From: Brian Mayton (bmayton_at_mac.com)
Date: Mon May 12 2003 - 20:41:06 PDT
I have two questions about the Newton that I haven't been able to find
an answer for. I'm hoping that someone here will be able to point me
in the right direction. I haven't had enough time to read this list
nearly as much as I'd like lately (the end of the school year is
approaching and everything is quite busy right now) so forgive me if I
ask something that's been covered recently.
I recently got a MacAlly 4-in-1 PCMCIA adapter card. It's a PCMCIA
card that takes MMC, Secure Digital, Memory Stick, and SmartMedia and
fits in the PCMCIA slot. I got it to use with my computer, but to my
surprise, it actually works quite well with the ATA Support drivers on
my Newton. It recognized and partitioned both my Secure Digital cards
with no problems whatsoever. However, when I close my eMate and open
it again, it restarts because the power was interrupted. I thought
that was just because I was using an active adapter card, and not just
a passive adapter with compact flash. However, reading several sites
on the internet seems to suggest that this is a common bug with ATA
support. The FAQ says that in the latest release, "The eMate power
management bug is back. " This leads me to believe that the bug, was
at one time, fixed. As I'm using my cards for noncritical data, I
would much rather take my chances with an older release with a higher
possibility of data corruption than having to unmount my stores every
time I want to close my eMate.
Was there, like the list of known bugs seems to suggest, ever a release
that didn't have the eMate power management bug? If there was, which
version was it? Can anyone point me to it?
My second question has to do with eBooks. I would like to use my
Newton as an eBook reader, as it seems much better suited to the task
than my Palm, since it has a much larger screen. I downloaded Newton
Press, pasted in the text of the book, and transferred it to my Newton.
I was surprised to find that I didn't have enough memory on my
internal store for the book! I had started with a 450K text file, and
I had 800K available on my internal store. I went back to the computer
and found that the package that Newton Press generated was close to a
megabyte in size! Why is a Newton press book almost twice the size of
the original text file? Is there another (free) way of viewing eBooks
on the Newton? I tried importing the full text of the book into Newton
Works, but Works seemed to slow down dramatically with a 500k file in
its soup. I've also tried Newtscape in the past, but I'd like to avoid
purchasing shareware if possible.
Thanks for any help or advice,
Brian.
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