I got an IM today from Nicolas asking me if I have checked out today’s entry on CrazyAppleRumors. Very funny!

Newton 2100 And eMate 300 Declared “Obsolete”

Shocking news hit the Newton-using community today as Apple quietly announced that the Newton 2100 and the eMate 300 were officially declared “obsolete.” A declaration of obsolete means that Apple has discontinued hardware service with no exceptions and service providers cannot order parts.

Reaction from all 15 Newton users was swift and angry.

“Who’s obsolete, Steve Jobs, you bitch?” asked a visibly agitated Grant Hutchinson. “Your momma, that’s who. It’s… it’s your momma who’s… um… obsolete.

“I’m sorry, I know that doesn’t make any sense. This is just really upsetting.”

More disturbing than those who - like Hutchinson - expressed anger, were those continuing to live in denial.

“Steve said he was going to replace the Newton,” said Adam Tow, sitting in a corner hugging his knees and rocking back and forth while tapping at his Newton 2100 compulsively. “Steve wouldn’t lie to us. He wouldn’t lie to us! Why would he lie to us? He has no reason to lie to us!”

A review of online materials indicates that Jobs has lied to Apple customers no fewer than 3,453 times.

“A Newton replacement is coming!” Tow shouted. “It’s coming! Just wait! You’ll see!”

Apple declined to comment for this story other than to say that Tow is wrong and a Newton replacement is not coming.

Nowhere is state-of-the-art more apparent than in monitor design. Randy’s laptop backlight conked out of him the other day. To tide him over, he picked up a 21-inch NEC MultiSync XP21, a.k.a. the Andre the Giant of Monitors. Anyone know of a place that fixes backlights on a Dell Inspiron 600m?

Next to the 30-inch Cinema Display, the XP21 looks like it’s from pre-historic times. The NEC was released around 1996 at $2299, more expensive than what I paid for the Cinema Display!

Max resolution on the XP21 is 1600×1200 versus 2560×1600 on the 30-inch. The NEC weighs in at 79 pounds! The Cinema is svelte at 27.5 pounds.

Rae was remarking that I bore a strong resemblance to the 9,400 year old Kennewick Man recreation gracing the cover of the current Time Magazine. Your thoughts?

He was clearly right-handed: the bones of the right arm are markedly larger than those of the left.

That’s true for me too, due in large part to my regular photographic exercising and my dislocated elbow injury!

This reassembled replica of the skull suggests an Asian background.

Looking at the photo reminds me of watching Predator. I still find it freaky to think that we’re all walking skeletons!

Today, I received an email from Apple asking me if I wanted to do an Aperture user survey. I took 20 minutes out of my morning to fill it out, and I was surprised at how disappointed I was with the 1.0/1.0.1 release. There’s a post on Photography Blog that lists some of the new features in the upcoming 1.1 release. I’m hoping that the update will fix what I marked in the survey as the most disappointing aspects of Aperture:

• RAW processing algorithms
• Noise reduction
• Photo organization and management

Aperture has great potential, and I really want to use it on a regular basis. Today, I’m still using iView Media Pro 2.6.4 for my photo organization and CaptureOne for my wedding projects. For studio shoots, Aperture works great, but for those projects that require high-ISO image processing, it can’t yet compare to the combination of CaptureOne/DPP and NoiseNinja.

Two days, 15+ car trips and one U-Haul trip later, we’re done with the move from Cupertino to Santa Clara! I am still having problems coming to grips with the fact that this is our house. It was only two months ago when Rae, Jon, and I walked into and marveled at the house. It feels like I’m living in someone else’s house, except now all of our stuff is here! I figure this is a common feeling for first-time homebuyers.

One of our next tasks in the coming week is deciding what stays and what goes. We didn’t have much time to throw things out prior to the move. Now that everything is in the garage, we can separate items into several buckets:

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This weekend, we’re moving from Cupertino to our new house in Santa Clara. Over the years, I’ve accumulated a boat-load of junk. I’m trying to simplify my life according to Felix’s principles, but it’s difficult. Why in the world do I find myself insisting on keeping these things far beyond their usefullness? Perhaps it’s sentimental or perhaps it’s the thought that I might use an item in a few years. Sometimes I wish for the days when I was a freshman college student, when I only had one carload of stuff with me.

Fortunately, there’s a city-wide dump day in Santa Clara coming up. If I don’t get rid of it now, I’ll be able to do so when April rolls around.

I spent yesterday afternoon and late evening rekeying several of the locks in the new house, and boy was it an interesting experience. I’ve dabbled with lock picking in the past — for educational purposes of course — but I have never rekeyed a lock before. While browsing the aisles at OSH, I noticed a rekeying kit amongst the rows of Schlage and Kwikset locks. I figured that it couldn’t be that hard; after all, “Simple,” “Facil,” and “Only needs a screwdriver” were written in big type on the kit. The price made sense too, $10 for the kit instead of several times that to replace the locks or have them rekeyed professionally.

The instructions in the kit were pretty good, so as long as you knew which kind of lock you were disassembling. That said, it took me some time to get familiar with the three to four types of locks in the house. The actual process of rekeying is simple, so as long as you don’t pop the internal pins and springs!

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Microsoft took the wraps off of Origami today. News outlets are calling for a reality check. If people complained that the Newton was too big, wait till they get their hands on an Origami unit. It’s huge in those screenshots on the Microsoft website!

The more I use the Treo 700w, the less I’d want to have the Newton OS on it. Don’t get me wrong, the Newton UI on any mobile device would be a boon. It’s the small physical size of the screen which would turn me off. I’ve tried taking notes on the 700w, both with the built-in keyboard and with the various HWR systems (Calligrapher or the Block Recognizer) and it’s painful. You can’t write more than two words before running into the edge of the screen, and the keyboard is too cramped. Why on Earth would they replace the colon character on the Treo 600/650 with a semicolon? Why not add an additional modifier key on the right-hand side of the keyboard? I’m going to get carpal thumb syndrome trying to hit modifier-Q to generate the “/” character. The best thumb keyboard I’ve used to date has been on the Blackberry 957.

I’ve been using my Newton to take notes during meetings at work. While I dislike the overall size of the device, I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the large physical screen size. An ideal Newton replacement for me would have be primarily all-screen with just enough of a bezel for comfortable holding. The mockups of fake 6G iPods are getting close. I’d use it landscape orientation to avoid the Treo 700w size issues I mentioned above. This ideal Newton replacement is also being trumpeted by Lunatic at the SNUG meetings.

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At last night’s COBA meeting, Doug Quist mentioned that Smugmug is holding a focus group next week on March 16 in Mountain View. Natalie Moss is organizing the focus group, so if you want the opportunity to talk to the men and women behind smugmug, here’s your chance!

Send an email to Natalie today at: moss.natalie (at) gmail (dot) com.

TechCrunch has details and screenshots of Google’s upcoming calendaring application, codenamed CL2. Aside from the typical Web 2.0 goodies, such as AJAX UI, feeds, integration with Gmail, and notifications, there’s a feature called Quick Add.

Quick Add gives you a text box where you can type all the information about your event in normal English, and we’ll fill out the form for you. We’re pretty excited about this feature, so please let us know how it works for you.

Quick Add? I wrote a similarly-named product for the Palm OS years ago! My QuickAdd was a web clipping application that allows you to add new memos, addresses, dates, and to-do items from a single application. It tied in with another product of mine, iKnapsack, a tool to get web content such as calendar entries directly into the Palm’s native applications.

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