded myself that, from time to time, Newton Poetry covers subjects like…oh, I don’t know…the Newton?

So I took my $30 and lucked out on an affordable Keyspan serial-to-USB adapter – model USA-28x (above). Now we can have some fun with that eMate I picked up, do some connecting with OS X, and play around with NCX, NewtSync, and the rest of the “new” Newton connection utilities.

If you’ve ever wanted to know what those eight little pins in the serial connection do, check out this handy site that lists each pin’s job and function in the Mac system. Pretty cool.

As soon as my Keyspan adapter arrives, I’ll post some project notes on how to connect a Newton with OS X. That is, assuming the entire thing doesn’t explode in my face. But that’s part of the fun, right?

Old iPhone commercial music and all.

What could be more green than charging your Newton MessagePad or eMate with a solar battery charger?

You can find one like the above model over at Newton Sales for “only” $139.99. The subject of solar charging pops up in the Newtontalk list every once in a while, and Newton users have had varying degrees of success charging their battery packs or rechargeable AA batteries with solar panels.

It seems a bit of an expensive option to go environmental with your Newton, but maybe it’s worth it. You can charge your car’s battery with the sun’s rays for about the same price as Newton Sales’s model, or you can get your own cheaper AA battery solar charger elsewhere online.

What do you think – is it worth the extra expense just to up your geek (and green) cred?

Jesus Weeping God – we’ve been down this road before.

Forbes.com has yet another “Newton was a smelly sock” article and photo series focusing on Apple and the Bandai gaming platform. And guess which pioneering, monochrome product is also featured?

That’s right, the Newton. And don’t forget to include the photo gallery, you pimps. Up yours Forbes – again.

By some accounts, businesses are snatching up Macs more and more these days. 9 to 5 Mac says the use is quadrupling, while some say the increase isn’t so great. But for the subject to even be noticed, something has to happen.

In fact, something is happening: Apple, whether directly or indirectly, is telling the enterprise market, “we’re not so bad.”

Apple tried this years ago. The Apple III was meant to be a business model PC. So was the Lisa. But their cost or glitches, combined with IBM’s early dominance, relegated Apples to the “creative” and education markets. Hippies love Macs. Suit-and-tie professionals? Not so much. At least that was the perception.

Then Apple created a tool that was tailor-made for business: the Newton Messagepad.

More… »

Check this out.

Cult of Mac interviews James Wages on his classic Mac SE/30 web-surfing machine and Newton 2100 sync setup. He even uses his Newton keyboard (with an extension) on the SE! You can check out the Flickr collection here.

A lot of people might look at James’s setup and think, “Jesus, what the hell’s wrong with him?” Me? I look at it and think, “My hero.”

Today, Newton Poetry celebrates its first anniversary. From its simple beginnings it’s grown and developed and changed into something not too far removed from the original idea.

A year ago, Newton Poetry started as a blog about poetry that I scribbled into my Newton MessagePad 110 and the translation that came out of the Newton’s handwriting recognition technology. Misspellings, garbled text, weird syntax – it was all par for the coarse, and tons of fun to read. I got my inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s famous “Jabberwocky” poem (hence my sub-headline) and the story behind it. But after a while, the act got old. I got bored, and I wanted to explore the history and mechanics of what made a ten-year-dead platform exciting and still relevant. What is a Newton? Why do people still devote free time to this machine? How can it be useful in this iPod Touch and iPhone age? Is Apple working on a new, revised Newton platform? How do you use a MessagePad in today’s OS X environment, a system never designed to handle the Newton’s serial-based connection?

There was something there, and there was a (admittedly small) audience. While the poetry stuff garnered plenty of views, it was mainly from search traffic; searchers were probably looking for meaningful analysis of the poem they were looking for, not some weird, misspelled translation. Whereas posts like getting an original Airport card working in a G3 iBook, or fixing up a PowerMac G4, drew tons of attention and discussion and comments, the poetry just…sat there. No love at all. Despite early experiments, no community formed around the idea of (a) submitting a poem, either famous or amateur and then (b) having some 15-year-old PDA spit out random text based on that poetry. And really, scribbling a poem and waiting for the response is tiring. It’s no fun anymore. Therefore, posts with poetry have dropped off. I just haven’t felt like doing them.

Posts on Newton history? Those I love.

Maybe it’s that I’m interested in poetry, and I’m interested in the Newton, but I’m not interested in the combination. At least not any more. There are no volunteers who are willing to do Newton poetry (that I know of), and I’ve given up on the idea of training apes to do the work.

Result: no more Newton poetry.

Merlin Mann’s post on blog pimping and writing about what you truly love hit a nerve with me. Those poetry posts generated plenty of hits. I didn’t write them because I wanted Google-trafficked attention, but I took a shot on building something out of a goofy idea. If I wanted a money-maker, or an attention whore, I could post a Newton poem a day and sit back as the hits kept coming.

But that’s not what I want to do. What I want to do is explore the Newton platform, and experiment with it, and run fun little projects on classic Macs, and eke out an blog existence that where I appreciate and enjoy spending time messing around. I look back at those Newton poems and…golly…I just don’t get misty eyed reading them, you know?

Newton Poetry might become a self-hosted blog. I have a goal to achieve before that happens, but it’s something I’ve spent more time and research on. Taking a WordPress.org trip into blogland is one of the last great experiments I can pull off with this thing. The idea makes me nervous, but I look at the blogs and sites I love reading, and all of them have benefited from the kind of modifications and customization that make a self-hosted blog worth doing. Graphics and a unique domain and tweakable CSS – I have no idea what I’m doing with any of that. But the question is: how else can I learn? How else can Newton Poetry grow?

There lies the rub, friends. What’s next? Where do we go from here?

Projects like the upcoming links page and the how-tos have helped develop Newton Poetry into a beast all its own. Newton fans and users have to have a home base in this day and age. Luckily, they have several. But as time goes on, more and more of those “page not found” messages will creep up. Newton-focused web sites are disappearing, and it’s up to a few of us die-hards to keep the tradition alive.

I don’t know how to program with NewtonScript, and I don’t know how to make a Bluetooth card work with a MessagePad 2100, and I sure don’t have the length of years behind me to remember when John Sculley first released the Newton MessagePad onto the thirsting masses. But boy I have fun with my Newton. And I know you do, too. Most of you give two shits about what happens with Apple, too, and many of you have iPhones to play with, and you wonder about the connection between today’s iCal and the MessagePad’s Calendar. You hit “send” on the the e-mail you just scrawled with a stylus or tapped out with the on-screen keyboard, and you understand how a non-physical input method can be a boon in today’s crazy world. You waste time playing Newtris on your Newton and the new Tetris on your iPhone, and you check out great sites like Blake and Arn’s TouchArcade and you remember when some of those simple games (chess, blackjack) first appeared on your monochrome Newton screen. And God Almighty, you curse the day Steve Jobs hit the big Reset button on the whole Newton ideal.

If any of that sounds like it might apply to you, then I hope you’ll find that Newton Poetry serves some purpose in your hectic life.

This whole thing was a shot in the dark a year ago. Everyday I watch that “today’s views” number creep up as some geek who just bought an eMate off eBay finds out how to connect his or her new toy to their iMac and a whole new world opens up right before his or her eyes. That’s what this site should be about. That’s my audience. That’s where I see this site going in the future. Because while I haven’t yet purchased a 2×00 MessagePad model and connected to the web via Wifi, I will, and I’ll explain how the heck I did it. Maybe that’ll help someone. Maybe it’ll just confuse others. Whatever. It’ll be damn fun to try.

It’s a new day, Dear Reader, with a more focused direction. File this in the “What Does It All Mean” folder, and read on. We have plenty more to talk about.

What do you do when you’re not allowed to buy an iPhone?

Get a Newton, of course. That’s exactly what Scott Hanselman did. Scott learned who’s really in charge in the household: “She’s is not going to give, and I desperately needed to find another Apple device to caress.”

So, for $100 (only $99 less than an 8 GB iPhone today), he grabbed an MP2000.

Check out the rest of Scott’s story over at his blog, and see how he connects his Newton with Outlook 2007.