Category: Uncategorized
A few weeks ago I posted a story about a LCD color conversion, here’s a video of two converted LCDs in action. Enjoy!
Technology continues to March forward each year providing transformations in new levels of power, performance, conveniences in computing. 2015 surely is no different. Apple will soon make available a familiar but yet radically different design for the computing paradigm. Apple’s new dictate for computing will become either a love or hate situation. As you might guess I am referring to Apple’s soon-to-be released Macbook next month. So what are the issues? And, why a love or hate sit…
Steve Nickolas has posted a patch which fixes the Apple II game Cubit on the Laser 128 computer. Cubit was a 1980’s clone of the popular Arcade game Q-Bert and was long the bain of those users who purchased the Video Technology produced Laser 128 Computer. A single memory location jump was causing the game to stop mid-stream as explained by Steve below: My experience has been Cu-bit breaks on a Laser due to firmware incompatibilities because it jumps to…
Back in 2012, I bought an Apple //c to mod it put a G4 inside. When I started cleaning it, I went online to do some drive alignment, chip reseating and general restoration. That’s when I stumbled upon Retr0bright. First I had some trouble finding xantam gum, so i settled for Arrowroot. Waited for a weekend and on a Saturday, I lay down all the parts on the sun for a full day. The parts were so yellow, that I…
While we don’t often comment on politics, earlier today, president Obama laid forth a proposal to the Federal Communications Commission to enact the toughest Open Net-Neutrality laws possible. His commentary that the Internet should remain unregulated with respect to control of content access is the first real proposal for such openness from his administration. Obama’s detailed proposal came through an open letter to the people on Whitehouse.gov and is as follows: An open Internet is essential to the American economy,…
The developer of one of the most popular platform games of the early 1980’s has passed away. Lode Runner was an overnight success for Douglas E. Smith and had heavy competition from several publishers after he submitted the game for evaluation. The game originally was developed on the Apple II and became so popular that it has appeared on many of the later gaming platforms. His latest incarnations of the Lode Runner game were being published through Tozai Games.
Nishida Radio has released a photo of a prototype HDMI card for the Apple IIe that they have been working on. Proprietor, Koichi Nishida mentioned in a short conversation yesterday that he will be creating the //c version of the HDMi card first. The popularity of Nishida’s previous cards has meant that stock has been dificult for him to maintain as most of the cards sell as quickly as he is able to assemble them. The HDMI cards will likely…
Apple has released the first update to iOS 7 since last September to the general public after a long beta test period. This update includes fixes for the TouchID fingerprint system, a fix for the home screen crashing issue, as well as the new feature for automobiles: CarPlay. Apple calls CarPlay “a better way to use iPhone while driving.” The system is only available on select new cars for 2014. iPhone 4 users will enjoy improved responsiveness and performance with…
Sam Shead from ZDNet writes that the USPTO has granted Apple a trademark to its stores in order to cut down on copycats. Mr. Shead states, The approval was granted more than two years after the company first filed the application to trademark its stores in May 2010. Apple has requested that no store be allowed to replicate various features, including “a clear glass storefront surrounded by a panelled facade” or an “oblong table with stools… set below video screens flush mounted…
Java Apple II emulator author Brendan Robert was quite understandably pleased to announce that his JACE emulator has reached a new milestone. Said Mr. Robert: This is the first major release, bringing this emulator within a hair of my original vision for what I wanted it to be: it is a complete recreation of the computer I had growing up. (yaaaaaay!) There are a few bugs left to fix, but the only people in this world that claim software is…
The infamous “top-secret” document-leaking web site WikiLeaks recovered just Monday from what appeared to be a massive, week-long DDoS attack from thousands of distinct IP addresses. The group took assistance from security and performance firm Cloudfare in order to handle the extra capacity needed to withstand the attack– over 10 gigabits per second. A posting on the site states: “The bandwidth used is so huge it is impossible to filter without specialized hardware, however… the DDoS is not simple bulk…
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…
Apple ][ Scans has completed scanning the entire Obsorne / McGraw Hill Guide to Your Apple /// available on their website. According to Apple ][ Scans Curator, Mike Maginnis, the original scan had “the first two chapters of this book and made it available online. It had some great notes from Dave Ottalini inserted in the PDF, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t the whole thing. This new scan is the complete book and is higher quality than the first…
A couple of months ago I posted an article about a “home made” antenna I made from plans on the internet. A couple of days ago I completed an antenna with a different design I also found on the internet. Last night I held a demo of it for some friends (including a couple of retired TV/RADAR/HAM professionals. They were fairly impressed with the results and sensitivity. Considering the darned thing was made of wood and mostly wire coat hangers…
Regular readers will know I’m into DIY and fixing things. Lately my Linux PC has been having some hardware problems (which is why people haven’t been seeing a lot of regular posts from me lately). It’s been going on for some time in fact. I’ve checked out a lot of potential hardware issues and ended up replacing most of the computer at one point or another. One thing I haven’t checked out is the SATA cables. Last Friday I borrowed…
Apple Inc. (AAPL) Shares were trading at a low of $516.22 USD per share in the morning session on Wall Street. The obvious antincipation of Apple’s new offerings without any real news, weighing on the stock heavily. However, after the morning’s losses, the stock has climbed back to the $530-531 USD per share price range with just 30 minutes left in the regular trading session. Most analysts are still posting Apple as a Strong Buy and little change from the…
I’ve discovered something surprising. There are many E-book readers for the Mac and only one for Linux. This is a shocker. Ideally, with a few changes, those Mac readers should function under Linux. I mention this because I like how some of the ones for the Mac work. The reader for Linux is so-so. Since there is only one (and I talked about E-book readers at length a few months ago) I’ll just say it is available in the Debian/Ubuntu/Mint…
A quick read of all of the supporting documentation for the iBooks Author program show that there are some limitations to the program. Apple shows the limit at 2GB and actually recommends only 1GB in order to make it easily accessible to the users. While this is not all that unusual for Apple to recommend smaller sizes, a quick check of the current offerings in the Textbook section shows that the Person Biology textbook is over 2.7gb. ALso, E.O Wilson’s…
Frank Kunze has posted a slew of new screenshots on the Eamon Adventurers Guild Online Blog showing some of his work on the recently announced Eamon Deluxe 5.0. Eamon Deluxe is Franks offshoot of the original Donald Brown created classic Eamon. The latest version of Eamon Deluxe will run on multiple platforms and will also have a number of the original calssics updated to run on the new platform. The Eamon Adventurers Guild was originally run by Tom Zuchowski but…
Popular news website Reddit is planning on a 12 hour blackout in protest against the SOPA piracy bill that is currently being considered in the U.S. House of Representatives. Apparently Wikipedia will be joining Reddit in that Protest as will many other websites acorss the Internet. While the goal of SOPA was to make it easier to fight against copyright infringement, the reality is that it provides anyone who claims copyright infringement an easy way to censor the Internet without…
