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Gosh, look at that blurb on the Mac School box, "Apple Macintosh System 7 Compatible." We're talking 1991 here! My first Macintosh in 1992 was a IIci running System 7.1. Those were the days, huh? But who hangs on to this stuff for over 20 years -- it's been as obsolete as Hollerith punched cards for, well, ever.

Mac School was administrative software for teachers. Chancery Software, the publishers of the Mac School program, announced in 2001 that an OS X version was coming soon. In 2006 Chancery was purchased by Pearson Education, which is now Pearson School Systems. Chancery was founded in 1983 and based in Burnaby, B.C., Canada.

HyperStudio is a multimedia authoring tool. It is possibly the last surviving clone of the amazing Model-T of software: Apple's HyperCard program, a kind of Swiss Army knife for creating stuff. Unfortunately, just as the Model-T was available in any colour, so long as it was black, HyperCard could be used to make anything -- programs, ebooks, databases -- anything -- so long as it was in black and white. HyperStudio was created by Roger Wagner back in 1989 for the Apple ][gs. It has been in development ever since. It is currently marketed by Software MacKiev, and looks like a cool program -- it's certainly got the pedigree. Click on the images to enlarge them.

Twenty-five years of HyperCard ►
Why HyperCard had to die ►
Some more trashed vintage computer packaging ►

[caption id="attachment_1932" align="alignnone" width="497"] Two pages from the triumphal tramp through Big Blue's three-quarters of a century.[/caption]

Found today in a "Paper" blue bin: Twenty-four years ago International Business Machines celebrated it's 75th anniversary in the pages of this issue of Think, September 1989 (Volume 55, Number 5), it's in-house magazine. The triumphal tone throughout is to be expected in a house organ, but it was a huge milestone, and IBM's corporate history was also largely the history of American high technology supremacy in the 20th Century -- hard not to be a bit smug. And The Damocles sword of anti-trust action no longer hung over their head.

I find that a copy of this oversized paperback magazine is available on Amazon for $14. Click on the images to enlarge them.

"Think," is the famous company motto coined by IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson, Sr. in 1911, I believe it replaced the less successful team-building slogan, 'There is no "I" in I.B.M.'

[caption id="attachment_1816" align="alignnone" width="497"] Things sure aren't going swimmingly for Windows 8. Click the image to enlarge it.[/caption]

Microsoft has been cast as the more conventional, IBM-esque, company, and Apple the maverick innovator, yet Microsoft's Windows OS has developed in fits and starts, while Apple's OS has, superficially, at least, followed a smooth evolution. Why is that?

Picked up a new eight Gigabyte Secure Digital card at the corner dumpster; Can't argue with the prices. The SD card is now hosting a Linux distro, but, as usual, I had to reformat it first. I'd rather they were empty, but they never are.

[caption id="attachment_1740" align="alignnone" width="497"] I guess this is one of those musicians who plays a tune on bottles. Click image to enlarge.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1741" align="alignnone" width="497"] That "infected" bit doesn't sound good. It doesn't get any larger than this.[/caption]

By the way, when you tire of those old flash drives, SD cards, hard drives, etc. and throw them away; whatever you do, do not erase them first, certainly never zero-out the data. Any ways, it's not necessary; dumpsters and other garbage receptacles contain electronic jiggery-pokery which safely deletes the data for you. Believe it.

[caption id="attachment_1302" align="alignleft" width="491"] Click the image to see how they always get their search results.[/caption]

Well, I certainly didn't need an American search engine to tell me, a Canadian, that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were celebrating their 140th anniversary. Actually, I had no idea whatsoever. I just didn't need an American search engine, pointing out my ignorance -- or maybe I did. That is, after all, the kind of the job Google does now, isn't it; keeping track of just how dumb I am, and making allowances.

How Google is my brain. Let's list the ways:

• understands and corrects my crappy spelling


• answers all my stupid questions to the best of the Internet's ability


• handles all my correspondence


• used to be able to handle all my RSS feeds


• Since 2009, has been tailoring my search results to make me happy

There's probably more ways, but, Google knows, I just can't remember.

I have joked that, thanks to the Internet, I don't need a brain anymore -- that the content from ten-million-or-so people equals about five smart people, and that's enough to take care of all my intelligence needs. Want proof? Just Google "how to tie yor shuz."If you're still remembering how to do stuff like that, then you're working to hard.

After reading (at least the cover of) Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble, I could have become concerned by this so-called filter bubble -- how Google has been spoon-feeding me biased personalized search results based on my previous search history, to keep me happily Googling for more, but golly, what choice do I have?

My brain is in the cloud. Does that mean it's free?

The catchy phrase, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product."  lies somewhere at the heart of what Internet privacy activists, such as Eli Pariser, are on about. Others, such as Derek Powazek, say the phrase just lies. I remember back in the latter 1990s when the free version of the dominant Macintosh email client Eudora began displaying advertising banners -- there was no revolution, and so it began.


One key to succeeding in the Internet Age seems to me to involve profitably identifying things people won't miss. This is a hard one for me to explain: Remember long-play records, and all that dynamic range they could hold in those wee grooves? Well, the MP3 format threw that stuff away to compress the file, and no one cared; they still preferred MP3s to LPs.

Facebook is a dumpster?

Google, Facebook, Wordpress.com -- all social media, are learning  to profit off of the kinds of personal information, which people don't care about, don't think is important -- their likes, their shares, their search patterns. People are just tossing this stuff out on the Internet, and social media is binning it, and selling it. I'd say it's like human derivatives, if  I had more than a clue how fiscal instruments like that worked.

But what am I saying,  I don't need to try and understand or remember that sort of stuff anymore. I may not know [fill in the Google search bar], but I know what I [like].

The AC adapter that fits my HP Pavilion dv6k packed it in yesterday. It was a cheap-o multi adapter which reeled in the cords to save space. This seemingly handy feature doomed the thin cords to a hard life of wear-and-tear, and an early death from friction. So, for the moment, back to the good, old, Acer Aspire 533, which has been sitting in the storage locker and ... malfunctioning. Hardware-wise the left click had stopped working. OS-wise, Xubuntu 12.10 had lost window decorations -- you know, Close buttons-'n-stuff.

So, booting off the Ubuntu 12.04 live stick I always seem to have (I should force myself to try Linux Mint for more than three hours, right?), I was checking my blog, and  installing. The public WiFi only cut out once (how many language packs does Ubuntu install?). Then almost by reflex in the Terminal, I sudo apt-got busy:

Post-install install:

• Gnome-panel (bye-bye Unity)


• Synapse (semantic launchers rule!)


• The GIMP 2.8 (how else to crop the photos on this blog?)


• qBittorrent 3.0 (It's a free country, and Bittorrent helps keep it that way!)


• Blogilo (a KDE offline blog editor. The best Linux can do, I think)

[caption id="attachment_1150" align="alignleft" width="233"] After the 15-inch HP, the Acer's screen is tiny -- better click the image.[/caption]

I also disable the overlay scroll bars (Ick!), and toggle mounted volumes and trash on the Desktop (I like the Apple-flavoured Ubuntu best).

After I get a new trailer, I'll save up and get a new multi-adapter for the HP, just so I can discover that the power supply is also kacked, but in the meantime, I want my Internet.

The "Standby" image is from here.

Both for my Acer Aspire One 533, with it's little 10.1-inch screen.

My basic Ubuntu wallpaper, referencing the Aspire's Atom processor, and the Windows 7 Starter OS. There's my G4 iBook, and the awfully fun HP Pavilion TX1000 I had prior to the Aspire. The woman pictured on the wall is a cosplayer in the character of Radical Ed, from the late 1990s anime series, Cowboy Bebop.

This was specifically for various experimental versions of Ubuntu 12.04 running on a 16 GB Patriot USB stick. Click the images to see the 1024 x 600 versions.

[caption id="attachment_1112" align="alignleft" width="300"] Click image for full-size 1600 x 1200 image.[/caption]

Ran this up for Toad a while back. He's a big Pink Floyd fan -- me, not so much. I liked the "obvious" juxtaposition of the two visual ideas. The execution is fast, and the result is a bit rough around the edges.

[caption id="attachment_1106" align="alignnone" width="497"] Not THAT Henry! That one's © King Features Syndicate. Click to enlarge image.[/caption]

It may be a hardship to be homeless, but to be homeless, and computer-less? Oh, the horror. Well, Henry was both for a while. Now he has a quite-nice, 17-inch Toshiba Satellite P300 laptop. He appeared with it in McDonalds one morning, and happily showed me the shiny "Vista-ready" slab he'd found the previous evening, with none of the usual, tedious dumpster diving, it had been beside a dumpster, with bags and bags of other stuff.

Henry did have one problem. He couldn't get past the login screen --

[caption id="attachment_1034" align="alignnone" width="497"] Bit scratched but, kind of futuristic in a puffy sort of way. Click image to enlarge.[/caption]

This must've been one great electronic toy -- it took someone nearly a decade before they were willing to throw it out. I pulled it out of a dumpster last year, It's a VideoNow Personal Video Player, first generation, from 2003, sold by Hasbro through its Tiger Electronics division. It's about the size of extra-thick portable CD player. Requires two AA batteries and plays proprietary four-inch PVD discs at about 15-frames-a-second on a small, low-resolution black-and-white LCD screen. It has basic navigation controls, contrast and volume, and a headphone jack. Apparently it doesn't have much in the way of skip protection. By 2004, there was a colour version and apparently that year it was an award-winning toy. The VideoNow went through several generations, and appears to have been discontinued by 2005.

The unit I binned was in very good shape and contained a Transformers PVD disc. Click the images to transform them.



Hasbro made editing software for creating VideoNow PVDs, and sold a PVD video camera. It was interesting to read how users experimented with recording on, and cutting down CD-R discs to run in the latter-generation units. There seems to be no straight forward way to play the PVDs on a computer.

Here's a YouTube video of the original VideoNow in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ8RpMxjEOs

[caption id="attachment_1023" align="alignleft" width="250"] "Windows Vista-ready." Vista's the good one, after Windows 8, right?[/caption]



I've posted about dumpster laptops before -- and I will again, but they are an uncommon find, at least, for me. This Samsung, sans memory, was sitting by the side of an alley by a dumpster, just feet from where I moved it for a better photograph. The memory slot door was unattached underneath it. No AC adapter, naturally. Click images to enlarge.

A comment by xian to my post about MS FrontPage gelled a quasi-idea for a post about one of the precursors to modern blog sites.

[caption id="attachment_527" align="alignnone" width="497"] A tasteful example of an old GeoCities homepage.[/caption]

GeoCities.com was a real watershed phenomenon. It was an American Internet Service Provider which came into being with the Web, in late 1994, and gave people Internet access, and their own personal Web sites. When Yahoo, who'd owned it since 1999, shut the U.S. part down, there were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities. (■) Compare that with the leading modern free blog site: As of 2012, it was estimated that about half of the world-wide total of 72.4 million wordpress sites were hosted on wordpress.com. (■) That's 36.2 million. GeoCities success is still staggering, and it arguably led directly to Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere.

What follows will be a bit of a history lesson for some. A lot of it was part of my life.

Who knows why ordinary people wanted to access computer networks from the comfort of their own home? A similar impulse probably led to the invention of Haggis.

The "when" is pinned down as Feb 16, 1978, according to Wired magazine, when Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first public dial-up bulletin board system. They announced it in the November 1978 issue of Byte magazine, titled "The Sky's the Limit," available at Internet Archives.

Little blog cabins everywhere

BBSs thrived until the mid-1990s, and the World Wide Web. They were often hosted on ordinary PCs with very limited ability to handle concurrent users. A BBS was roughly analogous to a modern Website: files to download, and moderated discussions. They were usually labours of love, dedicated to a special interest.

All connections were dial-up over the phone system;  slow and noisy, and long distance charges applied. Most BBSs were little more than one-room shacks. Worse still, the mainstream typified BBSs-as-a-whole, as a sort of bad neighbourhood, populated by hackers and pirates -- not a family-friendy destination.

A friend asked me to explain using BitTorrent, and like a lemming, here I go. ...

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol which allows computer files to be shared anonymously between computers connected to the Internet. Its anonymous nature, and ability to handle really large files, has made it synonymous with file piracy. True, but all digital distribution channels have been, in their turn, exploited for file sharing/piracy, going back to before Bulletin Board Systems. I say it's the nature of the files which encourage sharing and piracy; digital files make nonsense of "ownership" because they can be given away, and kept at the same time.

It has just come to my attention that Microsoft's FrontPage program is still being used by some people. WTF? I was scared for a moment, but a quick search shows that the program was discontinued in 2003, but it was replaced by other similar MS products, and Publisher is also used to create Web pages, which are every-bit as awful -- I was just looking at one.

Back in the day, stone-age flint-chipping tools like FrontPage, filled a niche; people who wanted even the simplest sort of Website were at the total mercy of blood-sucking brainiacs who could write HTML. FrontPage wasn't the only tool that allowed  clueless, code-less  people to produce simple Web pages at the expense of all that was holy about code, but FrontPage was well-know for just how bad it's code was. But the users it was aimed at didn't care, and they didn't have much choice.

Now they have a choice. Why would anyone use something like Frontpage or Publisher to produce a Website, when they can use a Content Management System, like Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla, to name a few.  CMS are free, easy to use, and produce good results. I can only imagine that a lot of people who would benefit from them, still don't understand what CMSs are.

Illustration by Dave Gilson. Nicked from here.

Great Powers are meeting in battle as we make phone calls, surf the Web and play games. The prize is intangible; we can't hold it in our hands, but we can hold it in our phones, and our computers.

It's been said generals prepare to win the previous war. Back in the 1990s Apple and Microsoft had to just sit and take it while any old kludgey third-party software could be installed, and make a mess all over their operating systems. They could only fight back through the mail with floppy disks, and later, CD-ROM.

The rise of the Internet coupled with the powerful generation of cell phones that came after the iPhone in 2007, finally offered Apple, Microsoft, and new-comer Google, the ability to control their destiny.

The iPhone, in my opinion, represents a kind of "before-and-after" moment. It settled the question of what was the "best" form-factor; it finally broke Microsoft's effective monopoly over the Internet browsing experience, and it turned the premium feature of WiFi into a ubiquitous feature, creating the conditions for constant Internet conectivity.

In a world where everyone is increasingly connected 24-7 to a network (the Internet), that world begins to look like a traditional computer network, with network administrators wielding control over the user's access. But in this case, who are the administrators? Are they the the phone carriers who sell people the phones on plans, or pay-as-you go? Technically, yes, but the company’s who control the operating system, hold the greatest power of all. Apple controls the iOS, Google, the Android operating system, and if any phones running the Window 8 phone OS are sold, then Microsoft will control those.

Faster iPhone! Kill! Kill!

Network administrators have to be able to reach into any or all parts of their network to quickly deal with a threat, such as a virus. All the big computer companies have admitted to having such a "kill switch" in their phone and desktop operating systems.

Steve Jobs admitted there was one in the iOS in 2008 (♦). Microsoft has included one in Windows 8 (♥). Google has already used theirs, in 2011,  to delete malware on 50,000 Android phones (♣). Even Amazon, way back in 2009 controversially used a kill switch on their Kindle (♠).

So this isn't the Wild West 1990s, when Apple had to stand by and fume, while Adobe's Flash plug-in caused so many Macs to crash so often. When Steve Jobs slammed the door on Adobe's mobile Flash, with Microsoft nodding in approval, in 2010, this was both a settling of accounts, and the start of setting things right.

Quality and quantity, together at last

Utter control of the user experience is part of ensuring customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. Plus, Apple, for one, knows a bit about up-selling existing users.

The stakes and numbers involved, between Apple and Google are becoming positively planetary: Apple claims over 500,000,000 iOS devices sold -- that's half a billion. And, reportedly, cumulative shipments of Android devices top one billion. Of course, Mark Twain's observation concerning statistics applies.

So the legal see-sawing all over the planet between Apple and Samsung, isn't; it's always been Apple versus Google, for apparent control of the Earth. No idea who will win, but I Googled all these facts, and sources.

I Found this HP Pavilion dv6000 in the garbage well over a year ago. I didn't have an AC adapter for it so I left it in my locker, then it went off with Toad, who said he had an adapter; he didn't, and I finally got it back about a month ago. Now I had an adapter so I played with it. The casing was very clean and unmarked. There was no internal hard drive, but it booted a variety of live media. I was pleased it booted Ubuntu with no problem, making it the first computer driven by an AMD proccessor to do so. It still had its wireless card, which was recognized by every distro I tried. It had a much faster proccessor, and about twice as much RAM, as my little Acer Aspire One 533 netbook.

The HP also had a standard ratio screen, unlike the Acer, who's 10.1-inch netbook screen (1024 x 600 resolution) was, height-wise, 40 pixels off standard ratio. I had found that a number of Linux applications, including GIMP, but mostly KDE applications, such as DigiKam, would draw windows 1024 x 640, and somewhat important buttons such as "Save," would be stuck down in the right-hand corner -- in that 40-pixels below the bottom of my Acer's screen.

The HP was more a tank-top than laptop, but I had a bike trailer.

I bought a 250 GB Apple Toshiba SATA laptop drive from another binner for $5, or $10 dollars. I cajoled Toad into helping me install it, which he did with the aid of an adapter doo-dad. In gratitude, I gave him a bag of $13-worth-of-nickels.

The six-cell battery didn't hold more than a ten-minute charge anymore. Research showed that brand-new it was only rated for two hours. Luckily I found Leading Age Computer, a store at Kingsway and Joyce, in the Collingwood neighbourhood of Vancouver, which was selling a twelve-cell battery for a mere $60.00, taxes in. This thing may weigh as much as my Acer, and it's twice the thickness of a six-cell, but it's giving me over four hours of charge.

I installed Ubuntu 12.04.1, because my experience with 12.10 on the Acer made me remember all the better qualities of 12.04. Now that it's installed I'm remembering that it's not without blemishes. But I know I can successfully un-install Unity from 12.04, which absolutely wasn't the case with 12.10.

---

The specs:

OS: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 32-bit
Memory: 2.9 GB
Processor: AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-60 × 2
Graphics: Unknown (to Ubuntu)
Disk: 240 GB

---

True there is a vertical blue line (sometimes lines) that sits about two-inches in from the right side of the screen, but I knew that was there from the first distro I booted -- I'm told it has to do with the graphics card, which in this HP, is soldered in. Any ways, I believe HPs have poor build-quality by design, so any or all of it could go poof at any moment. So far though, I'm pretty pleased.

Shown above is my black Sansa Clip Zip + music player. It has 4 GB of built-in storage, and takes micro SD cards. By itself it's an okay music player, but it's real strength is that it's one of a number of digital music players whose  firmware can be easily replaced with a third-party, opensource firmware called Rockbox. Many people would say that a Sansa running Rockbox is better than an iPod:



Rockbox is almost too configurable, in both look and sound. There are walk-through installers for Windows, Mac, and Linux, The site offers a wealth of information including which players are supported. If there is a drawback it is that the supported players are older hardware, and increasingly hard to find; the SCZ+ is one of the newest players supported.

The Black SCZ+ shown above was a replacement for a white model which was rendered read-only one day. I attribute this not to the player but to Linux/Ubuntu, as I've had this happen permanently to a micro-SD card, and temporarily to an external hard drive. I managed to restore the micro-SD by getting an SD card-size adapter, which had the physical switch to toggle write-protect on and off. I have also managed to un-bork the white SCZ+ by reformatting it on a Mac which naturally still saw it as write-enabled.