Newton Poetry

Macworld has a four-part “How green is Apple?” series going, exploring the company’s e-waste practices and altruistic motivations.

Many environmental groups, like Greenpeace, say its hard to rate Apple effectively when they’re so damn secretive:

Yet Apple earned just 4.7 points out of a possible 10—dramatically lower than competitors Samsung and Nokia. That low score was largely due to Apple’s reluctance to open up more about the environmental impact of its overall corporate operations. “They could elevate their score quite easily with just a couple of fixes,” says Greenpeace’s Harrell. “They could do a greenhouse-gas inventory of their supply chain, which they probably have done. But they haven’t talked about it.”

As someone who deals with e-waste on a regular basis, I’ve had my own ethical struggle with Apple’s environmental practices. But it’s this kind of pressure, and pressure from their customers, that will ultimately make Apple more open about its “green” behavior.

[Via Macsurfer.]

Eckhart Köppen, the whiz behind the Y2010 Diagnostic tool, has come up with a simple four-step process to get rid of the problematic Fix2010 packge:

1. Install the Y2010 Diagnostic Tool
2. Launch the tool and Tap “Clear Alarms” – note, you will lose all alarms in Dates and need to set them again!
3. Delete the Fix2010 patch package
4. Reboot the Newton

Now Köppen is looking for volunteers with MessagePad 2100s to help him work on a solution to the 2010 bug. His patch testing is a four-step process, as well. If you have a spare MP2100, and you want to help contribute to the Y2010 fix, contact Köppen to help with his testing.

Hats off to Andy Hill, creator of the Newton Art blog, for coming up with a heck of an idea.

Using packages like HexPaint and Newton Works, Hill highlights artistic scribbles that are created on the MessagePad and eMate. He’s taking user-submitted work as well.

Here’s how Hill recommends getting the artwork off your Newton:

First draw the picture. Then copy it and paste it into a new Note. Mail the note to yourself using Mailv – and make sure you choose GIF in the format not text. Then upload the image to the blog.

Simple enough, although I would think taking a screen capture would work as well.

There are more and more artwork-themed apps coming from the iPhone; it’s nice to see Newton fans getting creative, too. They just have to stick to monochrome masterpieces.

As a side note, I’d like to point to the Newton Art blog as the perfect example of what constitutes a great blog. It’s unique, it’s quirky, and I bet it’ll be a lot of fun for Hill to maintain. Who else does this kind of stuff?

[Via NewtonTalk.net.]

A bit of fun today. It was only a matter of time before someone would parody the “Congrats, It’s a PC” ads by Microsoft.

Apple has already responded in their smug way, but this kind of thing is much better. I mean, not even the homeless guy will buy an HP.

I wonder how Blue Ray compatibility would help Homeless Frank’s cough?

“If Apple had sold even close to 30 million Newton OS devices in its first 18 months, Apple would not have been ‘beleaguered’, they would not have bought NeXT, and Steve Jobs never would have been brought back. Instead, IDG reported that Apple sold a grand total of only 60,000 Newton units in all of 1996, the Newton’s third year on the market. That’s about how many iPhone OS devices Apple sold per day — per day! — for the first 18 months after the iPhone went on sale.”

– John Gruber at Daring Fireball, on Apple’s too-intent focus on the Next Big Thing during the 1990s.

Couple of interesting things I found concerning the Newton eMate 300.

The first: a colored-eMate? From the picture above, it seems Apple (that’s former Apple CEO Gil Amelio and Frank Casanova there) had iMac-like color options slated for this particular Newton model.

Grant Hutchinson did some investigating on the multi-colored eMates, including asking Casanova where the prototypes came from, and turned up quite a few nuggets of good information.

An orange, red, or purple eMate would be a lot of fun to work with (much like my favorite Apple laptop, the clamshell iBook), but I’d love to get my hands on a clear-cased model.

The second concerns the rumored “bMate” – a business-model eMate for on-the-go writing pros. Says Pen Computing Magazine:

Journalists began snapping up eMates as the perfect portable writing tool. Even Steve Jobs liked the eMate. Apple reportedly began developing a “bMate” version for business people, featuring a better screen and a StrongARM processor. Anticipation was high for these new keyboard-equipped Newtons.

In hindsight, we can now see how the eMate’s design and ideal led to the creation of the original iBook. Salon.com quoted Apple as saying just that:

It’s also possible that Apple will release a version of the eMate based on the Macintosh operating system; the press release announcing the eMate’s demise promises that Apple “will be serving this market with Mac OS-based products beginning in 1999.”

And what do you know, the multi-colored “iMac to go” iBook G3 was released in 1999.

The Newton eMate 300 is a great machine. Small, portable, rugged – a sort of proto-netbook that lets you type on the go. And the battery life is great if you have a working, rechargeable battery with plenty of juice.

When my eMate came, I found out right away that the battery pack was probably the original. It held a charge for about three minutes. So while it’s handy to pop a few fresh AA batteries into a MessagePad and be back up and running, the eMate relies on its single battery pack. If it goes, you’re stuck with replacing it, building a new one from scratch, or keeping your eMate plugged in at all times.

I opted for the simplest solution: buy a new battery pack on eBay and installing it myself.

To start, I grabbed a new eMate battery pack from PowerBook Guy, a Torx wrench (I actually took my eMate into the hardware store to get the perfect-sized wrench), my eMate, and some starting instructions from Frank.

The first step is to flip your eMate over. See that half-circle hatch near the handle (above)? That’s what you’re taking off.

There are just two screws to remove on the cover, and they’re both at the top.

I left the screws in their slots as I lifted the cover off so I wouldn’t lose them. Now you see the good stuff: a few memory slots and the battery.

The battery pack isn’t bolted to the eMate; it simply rests in a little trench, with a wire attached to the circuit board.

This is the most delicate of the steps: pulling the battery connection cable away from the circuit board. Be careful, and use something (I used my fingernail) to wedge the connector away from the plug-in.

From here, pull the battery pack out of the eMate. The actually battery pack fits snugly inside the holster, but slides right out.

Here’s what the empty battery tray looks like inside the eMate. The soft pads keep the battery pack case from sliding around inside the Newton.

Slide your new battery back inside the protective casing, with the connection wire sticking out of the right-hand side.

Now carefully slide the connection wire into the circuit board until it snaps tight. A little push on the white part will be plenty.

Place the battery case inside the eMate, replace the cover, and tighten your screws. That’s all.

I plugged my eMate in and let it charge a whole day, and now it’s like I have a whole new eMate. A fully-charged battery pack should last you for days, even with heavy usage.

The battery pack cost me about $20 (plus shipping) on eBay. There are some DIY die-hards who are all about making their own battery pack, but the soldering made me nervous. Maybe someday I’ll give it a try. This solution, however, worked fine for me.

Now my eMate is truly portable because I don’t have to worry about keeping it plugged in at all times. Replacing the battery pack was a cinch, too, and took all of about five minutes.

Frank Gruendel has done it again. Last time, it was a dual-screen Newton. This time, he’s hot-wired a proto backlight into a Newton MessagePad 100 (or OMP).

Check out Frank’s Pda-Soft site for a fun photo tour of the project. It’s just a preview, but already Frank has started a buzz on the NewtonTalk list.

OMPs, and any MessagePad pre-MP130, lacked backlighting, making it hard to noodle with Newtons in dark or low-light conditions. It wasn’t until the MP130 that Apple got smart enough to include it.

But now? Sky’s the limit. Congrats, Frank!

“I think what I want is an instant-on Newton-like device in the Kindle form-factor but with a stylus and it only runs OneNote (but better than OneNote) and is also my iPhone. Or something like that. Yeah. That sounds about right…I imagine nobody has done it yet because the market demographic consists entirely of people who are legally insane.”

– Steven Frank, from his blog stevenf, on a dream machine/wiki that holds everything he knows.

A while back, I asked, “How many Macs are too many?” I asked this after realizing that I have, at this time, three working Macs surrounding my Nerve Center here at home.

Newton Poetry reader Rand Careaga chimed in with his impressive suite of Macs, including the above beauty: an all-in-one G3 PowerMac, also known as the Molar Mac.

Like the eMac after it, the Molar Mac was designed for the education market, where the look-ma-no-mess-of-wires design was attractive. And hence the name: the thing looked like a giant tooth.

A giant heavy tooth: they were almost 60 lbs. heavy, and that’s only with a 15″ CRT screen. As the Washington Apple Pi Journal puts it in their hilarious (and comprehensive) post:

While it is possible for a single large, stupid person to uncrate one (or even six) of these without assistance, Don’t Do This. The machines are heavy, and the boxes are deep. You can fall into a box and never be heard from again. You can rupture vital organs of a personal nature. Accept the fact that this is a two-person task.

The All-In-One G3 came before the iMac, meaning no USB ports. It did come with serial and ADB ports for peripherals, as well as a floppy disk drive.

Molar Macs came in two speeds, 233 MHz PowerPC and 266 Mhz, meaning they run at the same clockspeed as the original iMacs, and shipped with 32 MB of RAM. For their time, these were speedy machines. And speedy to set up, too, thanks to their all-in-one design.

Sadly, I’ve never seen one in person. Any Molar Mac owners out there that can speak to their uniqueness?