Newton’s Lore

Palm has released the Centro Smartphone (not sure if that’s pronounced “chentro” or “sentro”). The Palm Centro “gives you voice, text, IM, email and web”. Includes Bluetooth, but not WiFi. Uses the Blazer web browser.

Probably not an iPhone killer but might be useful if you need something to use while waiting around for the iPhone to come to your country. Assuming you’re somewhere that has Sprint coverage of course.

Apple Insider are heralding Apple’s rumoured PDA to be the “Return of the Newton”

I guess the iPhone and iPod Touch make it fairly obvious that the hardware is now small enough, now hopefully the hotsyncing will be faster and more reliable than the Newton’s (and nowadays, the Palm’s long in the tooth PowerPC-only HotSync tools). I’m guessing it will be significantly different to the Newton on the grounds that Steve won’t want to remind people of what projects he has previously axed.

The notMac Challenge to create an easy to use open source equivalent to Apple’s .Mac service has received a claim from Ben Spinks. Prizemoney currently stands at 2*US$7966 and is available for evaluation until September 30th when Ben can provide the source code under BSD licence and get the prizemoney.

British actor/comedian Stephen Fry blogs at great length about his addiction to tech gadgets including the iPhone

With thanks to Andrew for the URL.

iLounge has an article about how Apple rips off its iPod customers by

• Breaking 2005-2007 iPod video accessories (I wonder if this has anything to do with the movie studios and iPod movie rentals?)
• Requiring customers to purchase iPod games again for the new iPods (perhaps because the screen resolution has changed?)
• iPod Touch screen problems (confirmed by an Apple representative to Walt Mossberg)
• Paying for ringtones of songs that you already own (pretty standard practice thanks to the music industry)

The Refurb Depot are offering unlocked iPhones for sale in Australia, 4Gb = AU$869.95, 8Gb = AU$999.95.

If you’re migrating a 10.3.9 Mac OS X Server to Mac OS X 10.4 (because hey, it’s probably stable by now with Leopard imminent you may find this AFP548.com article useful.

Finally I found a relatively painless way to import the Mac OS X Address Book into Thunderbird (note this is a one off import, not a dynamic link).

So,

1. In Apple’s Address book, select the addresses you’d like to export in the list
2. Select File -> Export vCard…

and save the .vcf file

3. Download morecols
4. Launch Thunderbird and select Tools -> Import and select the morecols .xpi file
5. You’ll need to quit and relaunch Thunderbird
6. In Thunderbird, open Window -> Address Book
7. From the Tools menu, select Actions for contacts -> Import vCard/vcf
8. Select the vcf file you exported from Apple’s Address Book

I wanted to print something from Windows running under Parallels. One suggestion was to install Bonjour for Windows, and then share the Mac printer (in this case my CUPS virtual PDF printer). The disadvantages to this were that a) I didn’t want my machine sharing things on the network as it attracts the attention of the network admins, and b) it didn’t work

Instead I downloaded the open source PDF Creator and installed it under Windows. It creates PDFs which I can drag to the Mac and store in case I ever get the urge to kill trees with a real printout.

I had a folder full of random files to compress (things that wound up on my Desktop over a period of time). I’d just installed p7zip via fink (”fink install p7zip”) so I thought I’d compare it against some of the other options. The results:

So it looks like tarring and then p7zipping is out ahead. The downsides of course being

• p7zip isn’t currently available via a tar commandline argument (you have to pipe, unlike bzip2 and gz which are the ‘j’ and ‘z’ tar arguments respectively).
• No Spotlight plugins for the p7zip format that I know of.