Author: Bill Martens
Apples long announced Apple Watch looks to be coming on March 9th. Apple has an announcement event planned for that day at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco at 10am PDT. Apple also will be live streaming the event over the Internet as they have done with all of their events since Tim Cook took the reins of the company. You can view the live stream using Safari or Apple TV on the day of…
Apple has long been listed on the NASDAQ stock index and will be moving to the Dow Jones Industrial index. The move for Apple, also ousts long time Dow Jones stalwart, AT&T. Source: Reuters
Apple has announced an initiative to make their latest data centers in Denmark and Ireland completely 100% energy self-reliant. The two plants will come to a total cost of 1.7 Billion Euros and will go into operation by 2017. According to the press release ” CORK, Ireland—February 23, 2015—Apple® today announced a €1.7 billion plan to build and operate two data centres in Europe, each powered by 100 percent renewable energy. The facilities, located in County Galway, Ireland, and Denmark’s…
Vintage Computer Festival East 10.0 has been announce. The festival will run the 17th to the 19th of April and will be held in Wall, New Jersey. According to their website: Vintage Computer Festival East is a hands-on, family-friendly celebration of computer history. It offers a book sale, classes, consignment sale, exhibit hall, food, lectures, museum tours, prizes, vendors, workshops, and more. The event is produced by Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists (MARCH) and is hosted at the InfoAge Science Center….
Apple CEO Tim Cook has announced that the National Parks system will soon be another Apple Pay customer. If you have ever entered a national park that is popular like Yellowstone or Mt. Rainier National parks, the lines entering the parks can sometimes be overwhelming. This will soon be alleviated by the Apple Pay enabled iPhone 6, with travelers being able to pay their park entrance fees with Apple Pay. One can only hope that this will alleviate the lines…
KansasFest 2015, the Apple II centric convention has been announced. Held each year in Kansas City, Missouri, KFest is the only remaining convention which is dedicated to the Apple II Computer. This years event will be held 14 to 19 July. More details about the registration are forthcoming. For more information, check the KansasFest website at: http://www.kansasfest.org
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…
Radio Shack, long considered a hackers dream has fallen on hard times as of late. They have struggled mightily to keep pace with the changing market and have finally bitten the bullet with the filing of Bankruptcy. During the 1980’s, Radio Shack was one of the main competitors for the home computing market along side Apple and Commodore. Their computers made headway into many schools and homes but failed to keep pace once they switched to IBM compatible systems in…
The Apple II Scans website (http://www.apple2scans.net) has posted two new AppleSource Newsletters/ AppleSource was an Apple dealer centric newsletter produced by Apple Computer Inc. The latest additions include the AppleSource 24 and the non-numbered AppleSource issues. You can download all of the available issues from the Apple II Scans AppleSource page at: http://www.apple2scans.net/magazines/applesource/
Apple released their latest update version of their Yosemite Mac OS X Operating system this week. 10.10.2 includes a number of enhancements and fixes, including : Resolves an issue that might cause Wi-Fi to disconnect Resolves an issue that might cause web pages to load slowly Fixes an issue that could cause Spotlight to load remote email content when this preference is disabled in Mail Improves audio and video sync when using Bluetooth headphones Adds the ability to browse iCloud…
Apple has released an update to iTunes for both Mac and Windows. Version 12.1 includes a new control widget which allows users to control which song is playing within the notification center. It also includes fixes which are meant to improve the ability of iOS devices to sync with the desktop. The widget allows users to control the song choice, see which song is playing or to buy new songs or albums from the App store. http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1614?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
Gerard Putter has updated the Virtual II emulator. The latest update to version 7.5.2 includes the following fixes: Fixed an issue that could cause the virtual procesor to get stuck in an endless loop. The right arrow key did not work correctly when used for game control. This has been fixed. Virtual II is an Apple II emulator for Mac OS X and is $49.95 for the full version. You can download the shareware version or the update from the…
The WOZPAK Special Edition has been re-published as a hardcover book. The new book is still the same 352 pages of Apple II information, however, it now fits nicely on the collectors shelves. The WOZPAK Special Edition was produced by Bill Martens and Brian Wiser and released as a paperback book in time for KansasFest 2013. This is one book you won’t want to miss and the Hardcover is…
Gerard Putter has updated the Virtual II emulator for the Mac. Version 7.5 has been released with Version 7.5.1 hot on its heels to fix an issue in the 7.5 release. Included in the two releases are the following updates and fixes: 7.5 Support for two Mockingboard cards in one machine, in order to listen to max. 12 channels. Corrected an issue with double low resolution colors. Added an experimental feature: the super serial card emulation can now work with…
CURVED/labs, a German company has come up with a design for an Anniversary Mac which pays serious homage to the 1984 Mac 128. Using all of the advances of the past 30 years and the style of the current Apple computers, the Neue Mac designed by CURVED/labs is a hybrid of many items including an SD card slot replacing the floppy disk from the Mac128K. Sadly, this is just a design and no physical machine exists but the design is…
According to data released on the App Store Distribution page of the Apple Developer Support site, adoption of Apple’s latest version of their iOS 8 is now at a 68% of all iOS devices. The site also says that 96% of the devices are using at least iOS 7 leaving just a miniscule 4% of devices using older iOS’s. It does not go into detail as to the device breakdown so it can only be assumed that the 96% is…
Over the years of the computer revolution, we always knew one fact. 48K or 64K or RAM memory or Random Access Memory, was not ever exactly 48K or 64K. When we bought our computer, we always expected and knew that we would be limited in what of that memory we could actually use. The Disk Operating System would eat a good chunk as would the Basic Interpreter. But now in this day an age where those not educated in computer…
Virtual Apple II released an update to the Virtual Apple II database today. Version 1.28 of the database includes a number of new software packages as well as updates to items recently added including a manual for David Schmenk’s PLASMA based game, Rogue. For those users utilizing the database through their ActiveGS Apps or other mobile based applications, you can update the database automatically through the notification which will appear shortly on your display. All other users can check out…
David Greelish’s fine historically compendium, Classic Computing: The Complete Historically Brewed is now available online in a PDF Ebook. The book which was produced in 2013 contains all issues of the Historically Brewed magazine. You can download the book for free from the Classic Computing website at: http://www.classiccomputing.com/CC/HB_Book.html
Brian Picchi, the curator of the Tanru Nomad Computer Museum and author of the 2013 Apple II game Lamb Chops, has released his source code to the public. According to his posting, “With the release of the new Assembly Lines book, I thought I’d share the source code to Lamb Chops which borrows almost entirely from concepts covered in that book. I wrote it in November of 2013 when I was first learning 6502 assembly language so it may be…
