Extras
What is Egg Freckles?
No. it doesn’t make much sense. Which is why the cartoonist Garry Trudeau coined this apt (or inept) bit of idiocy to lampoon the original hand-held Newton computer’s difficulty in deciphering handwriting.
After several years of working a helpdesk, I have found that like the cartoon, human expectations and technological capabilities rarely coincide. I started Egg Freckles as a means to share some of my experiences with technology.
Who are You?
My name is Thomas Brand. I started my professional training as a graphic artist, but found I had a greater knack for the technical side of design. I dropped out of art school to spend time behind the Genius Bar. Today I am a System Administrator for a small department at MIT. When I am not working, or writing about technology, I am running marathons for charity.
Read more about me on 512 Pixels, ShawnBlanc.net, or Zero Distraction.
Why an Apple Newton?
Apple’s dud from the 90’s may not be the most exciting theme for a technology website, but the Newton still has a lot of good things going for it.
- The Newton represents a document centric computing model which puts the user’s content above the tools that created it. When you start a Newton you are presented with the last document you were working on, not a screen full of applications or icons the way most computers work.
- The Newton’s handwriting recognition wasn’t that bad, and in later revisions it was actually quite good, if not better than similar offerings made available by Microsoft more than a decade later.
- Despite being a device developed before its time, the Newton is still beloved and supported by a community of dedicated users. It has seen advancements such as internet browsing, and wireless networking it was never intended to have.
The Newton’s usefulness may have run thin for most, but what better way to remind us of the potential of technology than to design my website around the little green MessagePad that could.
What Blog System is Powering Egg Freckles?
Egg Freckles is baked using PieCrust, a static website generator and lightweight CMS that’s all managed with text files. No complex setup, databases, or administrative panels. Simple, beautiful, and yummy.
What Other Tools Do You Use to Create Egg Freckles?
- Einstein for inspiration.
- Pixelmator for image editing.
- VIM for content-creation.
- Coda for site maintenance.
- BBEdit for heavy-lifting.
- HyperDither for Atkinson dithering.
- ImageOptim for PNG optimization.
- And Prompt for for posting on the go.
Can I Repost Your Content on My Own Website?
Egg Freckles by Thomas Brand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
That means you can republish, and remix my work for noncommercial purposes just as long as you link back to EggFreckles.net and share your revisions in a similar manner. If you do decide to republish my content I would love to hear from you.
How Can I Contact You?
EggFreckles[at]me.com is a good start, but don’t forget App.net.