Apple's Newton Message Pad, which was discontinued in 1998 sure has been getting a lot of press lately. It seems like everytime I turn around some other Newton freak has figured out a way to keep these devices current. Wired is running a story about Mike Manzano, a blogger who is using a Newton as his main input source.

Manzano fitted his MessagePad with a Wi-Fi card that sits in one of the Newton's two PC Card slots (it uses a driver written by a Newton user in Japan).

Manzano writes in longhand, running his posts through the Newton's spell-checker. "It's got really, really great handwriting recognition," Manzano said. "Natural and accurate."

Manzano e-mails his posts to his TypePad account, a hosting service run by Six Apart, publisher of the popular Movable Type blogging tool. The TypePad service does a lot of the magic; it's set up to accept blog entries by e-mail, making it very easy to maintain a blog from just about any e-mail-capable device.

The story goes on to talk about other Newton-based bloggers, and how people are soldering bluetooth chips into the motherboards to allow them to transmit images from digital cameras and blog those.

Yesterday I was talking about Fire, an IM client that works on OS X with several IM accounts. I downloaded it and used it through out the day to find that while it did the job, the UI still rubbed be the wrong way for some reason. Plus, I'm used to iChat's Address Book integration so I've been seeing my buddies real names, not screen names, and going back was harsh.

Luckily Boris Mann commented on that last post and tipped me off to Adium X. Minutes after installing this I trashed Fire and made Adium X my main IM client. It works with more services than Fire, has a gang of additional features, a much better UI, and lots of download add-ons that you can grab to enhance it. Plus, it plays nice with Address Book so you are back to seeing your friends Real Names. And then of course, there's the ducks…

OK, maybe it's more of a meet up, or a conference than a smackdown per se, but with a publishers panel featuring Jason Calacanis, Nick Denton and (ref'd by) Jeff Jarvis anything if possible. Set up by Gothamist, the excitement goes down at the SoHo Apple Store on Monday, May 3 at 6:00 p.m. I wonder if I can find a last minute flight out there for cheap. Other panels include names like Anil Dash, Jason Kottke, Clay Shirky and more - details and headshots can be found here.

I first heard about Fire a while back, it's an IM client for OS X that works with everything. AIM, ICQ, irc, Jabber, MSN and Yahoo! Messenger all in one app. The beauty of this should be obvious, run one program rather than six.  I downloaded it back then when it was still beta and found it to be way too buggy for regular use, and forgot about it, but the 1.0 version has just been released and it looks a lot better. I'm quiting a bunch of apps and loading this up right now.

MobileWhack writes:

BlueFOAF is Python application for Linux boxes (or those similarly equipped) that scans your local friends and friends-of-friends from a see FOAF file, allowing you to associate them with Bluetooth devices in the vicinity. Scanning every few minutes, it builds a nice GUI buddy-within-bluetooth-range-list. Writes Edd Dumbill, it's creator: "It's a nice toy and might have some useful applications. Figure out when your boss is in the office. Find friends at a conference or in a bar."

The program is set to scan every 5 minutes (but you can speed that up if you want) and there's future plans for porting to smartphones like the P800.

Jerry Steel has been working on a script using the ATOM API to export photos from iPhoto directly into his Typepad blog. He's got a demo version working and is finishing up a shareware version now.