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http://park30.wakwak.com/~weather/geiger_index.html no major shift by this point

Godzilla always comes in times of nuclear crisis. It's what she does. Get over yourself.

Not to mention that the "nuclear crisis" exists only in the minds of the media. Here's a realistic assessment from an MIT prof. Some heroic Japanese workers pumped enough seawater on the overheated core to keep the problem from becoming any worse than Three Mile Island. With any luck the death toll will be the same. here's a real-time Geiger counter in Tokyo if you want to follow along.

Meanwhile, real relief efforts are needed for areas struck by the tsunami, where thousands were killed.

It may look like a Model M, but it won't type like one. This one uses membrane keyswitches. Model M keyboards used buckling springs. See http://www.clickykeyboards.com/ for real Model M keyboards, or CVT and PCKeyboard.com for modern equivalents...

Myself, I can't live without that clicky feel, so I've got one of the Avant Primes at work (from CVT) and an old Model M at home... My quest now is for a split/ergo buckling spring model. I've only found 2 so far: the uber-rare IBM M15 and the overpriced Northgate Evolution. If anyone knows of others, please point me toward them. Thanks!

Try: http://park15.wakwak.com/~ftx/

I've been using it for about 2 years... tabbed browsing, text sizing, 'simply view' mode (no side scrolling or useless formatting), and the app is a mere 73K. Nice.

Try the FTX Browser from http://park15.wakwak.com/~ftx/. It's been around for a long while and supports tabbed browsing, and has what it calls 'simply view' mode which eliminates useless formatting and side-scrolling.

If all you want is tabbed browsing, then try ftxPBrowser. It is a freeware "wrapper" for IE that supports tabbed browsing, full-screen browsing, and a few other enhancements.
http://park15.wakwak.com/~ftx/ftxp3e/

Dan East

Try NetFront, which is a pretty good browser. Or, if you're using vanilla WinCE or WM2003, IE isn't bad, though it does suck eggs in PPC 2k and 2k2. But either way, if you're using IE on any CE OS, you should be using ftxBrowser, which adds tabs, configurable hotkeys and a better bookmarks system. One of the first things I install on a new CE installation.

Here is my list of must-haves for PocketPC/WinCE. I'm not quite what most would consider to be a "normal user," as I've got a lot of Unix leanings. However, I do not use a Zaurus because ... well, the software pretty much sucks. I really like real HWR, which doesn't exist on Linux and does on CE and the Newton. So PocketPC it is. But that doesn't mean you can't have your favorite Unix tools...

First, there are a lot of Unix ports from Rainer. I use his TeX distro for writing papers, Maxima w/ GNUplot and Tcl/tk GUI support for doing maths. I used to use Perl/tk, though Dialect (a really cool pythonish RAD language for CE and dekstop windows) has replaced it when I need to write an app that fits in as a CE app.

The app I spend the most time in is Squeak Smalltalk. It's not quite an application, but a development and application environment. Binary and source portable between oodles of platforms, including but not limited to CE/PPC, desktop windows/x86, linux of all flavors, Mac OS X/classic, Acorn RISC OS, etc etc.

One of the few regular PocketPC apps I use regularily is GowerPoint's uBook ebook reader. It's the best ebook reader I've found for the platform so far, and pretty good. The only thing it lacks that I wished it had was a text-to-speech feature for having books read aloud occasionally. It can read just about any format- txt, pdb/prc (both txt and html inside), html, rtf, and all of those formats zipped- and prolly others. it's nice to put a whole series- say, Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn series in one zip file with all of the books in the series. I typically buy a LIT and convert it when I have to, though sometimes I get books from fictionWise where you can sometimes get books in unencrypted formats.

Coding and reading... that leaves out the other big thing I do on my PDA (which is my computer): internettin'. (what a horrible word) I really reccomend the NetFront web browser- it's really nice. IE used to be really bad in PPC 2k and 2k2, though I'm told it's improved in 2k3 and 2k3SE, more like the IE that came with Handheld PC 2000 or vanilla WinCE 4.x, which is a very capable browser on the order of IE 5-5.5 or so. Handles most sites well and is pretty fast. However, it doesn't cut the mustard- no tabs, few and not configurable key commands, etc. For that, you need ftxBrowser, which I've bene using for years. Slick. It just embeds the IE control, so it's still IE (a good thing in the case of CE), but you've got a lot of features that are a must for me, a person who can't just do one browser page at a time. :)

There are a number of SSH clients around there. Some good ones that cost money, but there are some free ones. Rainer has one for free, though it takes a little work to get set up, but it's what I use.

I ran the UT2004 demo at what must have been hovering near the recommended mark (practically all the special spiffies were turned off), and the graphics still blew me away.


This is completley true for me as well. I almost felt like I was getting something for free.

Questions...

Is it just me or are the developers of UT2004 not getting enough critical and community thanks for making a game that runs so well on crappy systems? I could be totally wrong, but it doesn't seem like they are. Methinks it's just easier for some folks to complain when it *doesn't* work ;)

Next-gen games that run well (or in the case of UT2k4, excellent) on low to mid-range systems would be a welcome paradigm shift and would go a long way to extend the lifespan and relevance of PC gaming. Was that a specific goal of UT2K4's desiginers? If so, how hard is it to implement?

It *seems* like programming for next gen games would be harder for the bleeding edge systems because alot of assumptions about the hardware and drivers have to be made at the very beginning....wheras the crappy hardware in my computer is available for your perusal RIGHT NOW!

Someone enlighten me?

• Drivers: Via, nVidia, and Intel chipsets; ATI Rage 128, ATI Radeon, and nVidia GPUs; Highpoint HPT37x and Promise Ultra IDE controllers; miscellaneous 3Com, AMD, Intel, Linksys, and NetGear NICs; Sound Blaster PCI, Sound Blaster Live, Santa Cruz, and Via integrated sound cards; DirectX; Palm Desktop; Nero UDF reader
• Applications: Mozilla, CDex, OpenOffice.org, Pixia*, SmartFTP
• Plugins and viewers: Adobe Acrobat Reader, Flash Player, Ghostscript and GSView, IrfanView, Java Runtime Environment, QuickTime, Winamp
• Emergency rescue stuff: Norton Disk Editor, Diskman, DOSLFN, MBRWork, Norton Disk Doctor, RegEdit, CTMOUSE, FIPS, Ghost, NTFSDOS, Partition Manager, Partition Resizer, RawWrite plus a DOS boot disk image, Info-Zip UNZIP, Restoration
• Miscellanous utilities: Ad-Aware, UnxUtils, wget, PGP, Privoxy, Restoration, TweakUI, TweakUI XP, VDMSound, XVI32

* I'd like to include The Gimp, but I often install the free/Free stuff from this CD onto computers I give to charity, where people might take offense to the name. I'll probably replace Pixia with CinePaint in the future.

Mmm, delicious skin. For those not reading ACs, it's here.

I'm partial to Breeze, a little-known skin that isn't hosted on Mozdev or Deskmod.