Newton Poetry

Matt Howe, a Newton programmer I interviewed a few months back, has updated his Holidays package for 2009

You download the .pkg file at his site, sync it to your Newton, and your calendar will have U.S. and 10 other countries’ holiday dates for next year. I added it to my eMate and it works great – just open it up, select whichever country or set of holidays you want to addd, and presto, it’s done.

“All it does is insert the entries. Once done you can delete the pkg,” Matt says. “It does not remove the entries, nor check to see if they already exist. It is very simplistic, just a quick way to add holidays.”

You can download other fun Newton software projects from “Papa Duck’s” homepage.

A big thanks to Matt Howe, who created a holiday package to upload to Newton’s Dates application.

There are 11 different categories of holidays, including Polish, Australian, and Canadian holidays.

Pretty handy if you want your MessagePad to remember when Boxing Day is. “Holidays” is a free download.

Two weeks ago, I decided to dedicate all my GTD, notetaking, scheduling, and day-to-day tasks using nothing but my Newton MessagePad 110.

I originally bought my MessagePad on eBay just to play around with, and see what all the fuss is about.  As I’ve worked on this Newton Poetry blog, however, I’ve developed quite an affection for the green machine.  Maybe it’s contagious, I don’t know.  But I figured if I really wanted to get to know my Newton, I had to use it everyday – not just for translating poetry.

The project began on Monday, Feb. 4, though not with a bang.  That first Monday, I mainly got acquainted with setting up calendar dates and making appropriate folders to store my notes.  Nothing special; just the basics. More… »

Today I tried out another iPhone at the Deathstar store (aka, AT&T).

But lately I’ve been trying to revive the Newton by getting some old macs to work again. I’ve got an LC II, a Quadra, and a PowerBook 5300 – all sitting around unusable, and all because I don’t have a proper display with any of them.

The PowerBook’s screen seems to be DOA, and the two desktops are missing a monitor.

So the Newton has helped me build this blog, but not much besides that. What I’m scared of is entering all the information by hand, which would take forever. My contacts, calendar, to-do items, etc. – that’s what the Newton was built for, but without a proper information input system, it’s damn clunky.

Not like the iPhone: I could plug it into my G4 iBook and be all set. iTunes does all the hard work for me.

The Newton? A poetic brick. The MessagePad came with a Connection Kit, but I need the proper Mac (or, really, any old school PC would work – but who wants that?) to manage it.

Any suggestions?