cnn.com: Return of the Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 was the second computer I owned. The first was a Timex Sinclair (an ancient bit of technology that used a tape recorder for storing programs, and had a too-small, inflexible chicklet keyboard. Of course, it’s big advantage was that it was mine — while my mom taught me to program on an Apple II+, the Timex was the computer that I wrote my first original programs on.

The Commodore was a huge leap leap forward. For one, I got to hook it up to the spiffy new color TV I got for Confirmation. For another, it had an external floppy drive! No more having to carefully advance through the tape recorder, looking for exactly the right number to execute my program at. And the Commodore 64 had an amazing 64 kilobytes of memory, which made it ideal as a gaming platform for one of my all time favorite computer rpgs: Ultima II.

Initial Thoughts on the iPad

I’ve had some time to play around with my friends’ Apple iPads since it was released. My initial impression? It’s gorgeous … but limited. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing will depend on what you want it for.

Apple built the iPad as a consumption device, and it excels at that role. While some dismiss the iPad as little more than an oversized iPad touch, this misses its primary appeal: it’s huge, glossy screen. Yes, I can look at PDFs and comic books on an iPod touch, but what I see is a tiny fraction of what appears on the iPad. On a tablet, comic books loaded using the Marvel app display full-screen and are easily readable. You can zoom in if you like, but it’s not essential.

The same goes for PDFs — while there are several different ways to get PDFs onto your iPad, once they’re loaded they’re far easier to read than on a phone or a smaller device, like the Kindle or Nook. It surprises me that the iPad doesn’t do this natively – PDF support has always been strong in OS X – but perhaps the Adobe Flash spat is carrying over to this as well.

Web sites look great … unless they’re dependent on Flash, but honestly I dislike Flash sites and I already knew it would do that. My favorite sites tend to be blogs and text-heavy sites, and all displayed beautifully on the iPad. I see it as a great platform for casual reading with one caveat: weight.

Why I want an Apple iPad

I want an iPad. It’s not because I’m a raving Apple fan boy or obsessed with the latest gadget – it’s because it fits the way I want to use technology, and addresses frustrations I’ve had with contemporary form factors. There are three specific products that I want to use with a tablet: Pen-and-paper role-playing … Read more

The Blue Dolphin Splashes Down at Nuketown

This is my first-ever post written on my family’s spiffy new Asus Eee PC netbook, aka “The Blue Dolphin”, so named because it’s small and blue, which led my wife to describe it as a baby blue dolphin on Twitter.

Anyway … we decided to get a netbook as a direct result of our summer vacation; I could have used it at Origins, and it would have been handy to have for writing on Butler Island on Lake Champlain (where we spent a week hanging out with family friends).

It’s a cute little machine — it ships with a 160 GB hard drive, wireless N support, a 4 cell battery capable of up to eigth hours of use (assuming you use the Asus power management tools), three USB ports, an SD card reader, an ethernet port and Windows XP.

I’ll forgive it for that last bit; I don’t have the energy to hack this thing to run Mac OS X, and if I have to run Windows, XP isn’t too bad (though I am curious about trying Windows 7 on it). The whole thing cost about $300 from Amazon. which made it a fairly inexpensive experiment.

Five Cool Apps You Didn’t Know Your Mac Had

One of the things I enjoy about my Mac is stumbling across different applications (or uses for applications) that I never knew it had. Some of these are legacies of earlier versions of the OS, introduced before being supplanted by some later software, while others are simply obscure, lurking in the corners of your Applications … Read more

What Apple’s Time Machine Doesn’t Do

I recently did a full restore of my my Mac from Time Machine, Apple’s built-in backup utility for OS 10.5 (Leopard). I had to undertake this radical step because Boot Camp refused to create a Windows partition, complaining about “unmovable files” that could only be eradicated by reformatting the drive and reinstalling Leopard. Overall, I … Read more

Red Ring Redux

For the second time in two years, I have a dead Xbox 360. The machine gave me the Red Ring of Death on Sunday after crashing while running DeadSpace. The machine simply froze, and when I powered it down and powered it back again, I was greated with the ominous glowing red rings.

Normally, this would be inconvenient by manageable: Microsoft extended the manufacturer’s warranty on the 360 to three years, and my Xbox is still covered. Unfortunately, this month isn’t anything resembling normal. I’ve got three game reviews looming between late October and late November, and don’t have time to wait for Microsoft to fix my box.

The first thing I tried was stopping by Best Buy; I got the extended warranty for my first Xbox 360, and when it died I was able to walk into their store and get a replacement. Unfortunately, the warranty was from the original date of purchase and wasn’t extended when I got the replacement.

Comparing TinyMCE and CKEditor

TinyMCE and CKEditor (formerly FCKeditor) are two of the most popular open source WYSIWYG editors for web applications. I’m researching which would be the best to implement at the day job on a campus-wide basis; ideally I’d like to pick one editor, and then use it with all of our web apps. Here’s a run … Read more

Darwin Streaming Server: Lessons Learned

I spent a couple of days messing around with Darwin Streaming Server, the open source port of Apple’s Quicktime Streaming Server. Here’s what I learned from my poking and prodding of Darwin installed on a Redhat Linux box: Darwin streams over port 7070 by default. There’s an option to have it stream over :80, but … Read more

Debugging Firefox Extensions

I got to spend too much time the last two days fighting the good fight while trying to update and redeploy a Firefox extension that creates a toolbar of popular links for the college where I work. Firefox toolbar are nifty creatures, but they can be finicky. To start, in order to even offer one … Read more