Hospitality
Walking into a dimly-lit cabin on the shores of a subarctic lake, I thought I saw someone staring at me from a dark corner. I walked closer to get a better look.
He wasn’t too talkative.
Add comment July 9th, 2007
Love and Chaos (or, Fixing the eMate Hinge)
Although my confession here might cause those hanging out on the Newton mailing lists some degree of embarrassment for their newfound brethren (their technical aptitude, at least for hardware, seems to dwarf my own), I have to admit some trepidation, if not outright fear, in finally addressing the eternal problem of eMates: wonky hinges. It’s a well-known manufacturing defect that will cause the hinge springs to eventually pop out of their slots within the hinge and, sooner or later, puncture the display cable. However, reading the fix is enough to intimidate most beginners to electronics: it involves a lengthy process of removing the battery, opening the shell, soldering wires, stripping down the eMate to its bare components, recoiling wires with vicegrips, applying white grease or teflon lubricant, putting in washers to prevent future spring pops, and putting everything back together again. (The process, for those not faint of heart, might be found on Frank’s excellent Newton site.)
Thankfully, it was nowhere near as painful as it sounds, even though I did experience a few problems because of my tools and inexperience.
(more…)
Add comment July 6th, 2007
Syncing a Newton with a Modern Mac
My Newton MessagePad 2100 remains disconnected from my computer and the world at large while I wait for a) a Newton 2100 Serial Adapter Dongle; or b) Andriano’s Newton-USB dongle. Thus I’m taking this time to play around with my Newton eMate 300 and a few of the available sync programs. To tell the truth, I had heard so many intimidating and frustrating things about synchronising a Newton with a modern Intel-based Mac OS X box that I doubted I’d ever bother with it. Sure, I could always go back to my Pismo and OS 9, but my wife has now claimed that machine, and besides, I want to sync with my OS X address book, calendar, and so forth.
So, my current set-up: a 15″ MacBook Pro, a stock eMate 300, an old-school Mac serial cable, and a Keyspan USA-28X serial-to-USB adapter. One end of the serial cable plugs into the eMate, the other end into the Keyspan, and the Keyspan’s USB connector into my MacBook Pro. Keyspan drivers are downloaded and installed.
First, the most basic sync program: NewTen, by Panic Software’s Steven Frank. This is basically a package installer. I choose my Keyspan connect, set the eMate to dock via serial, and drag a Newton package onto the app. After a little while –remember that a serial connection can be rather slow– the eMate has the package installed. A one-trick pony at the moment, perhaps, but it works well.
Second, Simon Bell’s NCX, also known as Newton Connection. This is an impressive little app that looks to replace Apple’s official Newton Connection Utilities (NCU). While it doesn’t yet do full synchronisation, it currently has the ability to:
- Install packages through a drag and drop;
- Import and export NewtonWorks “paper” (text) files as RTF and Notes files as text, plus Calendars and Names.
- Back up and restore the programs, extensions and data files on the Newton.
- A pass-through keyboard. This is neat. Whatever you type on your computer comes out on the Newton. Drag and drop text on the window to copy it into whatever program is currently open on the Newton, right where you’ve put the cursor.
The latter has proven handy to drop text right into a NewtonWorks or Notes file right from the Mac’s desktop. The export works well too — I’ve written four articles on the eMate thus far (including this one).
The third program I’ve been trying out is NewtSync, also known as nSync. (*cough*) I’ve already used this program to transfer all 200 of my OS X Address Book entries to my eMate, and am now experimenting with its text, outliner, calendar, and newsfeed synchronisation. It’s still an early release, and so I’m attempting each sync with extreme caution, being sure to back up my data often. Thus far, no problems.
I should note that none of these programs were created by Apple, nor are they sponsored by Apple in any way: these are hard-wrought fan projects, pure and simple. There’s something to be said for the dedication needed to program such things, given that the Newton platform was prematurely canceled nearly a decade ago.
More posts later, no doubt, as I learn the ins and outs, strengths and weaknesses, of each of these applications.
Add comment June 3rd, 2007
YANN - Yet Another Newton Newbie
In two articles for DIYPlanner, one about the MessagePad 2100 and another about the eMate, I mentioned how I’ve got the decade-old Apple Newton bug. Given that the site is mostly about paper-based fetishes, there’s only so much I can say there without upsetting the apple cart. (No pun intended.) Here I can say a little more.
It’s a little bizarre: I normally receive a half-dozen email per article, in addition to the 6-12 comments left on the site. These Newton articles not only generated a lot of comments, but some 30 email, and were picked up by The Unofficial Apple Weblog and –giving me a brief and unexpected laugh-out-loud instant in a supermarket check-out line– on the MacBreak Weekly podcast. Most of the email posed the same conundrum: “I’ve always wanted a Newton, too…. Should I buy one on eBay?”
Add comment May 27th, 2007
Returning to Life
First, to all those who have inquired, yes, I am still alive, in the same way a hibernating bear is. That’s due to sheer exhaustion, to being stretched far too thin over the past six months or so. The new job, the new home, Conor (nearly three years old), Danny (nearly a year old), and a few lingering after-effects from previous contracts and jobs have been draining all my energy, and it’s only lately that I feel like I’m finally able to yawn and stretch, poke my nose out the door, and sniff the promise of Spring.
The new job up in the Northwest Territories is going very well, and I’m very happy to be part of a great team. Starting in any new workplace is often cause for trepidation, if not outright caution, but I’m pleased to find myself among some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. The weather here in Yellowknife may be cold at times (-40C, in fact), but the people up North are some of the warmest individuals I’ve ever met.
I’m not quite sure why I’m posting here today after such a long absence. (Yes, I have been around, in spirit if not in body, at DIYPlanner.com.) I think it’s because I’ve finally reached a turning point of sorts. My life, much like the land around me, is starting to thaw. And where there’s thawing, there’s life waiting to happen.
Add comment April 16th, 2007
Another One for the Road
I’m just packing up the final bits of my computer gear as I speak, but I just had to write this one last post.
Where I (currently) live, in Newfoundland, Canada, people have a lot to be thankful for. It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, with seemingly endless tracts of breathtaking rugged seascapes, adorned with icebergs and spinning seabirds and pods of whales, striking a connection with elemental nature that’s almost unparalled. There’s a longstanding cultural heritage ripe with music, art and storytelling, and a down-to-earth mentality that cherishes family, neighbours and even visitors. Here in Carbonear, the weather is warm (but not too warm) and the area is lush and verdant with giant beautiful maple trees nearly a century old. And while there’s a high unemployment rate, the people throughout the province are among the friendliest in the world, often inviting complete strangers into their homes to share a story and a cup of tea.
But there are also idiots. Yes, we have those too.
Last night, towards midnight, I was finishing up packing for the night when I heard a loud bang. I didn’t think too much of it, since the Canada Day fireworks had been sounding sporatically for the past couple of hours. But soon I heard the sirens and suspected there was a problem nearby. A half-hour later, I let the dog out and noticed police lights spinning on a house across the street. I shuffled into my sandals and went out to see what was happening.
There were three police cars, an ambulance driving away, and a crowd milling around a vehicle. A closer look revealed an older mid-sized car whose front end was completely demolished, a large nearby maple whose trunk bark was completely ripped off, and a young girl crying in the back seat of a police car.
It turns out that this girl, whose blood alcohol was several times the limit, and who had been driving without insurance or even a license, had hit our neighbour and crashed into a tree. She then tried to make a getaway, but the car didn’t make it more than a few feet. The neighbour was flung onto a nearby lawn and was suffering from two mangled legs, a badly damaged eye, and no doubt a series of other injuries. He was rushed to the Health Sciences Centre in the capitol of St. John’s. I knew him briefly from a school where I taught — he had just retired from teaching at the age of 52, and had bought a canoe for his holidays. She wound up with a nose bleed.
As I walked back to the house, I noticed the tire tracks. She had driven through a puddle on the opposite (left) side of the road, and swerved to the right, where she hit the neighbour and then the tree. There didn’t seem to be any skid marks.
I certainly feel for the neighbour, and I’m trying to feel for the girl. She’s young, and at that age we’re all a little stupid and obnoxious. (She’s the same one we often hear roaming drunkenly with a pair of teenage boys in the middle of the night, whooping and screaming and swearing as she passes by the house.) But I can’t help thinking she needed this to happen. It’s a lesson to be learned, and it’s rather ironic that a dedicated school teacher was nearly killed in the process.
Please, folks, if you’re going to drink for the holidays, remember to do the right thing and set a designated driver. It’s one thing to play games with your own life; it’s quite another to jeopoardise someone else’s.
Add comment July 2nd, 2006
The strange things done in the midnight sun…
Well, it’s time I shared the other big news of my life. After a year of hunting for a permanent, full-time position, I’ve been offered a position for a job I’m sure to love in Yellowknife.
For the geographically challenged folks out there, Yellowknife is the largest city (pop. 20K) in the North West Territories atop Canada –find Alberta on your map and let your eye drift northwards– and is rather close to the Arctic Circle. 
In fact, the picture at left was taken from my hotel room at about 1:00 or 1:30 am, and the midnight almost-sun shows the necessity of having thick curtains in the summertime. In the Winter months, there’s an equal amount of darkness. Summer temperatures range from 15-30C and the mercury in Winter can often drop to -30C. (People’s tires freeze to square shapes, I’m told.)
No doubt a few people are scratching their heads. Why, they ask, are you heading to a small, frigid place enshrouded by darkness half the year? Well, that’s a misperception, but I’ll deal with that in a minute.
The days of short-term contracts can be frustrating, especially when it comes to ensuring any sense of stability, and –with several mouths to feed– knowing where the next meal is coming from is always a worry. I used to love freelance work, but owing to a number of factors (mainly geography, overseas outsourcing, and those user-friendly technologies accessible to more amateurs), the contracts are becoming less frequent and less interesting. I want a job where I can grow, where I can learn, where I can exercise my media-related skills, and where I can become part of a team that really cares about what it’s doing. Jenny and I want a community that’s small enough to be close-knit, yet large enough to provide for our wants (including fresh produce like cilantro and mangos) — we want a place where we can feel comfortable settling down. And I’m a pretty rustic guy, so I like to commune frequently with the natural world, a faithful hound by my side.
I flew up to Yellowknife for a weekend (it took 23 hours to arrive from St. John’s, Newfoundland — a heck of a commute), and I got to know more about the organisation and the city. I can say that I was pleased at every turn. The company and its projects seem quite exciting, the opportunities for professional growth and learning are certainly there, and –hey– it’s mostly a Mac shop. Meanwhile, the people in the city (population about 20,000) are exceedingly friendly and culturally diverse, the shops seem to cater to every one of our necessities, and a wild and wonderful natural world of trees and lakes and animals is only minutes away. It’s also very warm, and the air is fresh and alive with all the greenery and flowers. Between the job and the location, it’s certainly the most exciting offer I’ve received, and there’s no hesitation in seizing it.
I’m in the throes of packing right now (Jenny just returned from hospital, so she won’t be in any condition to do much), and I’ll be heading north in the next few weeks to find a place and get things set up. Jenny, two-year-old Conor, and newborn Daniel will be joining me within a month or so. I must say, every indication points to a great future for the Johnston clan….
14 comments June 19th, 2006
Introducing Daniel Karl Johnston
Introducing my new son Daniel Karl Johnston, born late last night at 9 lbs 3 oz. Here he is, some five minutes old, with his proud mama and papa.
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For those interested, I’ll post a photostream later with more pictures and details.
I also have some more big news to share, which I’ll post as soon as I get a breather. (I assure you, there are good reasons for my absences of late….)
14 comments June 15th, 2006
43 Folders on DEVONthink and Smart Groups
Over at 43 Folders, Merlin Mann is rediscovering the wonderful Mac application that is DEVONthink Pro - DEVONthink: An appreciation of “smart groups”
I’ve now had DT Pro v. 1.1.1 in battlefield action for the last few weeks, and have been dutifully feeding it anything I find that seems tangentially interesting or useful; a few custom Quicksilver triggers mean one-click, no-look addition of any data type, from web pages to text selections to photos, full PDFs, and movie files.
DEVONthink Pro is probably my favourite piece of software. Ever. While I use a score of multimedia applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc.) on a regular basis, I am –by nature and trade, in the broadest sense– an information worker. I need a digital commonplace book to collect, track and act upon all those things that Merlin mentions, and much more. While DEVONthink Personal proved an excellent application for doing this, the introduction of DT Pro and its subsequent updates have left me continually astounded. (See my earlier detailed review of DT for more information.)
Merlin goes on to mention the “smart groups” –basically, agents to collect items automatically based upon their content or properties– but I’ve always found that its real power starts to show with things like concordance (estimations of related items — see Berlin’s article), offline archiving of web pages (very useful for changing sites like the NYT), sheets and records (think about a database), Dashboard widgets for quick access, and a teeming horde of AppleScripts. Those starting off with the software might not appreciate all these functions, but I can assure you that they all come in very handy, very soon. And the fact that DT/Pro gets “smarter” as you feed more information into it translates into a more powerful application every day.
Those needing to dig up knowledge on a constant basis can take the application a step further, though: I’m just now exploring DEVONagent, an “intelligent research assistant.” For a long while, I resisted: I’m definitely a Google power-user, and it seemed to do everything I needed it to do. Or so I thought. It turns out that DA has increased my research abilities many-fold. It scours not only the web in general, but also specific online databases to collect and collate information, compiling a useful text-only preview of all those tidbits it thinks I might like to know. With one click I can view the full pages in an integrated (tabbed) browser, or add the information into DTP. The new version also adds an interesting “visualiser” to see how other words and topics relate to your current item. The application takes a little getting used to, but it really pays off after a week or two.
So much information, so little time. At least with the DEVON gear, I can generally make the most of it.
2 comments May 23rd, 2006
Getting Past the Ego
A particularly lucid comment left by eletherious on my post “So you wanna start a blog?” has me thinking of a suitable response:
However, what you do not answer is why would someone blog rather than create a web site? Both requre the same focus and discipline over focus and content. It would seem that a web site provides more content and design flexibility whereas a blog is more one dimensional - literary / literal?
In the nearly fourteen years I’ve been producing both static and dynamic websites (oh, that makes me feel so old), this is a question with which I’ve grappled time and again. In fact, in the early days of blogs, when they were driven almost exclusively as vanity projects, I was one among many who resisted the creation of any product that stood simply as a monumount to one’s ego, perferring instead to produce a non-blog site that might showcase my writing, my artwork, my web design skills, and so on.
Do you see a difference between the two, as fundamentally ego-driven projects? In retrospect, I can’t. But I think this is due to a certain levelling of the stigma attached to both types of sites, and especially blogs. They aren’t simply vanity projects any longer, but also vital sources of ideas and information, and –ironically– a personal “static” website is more likely to be viewed with an air of hoity-toitiness (to use a technical term). After all, many static sites beg us to come back often and check for updates. Why should we? They rarely make those updates easy to find. Are we expected to troll through every page looking for something new every week? Isn’t that presumptuous, in a way? What could bring us back so regularly?
3 comments May 7th, 2006
D*I*Y Planner Hipster PDA Edition v3 Released
Whew. That was a tough one. Life can get to normal now.
1 comment May 6th, 2006
“So you wanna start a blog?”
Since it’s now possible for newcomers to the blogging world to set up a Blogger or WordPress.com account in mere minutes without the slightest idea about what one is doing or why, it seems like 98% of the blogs on the Web boast but a half-dozen erratic posts before going dormant forever. Of those that are left, most offer only simple “my link for the day” posts, which of course are fine for friends or people of very similar interests, but not so much for the world at large.
Now that I’m in the process of starting a new blog (on Sherlock Holmes), I figured it was about time to write down and share a few of my wildly-scrawled ideas concerning how exactly I go about such a thing (or, how I occasionally help others in a consulting capacity to do the same).
Like most other things, I conceive of a blog as a project, to be given due consideration, planning and effort. As such, I brainstorm, write notes, prepare a vision, gather resources, construct initial timelines, experiment with form, evaluate delivery options, and so on, before I even think of doing that magic little incantation which causes the blog to appear. I’m not going to get into all of these here. What follows are rough notes, not a course. But first and foremost to keep in mind is the approach: a lacklustre preparation usually leads to a lacklustre site. On the other hand, all the preparatory time in the world won’t mean squat if you don’t have the discipline or wherewithal (or –*ahem*– ego) to keep it up.
A clear vision is the primary thing to keep in mind. Vision leads to purpose, purpose leads to motivation, motivation leads to regular posts, regular posts lead to regular readers. So what’s this thing of yours going to be? Is it going to be a site to explore or exploit a niche interest of yours? Is it going to help develop commercial opportunities? Is it a playground to learn new technologies or methods? Is it to provide feedback for a project or cause you’re involved with? Or is it an ego thing, where you’re going to post idle thoughts as you feel like it? If the latter, pay attention: remember the 98% of dormant blogs? Almost all of them fall into this category. Repeat after me: “I want this blog to ….” Fill in the blank. If you don’t have a coherent point or two, then you lack a vision with focus.
8 comments March 29th, 2006
The Game Is Afoot!
A personal invite goes out to you all for a special sneak preview of my new blog, A Study in Sherlock, set to launch tomorrow. This site is devoted to the life, times and influence of the Great Detective himself, perhaps the most famous fictional character in history.
There’s a tonne of material already in the queue, and so it’s my intention that there will be something new every weekday, and occasionally on weekends. That includes original pieces (many of which are written for newcomers to the Canon), photographs, teasers for the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, illustrations, news stories, book reviews, audio snippets, “workshop” projects (such as do-it-yourself reference cards or CDs), radio plays, and featured sites. Most of these entries are selected to offer something for neophytes, but –hopefully– also provide ample occasion for discourse amongst the more experienced.
I appreciate any and all feedback from you fine folks — a contact form can be accessed from the top menu, and the comment forms are ready to go, so please don’t be shy. I hope you enjoy!
5 comments March 12th, 2006
Shameless Plug: The Jennifer Pohl Gallery
I’ve just finished an online gallery for my wife –the real artist in the family– and you can now see it over at her blog, The Space Above the Couch (click on the “gallery” link in the header to launch it).
1 comment March 2nd, 2006
A Study in Sherlock
One of the reasons why I decided to keep a blog in the first place was to force my mind into gear and keep learning. After all, nothing obliges you to delve into a topic quite like having to share one’s thoughts and opinions about it. (The old teaching dictum: “The best way to learn is to teach.”) Of course, to stick with something long-term, you actually need to have either a personal stake in it, or a burning interest for it, if not an actual obsession. While I do have a personal stake in this blog and DIYPlanner.com, sometimes the endless marching forwards of productivity methods can get a little wearisome. The subject matter is inherently practical and work-related, never something I’d pursue to unwind or relax. (At least, not any more.)
To that end, I’m thinking of beginning a new multimedia blog. The catch? This one will be about Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Since I first learned to read, I’ve always been fascinated by this character. I’ve read the Canon (the 56 short stories and four novels) dozens of times, the rest of Sir ACD’s works at least two or three times, and I have shelves and shelves of scholarly books, pastiches (books in the “original style”), biographies, films, graphics, television programs, radio recordings and more. While I possess nowhere near the knowledge of most Holmes scholars (alas, I have yet to subscribe to the Baker Street Journal), I figure this is a perfect opportunity to immerse myself in a lifelong interest, become more proficient in the subject as I go along, learn to relax a little, and offer some daily illustrations, links, photographs, texts, reviews and old-time radio shows for those who follow the life and times of the Master Detective.
Everyone needs a hobby to unwind. I figure a thirty-year obsession is about as close to a persistent hobby as I get….
8 comments February 21st, 2006
