goodbye to Gabriel, hello to the Device

[jazzfish]

So, that lasted about three days before I realised that "internet anywhere there's a wireless hotspot" isn't at all like "internet anywhere." And another two before deciding that, yeah, I could probably afford the monthly data fee if I was going to actually be using it, and I was needing a new phone anyway. Then a week before getting in touch with my parents again, and, as of yesterday afternoon it's goodbye Touch, hello iPhone.

So far I'm liking it. Not entirely sure what I think of the phone controls (plus I need to organize my contacts a little better) and I'd be happier if it could fit all my music. And it feels weird against my leg. Wider, longer, less of a phone-lump and more form-fitting. I suspect it's trying to symbiotically attach itself to me.

I went with an iPhone over some other phoneternet device for two reasons: first, the iPodness makes it easy to store music; second, the App Store. It's got everything. I mean, not just games. Everything. iBird, for pete's sake. This is amazing.

Last night, digging through boxen looking for a cell phone (long story), I stumbled upon my graphing calculator from high school. TI-81, baybee. I'm darkly amused that seventeen years later my telephone has several orders of magnitude more processing power, in a smaller form factor.

Comments

[thanate.livejournal.com]

...and your foolish PC brainwashing has caused the apple key not to say "apple" on it anywhere. grauwulf was horribly confused when I kept trying to tell him to use "apple-something" for shortcuts the other day.

(and the birds were pretty neat, but I want frotz for my computer! I wonder how many steps/emulators it would take to get the lost treasures of infocom off the original floppies and onto my computer...)

[jazzfish]

. . . seriously? "Apple" ? "Option" and "Command" at least make some sense, they sound like the kinds of things that make keys do different things. I guess it does "apple-system-y things." As though those things can only be accomplished on Apple systems.

Assuming you can access the files on the original floppies, it's surprisingly easy to turn the files on the disk into Frotz-readable ones. Find the game file (I think it's usually got a .dat extension, at least on PC), copy it to your modern computer, and rename it to .z5 extension. Presto!

[thanate.livejournal.com]

at the time when they invented the apple key, there wasn't any windows. It was keyboard branding, 'cause apple was way cooler than you. ;P

Um, lost treasures of Infocom were a mac-compatible version from the early 90s. And the main problem is how far back I have to go before I've got a computer with a working floppy drive, and whether that will talk to my current computer in any way, and then whether the disks still work.

[jazzfish]

I believe the word I am looking for is "Bah." :)

Yeah, I had Lost Treasures I a very long time ago. Somewhere I've got a CD entitled "Masterpieces of Infocom," with everything that wasn't a licensed property (so, no Hitchhikers, among a couple other things). Hm. And the game files are at least nominally machine-independent, that's the point of having a virtual machine [the Z-machine] to run them on. Hmm. . .

[rbandrews]

The first one I bought was a giant "Zork Collection" with every Zork game up to Zork Nemesis.

While poking around the directories with Zork I-III in them, I found out that they actually contained more than half of the games Infocom ever released. They just only had shortcuts to start Zork I-III.

[jazzfish]

*blink* Sounds like they just took Lost Treasures I, changed the launcher, and slapped a different label on. That's pretty awesome.

[rbandrews]

Yeah, it's pretty much what they did. I changed some batch files and managed to get them to run (this was pre-Internet for me, so I had never really heard of most of these before).