Month: March 2011

Mike Willegal has posted a photo of his fully assembled Brain Board for the Apple II. The Brain Board turns an ordinary Apple ][ computer into an Apple-1 allowing the user to perform all of the same functionality of the Apple-1 computer while utilizing the Apple ][ cassette interface and keyboard for I/O. For more on the brainboard, check out the post at: http://www.willegal.net/blog/?p=1321

Brutal Deluxe Software has released an updated version of their Apple IIgs volume mounting software, MountIt.  This updated version contains a number of upgrades aimed at making mounting image volumes much easier on your Apple IIgs computer.  Antoine Vignau and Oliver Zardini’s posting follows: Mount your disk image files files directly under GS/OS, just like another volume. MountIt 1.4 is a new Permanent Init File devoted to handling different disk image files (.DSK, .PO and .2MG) of any size (from…

Antoine Vignau, curator and creator of the Brutal Deluxe Apple cassette project has announced that there are more cassettes added to the project this week.  According to his announcement: Thanks to some recent purchases on eBay, I have received the following cassettes: – Program Design Incorporated: memory builder / concentration, analogies iq-builder, story builder / word master – Programma International: Echo, Magic squares, Match wits The manual of those cassettes are now online on brutaldeluxe.fr, I need more time to…

Apple introduced its new iPad 2 today at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California by none other than the master presenter himself, Steve Jobs. He mentioned that he could not let this historic announcement go by without showing up at the show, which is interesting because this presentation was a lot less historic than the iPhone coming to Verizon…. in my opinion anyway. Back to the iPad as it were, never owning an iPad myself…

The Mac has a unique way of setting up its $PATH variable. These are the locations the BSD portion of OS X looks at to find programs to run. In this case the list of paths can be found in the file /etc/paths. To edit it the administrator needs to sudo their favourite editor since the file itself is owned by root. For example “sudo pico /etc/paths”. This is useful for the programmer who wants to have their programs accessible…

Programmers are always looking for tools to make things easier. The Terminal program included with OS X is adequate. This alternative makes things a little less spartan. According to the documentation this is an active project where the author implements features from other shells. One thing I find useful is the use of the scrollwheel as the middle mouse button for copy and pasting selected text. It also uses PC (Linux) keybindings such as <Home> (beginning of the line) and…

Once again, the rumor mills have been running up all types of conjecture of what folks think the iPad2 will be.  I can tell you what it will not be.  It will not contain anything from the MacBook Pro other than 1 or two new  technologies.  Most of it will be rehashes and improvements of current technology. First off, memory has been a major issue on the machines from the get go.  I have friends who have the 16gb model…

by Rick Sutcliffe Some Things Old, Some Things New March 2011 For the last two months the Spy has digressed from the reader’s usual fare to cover two endemic ethical issues–to wit, the misconduct of the spammer, and that of the rogue board member. For March, there are many interesting technology news items to consider. To complete the title, the Spy may borrow a rumour or two, and will certainly consider things Blue (-Ray, that is.) New products are now…

This week, we were thinking about the new iPad2 and the discussions of a holder for the machine came up.  So we started searching and came up with a number of case hacks or cases themselves that we thought were absolutely brilliant.   The funny thing is that in another few days, many of those hacks will have to change in order to accommodate the long awaited camera that is expected to be in the iPad2.  But in the mean time,…