Category: General
The Kansasfest committee has release a teaser email containing the 2014 rendition of the Kansasfest Logo. Kansasfest is an Apple II centric enthusiast convention which happens each year in Kansas City, Missouri. The event draws hobbyists from around the globe and is usually inundated with advancements in the hardware and software on the Apple II series platforms. The 2014 Kansasfest will take place July 22nd to 27th. For more information, check the Kansasfest website at: http://www.kansasfest.org
As the end of the 2013 version of KansasFest winds down, the particip@ants begin to look to the next year. The dates for the 2014 rendition of the KansasFest Apple ][ convention have been announced and ccording to a posting on twitter from Ken Gagne of Juiced.GS, the event will be held 22-27 July, 2014. This year’s event featured Randy Wigginton as the keynote speaker and Steve Wozniak showed up to relive some of the good old days with the…
There will be another rendition of the OZ KFest this year. The austrailian compoinent of the Apple II fans has once again decided to have their get together to coincide with the Kansas City based event. According to the press release from Andrew Roughan, one of the event’s organizers, “The Australian retro computing gathering, OzKfest, will be happening in Brisbane, Australia, July 26-28. That’s just 6 weeks away. Steve Kazoullis and I would like you join us for a few…
Apple has announced that their Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, scheduled for 10am PDT today will be streamed live on Apple TV as well as the Apple WWDC 2013 App. For several years now, many developers and those in the Apple community have complained about a lack of live streaming of the Apple events. With the record sellout time of the tickets for the 2013 rendition of the WWDC event, Apple was forced to cover those who were unable to get…
Apple Inc. has released an iOS App for the iPhone and iPad which will give all registered Apple developers access to the event. The 2013 edition of the WorldWide Developers Conference in San Francisco sold out in a record 71 seconds this year leaving many developers in the dark so to speak. Apparently, Apple has heard the cries of anguish from those developers who figured they would be able to get a ticket and were not so lucky. The WWDC…
WWDC, Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, has sold out their entire allotment of tickets in a matter of two minutes. In previous years, tickets were still available until a few weeks before the conference, however, as the popularity of the Mac has increased, the conference has been a more desirable destination. This record sellout is not likely to change next year either unless Apple increases the number of available tickets. For more information about WWDC or the availability of the…
The first is more of an update than a review. Ubuntu 13.4 is out. For those into running Linux this has been a fairly successful update. Although I haven’t tried it there does not appear to be many complaints. Mint 15 (derived from this version of Ubuntu) should be out toward the end of May. The second is a program called Simutrans found at http://freecode.com. Alternatively it is available in the repositories if there is access to a Debian based…
KansasFest, the 25th annual convention dedicated to the Apple II computer, is now open for registration. Users, programmers, hobbyists, and retrocomputing enthusiasts are invited to Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, from Tuesday, July 23, through Sunday, July 28, for six days and five nights of sessions, demos, announcements, contests, and camaraderie. The week kicks off with keynote speaker Randy Wigginton, Apple employee #6, who worked on the Disk ][ disk drive, Apple DOS, and Applesoft BASIC. Wigginton will be…
Darren Crawford has managed to do what no one ever considered possible: Post a Facebook posting from an Apple //e computer. In what is a first ever event, Darren posted his message using a combination of Lynx and the mobile version of the Facebook website. It wasn’t just an instant success, but instead was a work of some trial and error. In discussions in the A2C.Chat channel of A2Central’s IRC, much of the discussion was about issues with character loss…
Apple has released updated printer drivers for the Brother series of printers. Version 2.10 of the Mac OS X printer driver was posted last night on the Apple Support website and is now available for download. The driver coversMac OS X Mountain Lion, Lion and Leopard You can download the new driver from the Apple support page for Brother printers at: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL894
Apple has updated their printer drivers for the HP series printers. Version 2.12 (listed as 2.13 on the apple support page) is now available for download and covers Mac OS X Mountain Lion and Lion, as well as Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) You can download the drivers from the Apple HP Printer support page at: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL907
The KansasFest comittee has announced that the 2013 rendition of KansasFest will be held from July 23 to July 28. KansasFest or Kfest as it is known, is the only remaining Apple II specific convention and draws programmers and hobbyists from around the globe. This year will mark the 25th year of the event and is expected to be one of the largest in more than a decade. For more information, check out the KansasFest 2013 page at: http://www.kansasfest.org/2012/11/kansasfest-2013-scheduled-for-july-23-28/
Minecraft is an on-line game where the players run around mining for certain minerals, build structures, combat monsters as well as each other. and generally explore an expanding world. It is divided into two components. Namely on-line servers as well as clients to access the servers. Both components are free however to make full use of the capabilities of the client, a non-free (premium) account must be used. The game components are available for the “big three” operating systems (Linux,…
The group behind the MacHeist Charity sale have added a total of 6 more apps to the heist over the past ten days and now have extended the heist another three days. While the apps list has grown, the price of the bundle remains a paltry $29.00 for the entire bundle of Mac applications. The current rendition of MacHeist, the fourth major one in the groups history, has reached 33,000 bundles sold and has raised nearly 240,000 USD for charity. …
The folks behind one of the most successful charitable application bundles, MacHeist, have announced a new grouping of 15 applications. MacHeist 4 includes 15 applications for the Mac, priced at $29.00 USD for the entire bundle. MacHeist donates 25 percent of all sales to charities specified by the purchaser. Past MacHeist events have raised over two million dollars for a variety of charities. The last three apps of the bundle will be unlocked for all users as a specified number…
Speculation is rampant about a possible new MacHeist which seems to be forthcoming. The MacHeist website has been redone with a Spider web with a spider and 7 flies caught in the web, making everyone on the Facebook page of MacHeist comment about a possible new heist. MacHeist gained notariety for putting together bulk packages of mainstream software and selling the packages for less than $100 for all of the software. While there have not been any large packages in…
A couple of weeks ago I noticed my HP printer was no longer printing two sided pages. Strictly speaking this was with Linux but it could happen with the Mac as well since they use the same printer driver software… I figured it was an application problem with Thunderbird and Firefox since all the other applications (and computers on my LAN) worked fine. It never occurred to me it was a driver problem. Thanks to some prodding by Adam T….
It seems that owners of Cisco and Linksys home routers got a rather invasive surprise this holiday season. Cisco pushed out an update to their routers which requires users to use the Cisco Cloud service to log in to their routers. According to Boing Boing, the routers lock the users out and only lets them have access back if they agree to the new terms of service permitting Cisco to essentially spy on them. While many companies have monetized users…
Mozilla announced plans today to build a mobile operating system entirely based on the Web and HTML5, all powered by the popular Firefox web browser. Already, Mozilla has several mobile phone companies behind it, including Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, and Telenor. The Firefox OS will be built on Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko technology, which promises to eliminate several limitations of web development on mobile devices. One of the key features will be the privilege of HTML5…
Google, Inc announced today that it has developed an iPhone and iPad compatible version of its popular Chrome web browser. The browser, which is available now in the App Store, offers many of the same features from the desktop version of Chrome, including synchronization across devices of bookmarks and tabs, as well as private “incognito” browsing. Google Chrome currently has over 310 million active users. The announcement was made on the second day of the Google I/O conference in San…
