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My 1st computer was a TRS-80 Color computer 2. I still own it and its still in use hooked to a Tandy "Plug 'n Power" X10 controler. It runs some outside lights and the attic fans. As long as it keeps working i have no real reason to ever replace it. It just sits in the basement doing its job year after year.

I also have another CoCo2 hooked up to my bigscreen and DriveWire4 in the living room. Every once in a while I'll fire it up and play some MicroChess or Bedlam.

Believe it or not there is actually a small but active community of TRS-80 coco users. The Drivewire project is pretty active ( https://sites.google.com/site/drivewire4/ ) and so is the coco mailing list ( http://five.pairlist.net/pipermail/coco/ ). Cloud9 is still in business coming up with cool new hardware and support services. ( http://www.cloud9tech.com/ )

I've used WikiServer beta, amazing what can be done on the iPhone... A new mailing list for WikiServer ( http://www.mobilewikiserver.com/ ) just went up at ( http://eight.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/mobilewiki-list )

There's a big thread about Casual Game pricing on the Casual Games mailing list that's well worth a read:

http://seven.pairlist.net/pipermail/casual_games/2 005-December/000570.html

The whole $20 price point seems pretty fixed but I don't know how long for. As a gamer, I hope it becomes more dynamic. As a developer, I'm not so sure.

For anyone wanting to get into Casual Games, as a developer or as a gamer, there are worse places to start that then review of 2005 on GameTunnel:

http://www.gametunnel.com/

And, of course, to be a part of the Casual Games blogosphere you could do worse than help me out with CasualGameDev.com:

http://www.casualgamedev.com/

<sarcasm>

The sun is angry; we are doomed. These flares are just the beginning, they will increase in magnitude until they are so big, they penetrate the Earth's magnetic field, destroy the entire ozone layer and sanitize the surface of the Earth with UV rays - just like an autoclave. Not even bacteria will survive except underground and deep in the Ocean.

The signs are showing, this is the END OF THE WORLD! The sun has been showing more activity since 1940 than it has for the last 1000 years put together. Doom is imminent!

Scientists don't act worried, they think they understand the sun and how it works, but science it just guesses. Maybe the sun is made of iron instead of hydrogen where would all the theories that say we are safe be then, if such a basic 'fact' about the sun turned out to be wrong?

As the flares grow in size and number you will all see that my theory is correct! "What is my theory?" you ask. It is that since the END OF THE WORLD makes a good movie plot point, that it must be happening NOW! These are going to be interesting times... We should all start storing canned food and porno mags in bomb shelters now before it's too late and we get cooked by the MASSIVE RADIATION STORM!

And what if the sun should stop flaring, and I should get proven wrong. WE ARE STILL DOOMED! In the same way that load from a light socket makes the generators in a power plant harder to turn, so geomagnetic storms transfer the kinetic energy of megatons of speeding charged particles directly to the magmatic dynamo at our planet's core. Small purturbations can affect this chaotic fluid flow in unpredictable ways but the most worrying is that the shock from the kinetic energy of all those particles will cause avalanches at the core/mantle boundary this will cause massive vulcanism that will cover the earth with lava!

If that doesn't get us, terrorists wielding viruses will.

Get out your sandwich board and whisky! Walk the streets and warn! THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH!!!!

<sarcasm>

I found something about it Including the report of the farmer who witnessed it. Interesting stuff.

how difficult is it to create websites with text to speech software in mind?
No, not at all. This is the point of seperating the content from presentation. Doing so allows a user-agent to do its job. When Joe was going on about empty alt attributes, he's refering to text-to-speech browsers.

Creating accessible sites is really not that difficult, despite what many here are moaning about. Check out some of these links:

happycog
evolt.org
css-discuss

http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/css-discu ss [Preview tells me that the HREF is kosher]

I can say with immense confidence that a Linux/BSD/etc. consituency would be enthusiastically welcomed (since the current composition is overwhelmingly right-brained), provided the strict-constructionist flames are kept to a minimum, and spewed on a foundation of merit.