UltraGalore!

MP3 Cassette

I bought this phone on a antique market somewhere and kind of fell in love with the heavy feel of the number dial pad (and the rest actually; the speaker alone has the same weight as a mobile phone).

RTT Phone

ah… the craftmanship… I pulled the guts and am planning on inserting my girlfriend’s old Siemens SL55. I want to use a PIC in order to decode the dial pulses and send it to the serial port in the Siemens mobile. Would be nice to also trigger the old bell circuit inside the phone but this would require extra batteries. Not sure if I want that. By just using the Siemens phone and the PIC I can use it’s own charger. The RTT even has a handy brace on it so you can walk around with it and use it as a real mobile phone!

I got this phone from a friend of mine after he dropped it on the floor too many times. It had become unreliable; dropped out several times, etc… he got fed up.

I kind of like the Palm software though…. once I saw people writing notes on the touchscreen I decided I had to try one once so this Treo needed saving.

My guess was the mainboard had a crack somewhere because slightly twisting the Treo like a wet towel could reboot the Phone. I already soldered the battery to the board because I thought it might just be the connector but no such luck.

I found a very cheap Treo for parts on ebay but it was a Verizon type which don’t have a SIM slot connector. Mine used a SIM card to connec to to a provider. The sim connector is a seperate card so I took my chances in buying the Verizon Treo and expected Palm to use a single motherboard with different addons.

Luckily I was right, when I got the phone the board swapped out without problems. I had to change the firmware to get things really working though. I found that this can be done with the use of the original Treo usb connector cable. this cable has a sync button on it and you need to press this button while booting the Treo in order to get to the ROM-upload mode.

I used the grack Treo ROM tool to upload a different Treo ROM to the phone. People from the http://www.palmclub.nl/ were so kind in providing me with a clean Treo ROM. Pretty cool… you can even compile your own ROM set with programs you use more often, or erase ‘useless programs’ to gain memory space.

After this I got me a stylus pen set and a new battery from ebay and now the phone works again. Ok it’s a big phone, but battery life on this thing is something else….

Getting your contacts and calendar in one place can be tedious. Now I would have liked to manage this myself, but there’s just too much involved setting up ldap, imap, etc on a router. So google it is. Google calendar can be imported from thunderbird and apple’s iCal. Also the contacts of a google account can be synced from both systems. I also have this calendar setup in the iPhone under Settings/Mail, contacts, calendar/ add account / microsoft exchange / See details here

‘B-Gone, mobileme’

Well i’s a sleek machine and performs multitasking as it should. But think twice if you’re a power user:

Typing:
Sometimes the next pad is pressed because they are quite small. Why doesn’t the interface turn when you rotate the phone sideways, it does when you play a movie? I guess this would also help ease typing a bit.

Connectivity:
No dial up networking? f#k… this phone just connects as a ‘photo camera’ to my computer, and that’s probably the crappiest thing on the iPhone.

Well after I bought my MacBook Pro I tried working in bootcamp because I’ve been using Windows since version 3.11. But Bootcamp is far from perfect. Sure, it runs natively, but some drivers have irritating bugs. I suspect network and display (the whine on dimming the screen drives me crazy!) drivers on this.

Anyway, so I started using Mac OSX more and more and tried harder and harder to find replacements for my favourite XP apps. I’ll mention a few.

Typing accents
I found this URL which shows you how to type accents on characters: http://www.theblog.ca/mac-character-map

Printing
Well, not a ‘favourite’, but my HP ColorJet 3600 is not directly connected to the Mac, but on a router with printing support. If you connect the printer through USB on the Mac, it works without problems, but the same drivers do not print when this is sent through IP printing. I’ve been Messing around in the prefs panel I couldn’t get it to work… Then I discovered CUPS – (a very powerful web interface on the OSX’s printing drivers: http://localhost:631 ) cool. – but no luck either. OSX keeps printing postscript data to the ColorJet which it interprets as plain text…

After searching around a bit more I came accross the HPIJS OpenPrinting drivers; you can find them here. Follow the installation instructions, it works flawlessly: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/MacOSX/hpijs

Quicktime
Apple sure keeps to themselves concerning video and audio formats…. On XP I watched movies in XVID and subtitles in SRT but this is another step to take on OSX. Solution I found for this is Perian; http://perian.org/ this extends Quicktime quite a bit! Combine it with http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv.htm for .wmv support too

Shared Discs
Then there’s Microsofts NTFS. I could see my external USB workdrives in OSX, but discovered I could not write to them. Turned out this is disabled, you need NTFS-3G to work with this: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

Default apps
In XP filetypes are recognised by their extension and on OSX this works differend. If you want to change applications with certain filetypes you can install RCDefaultApp http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/ which adds extension recognition to OSX

FTP
Well, next to the fact that you should install Firefox and Thunderbird right away, I found that FireFTP is not all that. I found another program called Cyberduck which handles FTP quite neatly: http://cyberduck.ch/

Torrents
Torrents? -> transmission: http://www.transmissionbt.com/

Developing PHP
I used WAMP on XP to develop PHP, on mac there is.. MAMP (yeah): http://www.mamp.info/en/index.php

Backup:
WinClone is an application which can backup your whole bootcamp partition from OSX. I used it to reproduce my XP environment on another Mac when I had to swap it out: http://twocanoes.com/winclone/

And ofcourse… don’t forget to install Firefox and Thunderbird+lightning for improved browsing, mail reading and calendar functions.

Cleaning up your attic can provide various results, e.g. an old Atari 1024STf. I got this one to run Cubase in the old days (ofcourse) but with my Macbook Pro nowadays, nostalgia has its limits…

I also had a PS2 Compaq keyboard lying around and an Abit iL90 mainboard which I got as a replacement for a non-delivarable mini-its board I actually wanted. Long story short; I didn’t really use the stuff.

Instead of entering the tedious part of selling it on ebay I decided to put things together. It’s not a super fast computer, but It has some nice similarities with the original specs.

MAIN SPECS

This ‘Abitari’ has:

• 1024MB RAM (Instead of 1024KB)
• 1.6GHz Pentium Mobile (Instead of 1.6MHz Motorola)

I did got rid of the floppy drive in order to install a 8GB Lightscribe Slot-in DVD drive. Just pop in those discs on the right side of the computer, just as in the old days!

It was tempting to remap the original keyboard to PC layout, but the Atari keyboard was not functioning 100% anymore and the Atari layout misses quite some keys to accommodate normal PC usage. I took the old Compaq 101-PC keyboard and put it in place of the old keys.

Furthermore there’s an M-AUDIO MIDISport 2×2 MIDI port to be plugged in the USB port to replace the standard MIDI Atari connectors.

INTERNALS

Here are the internals. The embedded power supply comes from a picoPSU hence the low power Pentium Mobile. (I did not want to stress this too much with a Dual Core) Because the MB is made for home theatre fan is low noise and only spins in high stress situations.

I’ve put an USB 54g wireless card inthere on the left, as well as  a bluetooth adapter. I had to remove the casing from these parts on order to fit it into the case. The board also has features for digital audio and HDMI connection which are still accessible from the left side. I’ve made som holes to provide for two USB on the side of the Atari as well as a FireWire connection. The black thing there on the right is the power supply, accompanied by a 2.5″ HD

I made a little adapter so the VGA port got its own connector at the outside of the case and made a mini-jack to dual RCA plug for the audio.

MOUSE

You have to control this thing in style. The Atari mouse is now rebuilt with a Logitech optical core and I cleared out some space for the scrollwheel. You can connect it on the original place below the keyboard.. I changed the gameport to a PS2 connector.

I’m telling you, it feels weird popping in a DVD…

….and play a DVD on your atari ST