How to Spot a Psychopath

You know those people who gloat insufferably about how they were in a junk shop in Chickenmilk, Wisconsin, and they found a 1933 Leica or Amazing Fantasy #15 or something for $5, and aren't they clever?

Well, I scored myself a Curta calculator for forty Australian dollars.

And yes, it was in a junk store, next to the usual random collection of broken cameras and mildewed binoculars.

(When the junk shop owner names a price and you immediately smile broadly and say "Sold!", they know they've screwed up.)

Mine is not an incredibly collectable Curta. It's a Type I with serial number 67087, which makes it an early 1967 unit, with plastic crank and storage case but (slightly unusually, I think) a metal "clearing ring".

Unfortunately, the actual finger-loop part of the clearing ring - the part that adds an element of hand-grenade-ness to the otherwise pepper-grinder-ish look of all Curtas - is broken off...

...perhaps because it sticks out when you don't swing it into the stowed position.

And there's no manual either. But it's still easy to twirl the top around to clear the readings, and everything else (including the carrying case) is in excellent condition. It's in perfect working order and clean as a whistle.

Intact Curtas regularly go on eBay for $US700 or more - they're somewhere between slide adders and Fuller Calculators on the mechanical-calculator-collector expense scale (I don't think Enigma machines really count).

So I reckon this still has to be a $US500 item, at least.

(I'm not itching to sell it, but if you're willing to pay top dollar, especially if you're in Australia, let me know.)

The actual practical value of a Curta calculator today, as opposed to its collectible value, closely approaches zero. It's not actually very difficult to use a Curta - for basic calculations, at least. But, like books of logarithms, Curtas have been made about as completely obsolete as is possible by electronic calculators.

Pretty much any electronic computer at all is hilariously superior to the finest hand-cranked calculator ever made. You have to try quite hard to make electronic calculation more obscure than mechanical.

The standard slide rule and its various specialised derivatives still have a place today as an inexpensive and durable rapid estimation tool. But Curtas were never cheap, aren't very tough, and don't let you quickly eyeball a multiplication or logarithm. Don't even ask what you have to do to calculate a square root.

This functional omission is at least partly by design, of course. People whose needs were already served by a $5 slipstick certainly weren't going to spend $US850 in today's money on a Curta.

I could go on, but there's little I could say about Curtas that Clifford Stoll didn't say in his 2004 Scientific American piece about them. Find plenty more resources at curta.org and vcalc.net.

(Original PDF here; it's one of those weird ones that looks like crummy scans overlaid by what looks like OCRed text, which you still can't search. Does anybody know what the deal is with such files?)

The other day, someone e-mailed me to ask where an Australian shopper could find one of those wonderful clicky keyboards I keep going on about without having to pay fifty US bucks, or more, for shipping from the States.

There aren't any Australian dealers of new or used buckling spring or keyswitch keyboards, if you don't count that silly Das Keyboard thing. Well, not as far as I know, anyway; feel free to tell me if you know of one.

So the best advice I can usually come up with is "use the eBay e-mail search notification thingy and wait".

But this time there seemed to be no need to wait, because there were...

...a bunch of these Unicomp Model Ms for sale on Australian eBay right now!

Except then a reader who's already bought one, from this same eBay seller, wrote to inform me that these are not actually clicky keyboards at all.

The bloody seller has the hide to say "The many different variations of the keyboard have their own distinct characteristics, with the vast majority having a buckling spring key design ... Model Ms have been prized by computer enthusiasts and heavy typists because of the tactile and auditory feedback resulting from a keystroke." in the listings, thereby clearly giving readers the impression that they're buying a buckling spring 'board.

And these are indeed "real" Model Ms. But, as explained on the clickykeyboard.com Buyer's Guide page, these are the "library" kind of Model M that's actually just a high quality rubber dome 'board. Big, heavy, solid, probably very reliable, but not the nice-keyfeel clicky 'board you're hoping for. They do not have "the tactile and auditory feedback" that an honest listing would not have damn well mentioned.

I apologise to anybody who's bought a keyboard already based on what this post said before I found this out. What a bloody swindle. Shame on you, Fistok.

And now, the rest of my orignal post, with a few more annotations:

The more observant among you may have noticed that these keyboards do not have a standard layout, and are in fact openly described as "terminal" keyboards. This is usually bad news. Old terminal keyboards seldom have a standard PS/2 interface, and so there's no way to plug them into a normal PC without doing something ridiculous like grafting in whole new electronics, or making your own interface converter with a microcontroller.

The seller assures me that these ones, however, have a standard PS/2 plug and all worked fine when he tested them on an ordinary PC.

[But I didn't ask him if they were really buckling spring, since he used the words "buckling spring" in the listing. More fool me.]

So they're just a PC keyboard with a funny cursor key layout and a bunch of extra function keys that may or may not be of any use to you, but will make you look very important.

And they're $AU19.99 plus $AU10 to $AU20 delivery, depending on where in Australia you are. He'll deliver overseas as well.

[The price still isn't bad, if you want a novelty keyboard that'll work with a normal PC. If you want a clicky keyboard, though, don't buy one of these.]

Once again, gentle readers, I call upon you to buy these things up so I don't end up buying one myself.

[Fat chance of that now, of course.]

Here's something you don't see every day.

Crystal skulls aren't the hip new thing in parapsychological woo-woo any more, but they were very big back in the heyday of documentaries narrated by Leonard Nimoy.

Why spend all the time carving and interminably polishing one, though, when you can make one with exactly the same mystic powers out of a buggerload of 1x2 clear Lego plates?

(Lugnet announcement post with a little more info here.)

Yes, my eMate is now actually useful, but I had a bunch of fun figuring out how to get data onto and off of it.

I started out by moving data back and forth with a plain old serial cable. I bought the bits to make one, but then a kind reader sent me his old Maclink cable for free!

And, after trying almost everything else, I'm back with the serial cable.

If you want to move documents - as opposed to contacts and calendar entries - to and from a Newton of any flavour, my official recommendation is to stick with serial and save yourself the pain.

But, I hear you say, the eMate has an infrared transceiver, which can talk to standard IrDA things if you install some software!

Yes. Sort of.

To enable IR data transfer, I did as I was told and used the serial cable and Newton Connection Utilities (which is what you use on Windows for serial document transfer as well) to install a bunch of stuff from 40Hz. I installed IC/VC and Neo and Nitro and Ntox and NHttpLib, not all of which were necessarily entirely essential for simple document transfer, but what the heck.

Then I tried to get the eMate to to connect to a PC, only to have it error out at the precise moment it connected, every time. Yes, even if I used the OBEX:IrXfer option, as instructed. This happened with a desktop machine with a USB IrDA interface; it also happened with my ThinkPad.

You actually can transfer data from a PC to an eMate even when it's doing this. What you have to do is kind of trick it, by starting a transfer (which will immediately fail) so Windows lets you pop up the what-file-would-you-like-to-send requester, then selecting the file you want, and starting another transfer. Then you click the OK button just as the connection happens... whereupon it works. For that one file transfer. Then it instantly disconnects again.

(I was sidetracked for a while by the instruction to run "irftp", which is a program that exits silently every time I run it, presumably because it sees no IR connection, because of the instant-disconnect problem. Oh, and if you transfer a plain ASCII text file to an eMate it won't be able to read it, unless you install plain text "stationery" as well. Fun!)

All of this is purely academic, though, because there's no trick you can use in the other direction. If you've got this problem, you can't send anything back from the eMate to the PC via IR.

Neo is supposed to "convert [an] object to text and send it", but all it ever actually does for me is convert an object to the generic eMate errors -8007 and -48205, and send nothing.

Perhaps all of this 40Hz stuff does actually work if you want to sync address book and calendar data, but I just wanted basic file transfer, and it wasn't happening.

You can also, apparently, use some Orinoco 802.11b cards with an eMate, and wired Ethernet cards too. But the Orinoco driver only works if you install Newton Internet Enabler, which is for... accessing the Internet, and doing other perverse things. Not transferring data from other computers. Well, not unless you do something ludicrous like transferring your documents via e-mail and installing a mail client on the eMate.

There's also commercial software that lets you use a CompactFlash card in a PCMCIA adapter as storage for a Newton device, instead of the old "linear" PCMCIA cards that work natively in these devices. I'd almost certainly be able to do this, since my dusty-old-stuff drawer contains the 8Mb version of a 16Mb card that's on the compatibility list, but it wouldn't help me much either, since the files the eMate put on the card would be in Newton Note format and I'd have to translate them somehow to access them on my PC anyway. Might as well hook up the serial cable and translate on the fly.

So, verily, did I say Screw It, and go back to the serial cable.

(I'm using the serial cable with my old ThinkPad, which is the handiest computer I've got that has a real serial port. I think Newton Connection Utilities will work with a USB-to-serial adapter, but I haven't tried it. For a bigger dose of old-stuff-on-new-hardware shenanigans, check out this page about running Windows 1.01 on 2005 hardware.)

Curse you, Jax184, for telling me to make sure a screen hinge clutch spring on my eMate wasn't about to let go and puncture the video cable.

Oh, all right, I suppose it's better to know about the problem before it happens than after. But still.

Off I went, all innocent, to the disassembly instructions here. They informed me that Apple cheaped out on including a couple of lousy connectors on the eMate mainboard, so you have to unsolder four wires if you want to actually remove the mainboard from an eMate.

Why do you have to do that? To reach the dodgy screen hinge springs, that's why. It's very difficult to reach the hinges even with the straw of a spray-grease can when the mainboard is still held in place by the soldered wires.

Since everything was, actually, still fine, I was pretty much willing to forego the unsoldering, put my eMate's back on it again, and just trust that the springs would hang in there. Except then I heard a piece of plastic rattling around inside.

It was, no doubt, some important little light guide or button that'd come astray (the disassembly instructions mention these things in some depth...), and I now had to remove the mainboard to reach it, anyway.

So I unsoldered the wires and removed the board... and found that the loose piece of plastic was actually just the base into which one of the case mount screws threads. It had broken loose at some point in this eMate's life.

That sort of thing doesn't actually matter at all, of itself. If more than one case screw in a gadget loses its mount then the device is likely to start feeling a bit creaky, but you can live without one.

Well, I was there now. I CAed the mount back down, put washers under the spring retention screws to prevent the springs ever popping loose, sprayed some new Miracle Lubricant Stuff that I'd bought earlier in the day at the second hardware store I went to in search of light-grease-in-a-spraycan (a Scottish fellow I once knew described the hardware store as "the store of broken dreams"; it sounds better with the accent) on the springs, and spent some time reassembling the bloody thing while the bits that jump out of their correct locations all jumped out of their correct locations.

After which, it was time to do the job that I had originally expected to have to do: Building a new battery to replace the very very dead original one.

I wouldn't say I'm a dab hand at battery building, but I've done it a few times. It's quite easy to solder up battery packs even if you are limited, as I was by what I had on hand, to normal cells without pre-attached solder tabs.

These excellent instructions for making a new eMate battery show you the solder-tab way, but you can solder directly to the ends of normal cells (even non-rechargeable ones!) as well. Just use a soldering iron with a broad tip, only a moderate heat, and - and here's the big trick - scratch up both ends of each cell first with a file or sandpaper, so that the solder will stick.

Get it right, and the solder will flow into place almost immediately. Get it wrong (fine-tip iron, high heat, unscuffed cells), and you'll boil the life out of the cells while still not getting any solder onto 'em.

(I talk about this more in my ancient piece about making external digital camera batteries, from back when all digicams ate AAs like popcorn.)

Aaaaanyway, I was so cocky about all this that I even built the pack out of fully charged cells. That's a big no-no for beginners - short out the pack while you're working and the thing may catch fire in your hands.

Against all expectations, though, everything went fine. The eMate played its happy first-startup sound (a variant on the Mac chime) the second I plugged the new pack in.

I didn't bother taking any pictures of this whole procedure, since I always find this sort of thing quite exhausting all by itself. Especially when you're working on something with a swoopy curvy case that's easy to not quite put together properly afterwards, requiring re-removal of screws and realignment of little catches and tabs.

But, hurrah, now it works, and I can actually play with it.

(My greatest achievement so far is working out that "Styles" is how you stop everything you enter appearing in large-print Apple Casual, which looks far too much like you-know-what.)

...is an Apple eMate 300.

The eMate is the keyboard-equipped cousin to Apple's groundbreaking but unsuccessful Newton, and it's one of those gadgets that's remained desirable in its (in computer terms) old age.

I've considered buying an eMate on eBay, but I don't really need one, and the bidding usually goes much too high for my essentially idle interest in the things.

Now, though, this eBay seller here in Australia has, after reading the above-linked column, kindly sent me one of the eMates he's selling, for free.

The engraving on the underside of my eMate tells me that it and its brethren came from Mount Riverview Public School. Where, if the condition of the thing is anything to go by, nobody got much use out of them.

(Now some kid who used this very eMate when she was in fourth grade is going to e-mail me and tell me how much she's enjoying her career as a barrister.)

It's not surprising that the eMates didn't get used a lot. Half-assed ineffective school computing schemes are still extremely common today, let alone ten years ago - but it's still a shame. The eMate remains a very competent assistant to a "proper" computer, at least for people like me whose needs stop at "Palm-ish sorts of jobs, plus a keyboard".

(Yes, Newton enthusiasts, I am aware that the Newton has some features, even if they were a bit slow, which other PDAs still haven't matched.)

The eMate is a product from the Golden Age of Apple, when they were concerned that mere high prices and IBM-incompatibility weren't always enough to prevent people from buying their computers. So sometimes, Apple simply refused to sell things to ordinary consumers.

Lots of regular people would have loved an eMate. The mere fact that it's still quite useful today ought to make that clear. But Apple wouldn't sell you one unless you managed to persuade them you were part of the "education market".

(More recently, they did the same thing with the early eMacs. Then they sobered up and started selling them to everyone.)

Now that I've got my eMate, I feel morally obliged to walk out into the bush with it and spend more hours writing something than I could using either of the other (working) portables in this house. I'll have to rebuild the utterly dead '97-vintage battery pack before I can take it anywhere, but that's no big deal. Even getting data on and off of the thing shouldn't be too painful, since the eMate has an IrDA transceiver.

(It's got a PCMCIA slot as well, but you can't plug any old laptop Ethernet card in there and expect it to work.)

I'll let you all know how I get on with my new toy.