Well, I can't say I didn't try. Over on the My Apple Newton blog (http://myapplenewton.blogspot.com/2010/03/nblog-update_14.html) there was an update that suggested that nBlog's Refresh Blog List function would work for brand new accounts on Blogger. So, I had a minor brainwave - create a new account, add that account as an author to the four blogs I update, refresh the list, and off we trot.
Sadly, it didn't work out that way. I created and added the account ok, changed the nBlog prefs and... nothing. No difference at all. So back to the old idea of reading the nBlog source code and either using SBM Utilities or writing some NewtonScript to create the soup entries.
At least the exercise got me the blog ids I'll need to create the soup entries.
In other Newt news, the 32Mb Compact Flash experiment is still going well. Write speeds are OK, reliability has been fine so it's all good so far!
Tuesday 23 March 2010
Wednesday 17 March 2010
Return Of The Flash - Wed 17/3
When I revived my Newtons, I made the foolish mistake of installing a 2 gbyte Compact Flash card as the default store in my "main" Newt. I partitioned it as 4 500 Mbyte stores and put different content in each one (apps in one, books in another etc) Everything started ok, but gradually things got slower and slower until they pretty much ground to a halt. Two things seemed to coincide - an increased use of Mail V, with a rather silly setup (multiple email accounts for a single owner slip) leading to lots of timeouts and reboots, and the 2010 problem making resetting the date and time every reboot both necessary and tedious. Add to that the 5 minutes between rebooting and the Newt becoming usable again and using the Newt was becoming a pain rather than a pleasure.
So, I admitted defeat, and went back to a trusty old 20mbyte card I had lying around. Suddenly restart times went from 5 minutes to 1 minute and fixing my Mail V setup to have separate owner slips for each email account dropped the number of timeouts and restarts. Joy to the world!
But I had got used to all that lovely space. I had no books on line any more. And then I started using PaperBoy for Usenet news, and suddenly needed space for articles.
Having bought the wrong kind of 32 mbyte Flash card, I decided to give Compact Flash another go. The reasoning being that the Newton wasn't really designed to have one 500 mbyte store, never mind four of them at the same time so it was a bit unreasonable to expect it to cope happily with that scenario. So, off to eBay I went and bought a job lot of old, small Compact Flash cards and installed a 32Mbyte card, partitioned into two 16 mbyte stores. So far, it has been working quite well - not as fast as linear Flash but not as horrific as the 2 gbyte card. Reboot time is more than the one minute with a 20 mbyte Flash card, but only about 1.5 - 2 minutes, and I have more packages installed. Who knows, I might get bold and try the 64 mbyte card that came in the lot at some point!
So, I admitted defeat, and went back to a trusty old 20mbyte card I had lying around. Suddenly restart times went from 5 minutes to 1 minute and fixing my Mail V setup to have separate owner slips for each email account dropped the number of timeouts and restarts. Joy to the world!
But I had got used to all that lovely space. I had no books on line any more. And then I started using PaperBoy for Usenet news, and suddenly needed space for articles.
Having bought the wrong kind of 32 mbyte Flash card, I decided to give Compact Flash another go. The reasoning being that the Newton wasn't really designed to have one 500 mbyte store, never mind four of them at the same time so it was a bit unreasonable to expect it to cope happily with that scenario. So, off to eBay I went and bought a job lot of old, small Compact Flash cards and installed a 32Mbyte card, partitioned into two 16 mbyte stores. So far, it has been working quite well - not as fast as linear Flash but not as horrific as the 2 gbyte card. Reboot time is more than the one minute with a 20 mbyte Flash card, but only about 1.5 - 2 minutes, and I have more packages installed. Who knows, I might get bold and try the 64 mbyte card that came in the lot at some point!
Thursday 11 March 2010
Adventures in Backlighting...
Given that I use my Newtons pretty much every working day (and since I got the E5830 working, as my principal email client), I keep something of a stock of the little green blighters, just in case something should happen to them. The current fleet consists of two MP2000Us (upgraded by my own fair hands with motherboards from JK Sales), two MP2100s, an MP130 and an MP120. The 130 and 120 don't really get used any more - the 130 because, well, it's just too *slow* for me, and the 120 because it runs NewtonOS 1.2, and having started with NewtonOS 2.0 on the 130 it just felt like a retrograde step to me.
For some reason, I really prefer the aesthetics of the MP2000 to the MP2100. I've no idea what it is; maybe it's that the "Newton Technologies" in the top left hand corner is a bit fussy, or that the screen printed Apple logo on the cut out disc that was supposed to have the Newton Technologies logo looks a bit "home brew" and unfinished... I dunno, but there's *something* about it. So it was a pain to have to retire my first MP2000 because the backlight just became too dim and useless, and it was even more of a pain to notice that the second MP2000's backlight was starting to go the same way :( Only one thing for it then; replace the backlights !
Luckily, Knowledge Navigator has been advertising backlights on eBait recently, so it was easy enough to get them. I played it conservatively, and bought one "white" backlight and one ordinary green backlight - on the basis that if I really didn't like the white one I could always swap it back for a green one.
Having swapped the motherboards, I thought it would be a doddle - Frank's web pages at www.pda-soft.de has pretty good instructions after all - but it proved to be a bit more of a pain than expected - for two reasons. First was my chronic fear of my horrendous soldering non-skills melting the backlight, the display, or everything else in range. This meant that first time round I didn't get good contact with the backlight wires, so had to take it apart and do it over again. The other was that there is a little metal tab at the top of the metal surround on the display top, which has to go in the opposite direction through the plastic to the digitizer cable. I hadn't noticed it, and first time around just could not get the case back together properly at all.
So, first time around it took about 4 hours to get the thing apart, swap the backlight, then get it back together again. Second time around was about 40 minutes ;)
And the result ? The white backlight is actually surprisingly nice to use. I thought I'd be too used to the green display to appreciate it, but it's actually easier for me to read in most lighting situations, and it gives the text a quite nice blueish tint to it. The backlight doesn't seem *quite* as bright as the backlights on the MP2100s, but I think that's just perception - the white might not need to be quite so bright to be perfectly readable, even in awkward lighting. The new backlight doesn't seem to be any harder on batteries, so all in all I'm pretty happy with it thus far. It's also allowed me to put the original MP2000U back into service as my daily use Newt, which I'm quite happy about as my second MP2000U's screen door clip doesn't work properly, so the door has a tendency to flail around a bit rather than actually cover the screen !
Didn't take any pictures on the way through, but if I do swap the other MP2000U's backlight over I'll take some pictures as I go and post them. Frank's pics are pretty good, but I don't think he mentions that darn metal tab, so I really need to get a pic of that...
For some reason, I really prefer the aesthetics of the MP2000 to the MP2100. I've no idea what it is; maybe it's that the "Newton Technologies" in the top left hand corner is a bit fussy, or that the screen printed Apple logo on the cut out disc that was supposed to have the Newton Technologies logo looks a bit "home brew" and unfinished... I dunno, but there's *something* about it. So it was a pain to have to retire my first MP2000 because the backlight just became too dim and useless, and it was even more of a pain to notice that the second MP2000's backlight was starting to go the same way :( Only one thing for it then; replace the backlights !
Luckily, Knowledge Navigator has been advertising backlights on eBait recently, so it was easy enough to get them. I played it conservatively, and bought one "white" backlight and one ordinary green backlight - on the basis that if I really didn't like the white one I could always swap it back for a green one.
Having swapped the motherboards, I thought it would be a doddle - Frank's web pages at www.pda-soft.de has pretty good instructions after all - but it proved to be a bit more of a pain than expected - for two reasons. First was my chronic fear of my horrendous soldering non-skills melting the backlight, the display, or everything else in range. This meant that first time round I didn't get good contact with the backlight wires, so had to take it apart and do it over again. The other was that there is a little metal tab at the top of the metal surround on the display top, which has to go in the opposite direction through the plastic to the digitizer cable. I hadn't noticed it, and first time around just could not get the case back together properly at all.
So, first time around it took about 4 hours to get the thing apart, swap the backlight, then get it back together again. Second time around was about 40 minutes ;)
And the result ? The white backlight is actually surprisingly nice to use. I thought I'd be too used to the green display to appreciate it, but it's actually easier for me to read in most lighting situations, and it gives the text a quite nice blueish tint to it. The backlight doesn't seem *quite* as bright as the backlights on the MP2100s, but I think that's just perception - the white might not need to be quite so bright to be perfectly readable, even in awkward lighting. The new backlight doesn't seem to be any harder on batteries, so all in all I'm pretty happy with it thus far. It's also allowed me to put the original MP2000U back into service as my daily use Newt, which I'm quite happy about as my second MP2000U's screen door clip doesn't work properly, so the door has a tendency to flail around a bit rather than actually cover the screen !
Didn't take any pictures on the way through, but if I do swap the other MP2000U's backlight over I'll take some pictures as I go and post them. Frank's pics are pretty good, but I don't think he mentions that darn metal tab, so I really need to get a pic of that...
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