Tao of Mac

Oct 15th 2005 · 2 min read

Chilling Out

  • Froze my personal e-mail queue (mail will eventually get replied to, but not right now).
  • Finally set up NetworkManager in Core 4. It works great, although it defaults to scanning for Wi-Fi networks upon startup (the package defaults to do so, you can set your instance not to), which can be bothersome on "slow" scanning cards.
  • Rummaged in CPAN for a few tidbits of interest, and noticed that, for some odd reason, I like coding in Perl when I'm angry - must be all the energy I'm expending to make sense of the code.
  • Set up a glorious 1680x1050 server to my Gnome box for full-screen coding. The toolchain isn't geared for a install, so I'm wrestling with it still (notes will be posted somewhere in the Wiki, but so far I've been taking advantage of this opportunity to test Writeboard).
  • Watched some canned .
  • Chuckled at the fresh batch of rumors concerning an  tablet, which are sure to be joined by ecstatic choruses heralding the Newton's Second Coming.

And this even despite the fact that the original rumor post got it wrong - there was, in fact, a video .

But nobody noticed that bit - they're just quoting Om Malik willy-nilly, even though he takes pains to point out that it's all speculation at this point. Maybe he should have driven home that point a bit further.

As to the rumors... Of course there's an tablet. There has to be at least a prototype someplace - what else would Inkwell be designed for?

But I would think it still a long way from the market, considering that isn't prone to opening too many battle fronts at once, and the traditional tablet market has been notoriously small. doesn't do cool things just because they're cool, it does them because it can reap some kind of profit from them.

There's probably a quite a bit of tech buried someplace in a lab waiting for a suitable opportunity to surface - I wrote about what an tablet would mean , and the situation is still mostly the same.

Web tablet groupies will chime in at this point and note that display, CPU and battery technology have improved tremendously since the Newton line ended, but I would think that a Newton emulator running on the is the closest we're likely to get to an tablet this year - and maybe the next as well.