Winter 2011/2012:

• January 24, 2012: Cameara operator, South Saint Paul at Simley, girls and boys basketball.
• January 19, 2012: Camera operator, Mahtomedi at South Saint Paul, boys hockey.
• January 13, 2012: Camera operator, North St. Paul at Henry Sibley, boys basketball.
• January 12, 2012: Camera operator, Henry Sibley at Simley, boys basketball.
• January 10, 2012: Camera operator, Simley at Henry Sibley, girls basketball.
• January 3, 2012: Camera operator, Richfield at St. Thomas Academy, boys basketball.
• December 22, 2011: Camera operator, St. Paul United at Simley High School, girls hockey.
• December 20, 2011: Camera operator, Hill-Murray at South Saint Paul, girls hockey.
• December 15, 2011: Camera operator, Cannon Falls at Simley, girls basketball.
• December 13, 2011: Camera operator, Humboldt at St. Croix Lutheran, boys basketball.

Fall 2011:

• November 10, 2011: Character Generator, Visitation vs. Wadena-Deer Creek
  at the Xcel Energy Center (streaming video unavailable, due to MSHSL rules), girls volleyball state quarter finals.
• November 1, 2011: Character Generator, Minnehaha Academy at St. Croix Lutheran, girls volleyball section semi-finals.
• October 25, 2011: Camera operator, St. Louis Park at Simley, boys football (partnership with ParkTV)
• October 20, 2011: Camera operator, Humboldt at South Saint Paul, boys soccer section finals, and New Life Academy at South Saint Paul, girls soccer section finals.
• October 18, 2011: Camera operator, St. Croix Lutheran at South Saint Paul, boys soccer section semi-finals and girls soccer section semi-finals.
• October 14, 2011: Camera operator: South Saint Paul at Mahtomedi, boys football.
• October 12, 2011: Character Generator, Visitation at St. Croix Lutheran, girls volleyball.
• September 29, 2011: Character Generator, Richfield at South Saint Paul, girls volleyball.
• September 27, 2011: Camera operator, Sibley and Simley, girls and boys soccer.
• September 20, 2011: Camera operator, Simley at Sibley, girls volleyball.
• September 15, 2011: Camera operator, South Saint Paul at Simley, boys and girls soccer double header.
• September 3, 2011: Camera operator, St. Croix Lutheran at Visitation, girls soccer.
• September 1, 2011: Character Generator, Henry Sibley at South Saint Paul, boys football.

For you, from ActavaTV (only $69.95!)

I found this in my mail. I’m not entirely sure why ActavaTV in New York has sent me this, but it certainly piqued my interest. As far as I can tell, ActavaTV is a Russian-language MSO, that provides, and this is where my rusty Russian skills come in, over two hundred channels from Russia, the Ukraine, Israel, and the rest of the CIS (basically, Russia’s southern-bordering neighbors). It purports to offer content in HD, and a variety of films. From the website, I’ve also managed to determine they offer karaoke and radio in addition to these services.

All these features (I can barely understand)!

So the box they’re advertising is only $69.95, and I knew that there were some Russian satellite television providers around, but this made no mention of satellite or anything else of that nature. Some quick Googling of the set-top box pictured in the flier revealed it to be an IPTV box. I was intrigued when I thought they were a satellite MSO (I’ve always wanted to get into Free-To-Air satellite DXing, a good, cheap package just might be the right incentive), but now that they’re an IPTV MSO, I’m really quite interested. The website was rather scant on service costs, but eventually I dug up some information in their feedback page. Turns out their premium package is $29.99 and their basic package is a mere $9.99.

If I should come across some extra cash somewhere, I might actually invest in this, if only to examine it more closely. Of course, I probably ought to brush up on my Russian before then (good thing I kept my dictionary and work books from high school).

• December 12, 2011: Camera Operator

• December 1, 2011: Camera Operator, Episode 34, featuring “The Humbugs”.

Today, I leave for a six day trip in New Jersey to see my friends’ wedding. In fact, by the time you read this I’m in the air. Before leaving, I thought long and hard about leaving my laptop behind. The Wired Travel Optimizer suggested this, and I’ve decided to compromise: bring the laptop, but don’t use it. My ultimate goal is to leave my laptop in its bag for the entire trip (except, possibly, for Netflix viewing in a hotel room). It’s coming along because I want it as a safety net. I know for a fact that there are some things I can’t do inside of mobile apps, like managing Facebook events, but I may be able to do them from inside the mobile browser. And it’s possible that I may run into one or two other things I simply can’t handle on my Nexus S. There also are likely things I just won’t feel like handling on my phone, but I could probably manage on my phone more easily if I spent some money. But I don’t exactly feel like spending $60+ on a Bluetooth travel keyboard that I may not ever use.

But in any event, the goal will be to see if traveling without a laptop would be realistic for me. I realize that for some people it isn’t, and for some people it isn’t even a question. But for me, this is a question that I haven’t been able to settle. The last half dozen times I’ve been flying, I’ve been going from one place to another for, typically, one to nine months at a time, and working in video while there. This meant that not only was my laptop required, but so were auxiliary disks. Now that they aren’t necessary… we’ll see.

This is quite interesting, I believe it could herald in a new age of photographic organization. Imagine if this was paired with the Auto-Upload feature of Google Plus (which basically uploads everything to a private Picasa album), and it stored the results with the photo. Now instead of having to manually tag your photographs, Google would do it for you, automatically.

How often had you gone through your photo library, trying to find that one image, but you can’t. You remember a couple details about it, you know what it looks like, but because you didn’t tag it, you can’t do a search for it. This could change that with auto-tagging, paired with facial recognition, it could finally help people manage their run-away collections of the random images we take these days.

Mark my words, this could be bigger than we imagine.

The more I use this machine, the more I realize how little I need in my every day computing. It also emphasizes what things are necessary for maximum utility in modern life. When the original Asus eeePC came out, reactions were mixed, but once you took the cramped keyboard out of the picture (as Asus did with subsequent, models of the eeePC) it was clear that a new computing market was born. Thanks to Intel’s Atom processor, what I like to call the Age of “Good Enough” computing was born. People did not need dual core processors, with monster GPUs to do most of what they wanted to do: they needed only modest hardware that could support the most important of modern software (a browser, Flash, music, word processing, etc.). They found that at a specific price, they were happy with a computer that was “good enough.”

In some ways, my Mac Classic II is “good enough.” With some modifications, it could in fact be almost entirely “good enough.” But its age has some issues. For one, its SCSI hard disk may need replacing in the future (being SCSI, this limits options, eliminating most SSDs and makes use of CompactFlash cards difficult). It already has issues with the lubricants gelling if the disk isn’t spun up every once in a while (requiring me to crack open the case and smack the hard disk to jar it loose). Its CRT is affected by my stereo being put on top of it. It’s somewhat bulky, it’s not that quiet, and Apple rates its maximum power consumption at 100 Watts (for comparison, what’s called a 100W CFL consumes 26W; a USB powered device, like a cell phone, consumes 1W; an iPad consumes closer to 10W; my 2008 MacBook Pro consumes 85W, and the average PC consumes around 250-350W). This makes it somewhat impractical.

This makes me wonder if it is possible to build a newer implementation of the classic Macintosh platform. The architecture is well understood enough for emulators to run the classic systems. Why not build a new physical machine? Perhaps implement it in an FPGA, much like how the 1chipMSX and C-One operate. However, there may be legal issues in developing a new implementation of the Motorola 68000 series processors (such as the 68030 which the Mac Classic II runs, and the 68881 mathematics co-processor it can run) on any kind of new silicon that Motorola doesn’t license. And, of course, there are problems with the legality of using Apple’s proprietary boot ROMs, and apparently there are no known clones of these ROMs floating around. But regardless, one could theoretically build a new physical machine, centered around modern 68000 processors (I believe Motorola still builds them, with modern examples including the Motorola Dragonball processors that were used in all Palm PDAs running OSes below 4.0), and the intention of plugging in a ROM salvaged from another Mac. A modern SCSI bus (or an ATA bus for use with SD or CF cards, assuming the OS could support that), an Ethernet port (emulated internally as a known SCSI ethernet adapter, perhaps even a WiFi adapter that masquerades as such an ethernet adapter), utilizing an LCD instead of a CRT, USB appearing as an Apple Desk Bus, things like that. This could reduce the problems associated with older hardware, perhaps making such a system a little more practical.

Or perhaps being away from my laptop for a week has made me a bit loopy. All I know is that I still can’t find a decent Oregon Trail for OS X.

Related posts:

• Living with a Mac Classic II – Day One
• Living with a Mac Classic II – Day Three

My solution is a clip-on charger. One side is a solar panel, and the other side is a nondescript box, much like a garage door opener. Inside you connect your headset, and flip down your sun visor to expose the solar panel to the sun. This charges the headset while you’re not using it. The box could also contain a small battery, so you can charge that cell during the day, and then have it charge your headset charge from the battery when sunlight isn’t available.

This way you have a somewhat secure place to stow your headset when you’re not using it, and top off its batteries. The built-in battery allows people who park their cars in garages or ramps to store power for when they won’t have sunlight.

The idea could also be used to power a speaker phone system too.

First off, I assumed that moving files around between machines would be easy. The Mac reads and writes FAT12 disks with ease, and the USB 1.44 MB disk drive I have plays nice with the family PC. And that’s where the easy parts end, and I am thrust back into the hell that was the Mac/PC formatting debacle.

To start, the Mac Classic II I am using, even though it is running the newer Mac OS 7.5.5, still predates Windows 95 and long file names. So when copying files to the FAT12 diskette, Mac OS truncates everything down to the old 8.3 naming scheme. But that’s when things go nicely. That’s assuming I added the three character extension myself. Even though Mac OS 7 has a feature called the PC Exchange, it only seems to work one way: PC to Mac. So any files I haven’t manually entered the file extension on becomes an almost indecipherable mess, meaning I need to use some brains to determine which file on the disk is the file I want, and which one is the resource fork that Windows will likely never understand.

See if you can guess which files are which

A task easier said than done, since the file and its fork are named in very similar fashions, but with almost random and unpredictable extensions. This is a stark contrast to how Mac OS X handles resource forks, which is the creation of those infamous .* and ._* files (an example is .DS_Store). So exactly determining which file is which involves opening the file, which can actually take a little longer than everyone is used to, since 1.44 MB diskettes are slower than DSL.

I also assumed that older files would be easily readable on newer machines. And to an extent, this is true. Microsoft Office 2003 does indeed read Microsoft Word 5.1 files. However, due to security policies set by default in Word 2003, reading of file types this old is disabled. This is likely due to several vulnerabilities in Word Macros in older versions of Office. This means that the easiest way to get information out are the tried and true, old as dirt TXT (AKA Plaintext) file, and the RTF (AKA Rich Text File, or RTF Interchange, as Word 5 calls it) format. This, of course, limits some of the editing capabilities, but maintains all the important features I need.

The other issue is writing e-mails. It is quite convenient to be able to have a distraction-free writing environment with a full spell checker, but being unable to copy/paste information is a bit more annoying than I had initially expected. It almost makes me want to buy a SCSI Ethernet adapter (which tend to be quite rare) just so I can run a simple mail client for sending (rather than reading) e-mail.

The last problem is that when I am composing things, I frequently refer to other sources, such as an e-mail sent to me (if I’m replying), the Wikipedia, a news report, and so on. Most of these sources are from the Internet, and for now I’m using my Nexus S as my bridge to the Internet, but its configuration for conservation of power makes it inconvenient. Then there’s the fact that I cannot copy and paste between the two, which is rather irritating. And if I want to move something from the phone to the Mac (or vise versa) I need to use another computer as an intermediary, which I would suppose is the most annoying, because if there were an easy way to throw files betwen the two (if, say, the Mac were networked, so the two could could pass files to each other) I could probably temper the other issues in this particular category.

On the whole, however, this isn’t as bad as it could be. The Classic II is pokey, but quick enough to get me to work before the cat decides I’m not doing anything important and decides it’s time for a long and involved scratching-me-behind-the-ears ritual. I am rather interested to see what it could do if I were to outfit it with a network card, some additional RAM, and some additional software.

But this reveals the issue with using these old devices: the hardware is quite sound, but the software is where everything trips up. I had, prior to getting an iPod Touch, considered snagging a used Newton MessagePad, which seemed like quite a good idea. And while I could deal with the fact that the Newton requires a serial port for linking to a computer with a USB-to-Serial adapter, actually getting the software to do the communicating was another story altogether. Sure, the Newton could talk to the Mac through Bluetooth or WiFi, but the software didn’t know how to use those particular protocols. And such are some of the issues with the Mac Classic II, however, it is saved by the fact that it has a strong community of dedicated users, and it was around when the simplest common protocols and formats were becoming popular.

Related posts:

• Living with a Mac Classic II – Day One
• Living with a Mac Classic II – Day Seven