ISSN 1496-3221
April 30, 2000
I own way too many domain names already, but due to a friend’s compulsion for retro technology, I just registered the nixietube.com domain. I guess I share a strange attraction and an oddly obsessive behavior towards obsolete computers and electronic devices with this friend of mine. After all, we did spend a good part of … More
April 29, 2000
Today at supper, my daughter asked me what an “edit your blog” was. She had obviously been reading over my shoulder while I was typing away in a Blogger window at my computer earlier in the day. I explained that “blog” was short for “web log” and that a log is like a journal or … More
April 29, 2000
Does your operating system make you want to lick it? Need a refreshing fix of gumdrop-inspired interface widgets? Start looking and feeling Aqua all over with the Liquid theme for Mac OS 8.5 and later. It’s all the user experience thrills and spills of installing a modern operating system, but without the hardware upgrade. Protected … More
April 29, 2000
If the Justice Department really wants to take Microsoft to task, rather than doing the obvious, maybe they should take a cue from the Pentagon and just crack down on PowerPoint. They could improve two things in the corporate world by taking this path. It would give competition a shot in the arm, and vastly … More
April 29, 2000
Tired of wussy little rollovers and weak animation? With PDF Xtra you can now add the chewy output-independent goodness of Acrobat documents to the immense list of media types that Macromedia Director can handle. Unfortunately, not all of the functionality of the PDF format is completely cross-platform. For example, you cannot save, scroll through, or … More
April 28, 2000
Business documents generated on the fly at hotpaper.com makes for an interesting online service. They’ve prebuilt everything from resumes to form letters to paper airplane templates. What about corresponding with the kids? Save all sorts of time using the Letter from Santa Claus. You can customize various text elements and then have their system spit … More
April 27, 2000
An extremely good friend of mine left our company today. Disturbingly, the announcement of his departure from was not made by him, but by one of our senior managers. Lately, he had been becoming increasingly disenchanted with the general direction of our project development and certain broad technology decisions. Being ever the skeptic, I wonder … More
April 26, 2000
Since I was blathering on about quasi-portable computing a bit earlier, let’s explore the do it yourself route while we’re still in the mood. For instance, have you ever wished you could just stuff the guts of a Quadra 700 into a hard-shell Smith-Corona typewriter case? I know I’ve felt the urge.
April 26, 2000
QuickTime 4.1.2 is fresh out of Apple’s oven. Among other improvements, it now works with Windows 2000. Actually, it’s nice to see that something works with Windows 2000.
April 26, 2000
The theme for my company’s sporadically scheduled TGIF this week is “retro-computing”. I’m in a quandary whether to bring a MacPortable, my Canon Cat Work Processor, or the 150 pound rackmount cartridge hard drive unit from the PDP8 stored in my garage. I’m leaning towards the self-contained demoing possibilities of the Cat, and quite frankly, … More