Lets do the Timewarp again…As KFest winds down, fewer and fewer people make it to breakfast. To them, I salute you. Please wake me when you get back. These late nights, crazy days have taken their toll on me.
Friday’s first session was led by Ken Gagne. It was a continuation of last year’s session on popular Apple II games. Ken demonstrated such classics as The Tinies, Columns, Puyo-Puyo, Ant Wars, Silvern Castle and others. Gagne also shared strategies on how to win some of the more difficult games.
Sharon Knoblock obviously knows a great deal about Genealogy. Her informative session covered every aspect of how to get started in tracking ancestry using the popular software package “Reunion” for the Mac.
As KFest winds down, fewer and fewer people make it to lunch. To them, I… wait a minute, I did make it out of bed. Never mind.
Howard Katz provided an indepth, highly informative discussion on Identity Theft and what you can do to protect yourself, or what should be done in the event you are victimized. Howard pointed out that this is a growing epidemic that he himself has experienced.
UPDATE: Howard’s handout is available here.
A change in the schedule brought Bruce Baker up next. Bruce led an interactive session for attendees to discuss how they use their Apple II computers. The topics ranged from Appleworks to games to publishing and printing.
Tony Diaz next demo’ed Disk Maker 8, an 8-bit disk image application for ProDOS. DM8 works with most popular image formats and handily converts them back onto diskette. The software is still in beta, but appeared to be very stable. DM8 was written by Mark Percival. At the time of this write up, DM8’s status as shareware or freeware hadn’t yet been established.
Hans Franke, our only international attendee this year (from Germany) formally announced his newest product, the BastelCard prototyping board. The Bastel has been covered in a previous A2Central article and in Computer Collector Newsletter. The BastelCard is available now for $89.00 US Dollars, (about 75 Euros) plus shipping and handling. Contact Hans directly to purchase.
Hans also announced the Co-Slot Card, a switchable riser card for slot 7 inspired by the Pro-Slot card. The idea behind this card is to allow users to install 2 cards in slot 7 and switch between them (they are NOT active at the same time). This could be helpful in situations where one card may only be needed occasionally. Three versions are expected to be available, one each for the //e and IIGS, and a solder-it-yourself kit. Pricing per card was announced at $28.00 USD for KFest attendees, $35.00 afterwards plus shipping and handling. The Co-Slot card should be available by late August or early September 2005.
The next demo was by Sean Fahey (your humble reporter). I brought one of my nifty new Uthercard ethernet adapters installed in an 8MHz Zip Chipped Apple //e. The Uther was designed by Glenn Jones and is sold and supported through his website A2Retrosystems.com. Glenn’s initial batch of 24 cards is gone, but he’s taking orders for the next production run. In conjunction with Contiki, the Uthercard works very well. As of this article, a driver for Marinetti was in development but not yet available. Priced at $89.00 USD, it’s significantly less expensive to the only other shipping ethernet card, the LANceGS.
The rest of the demo involved Contiki, an open source, character-based network environment for memory constrained systems. Adam Dunkels developed Contiki, but Oliver Schmidt is responsible for the Apple II port. Contiki gives your Apple II+ (with 6502A), //e or IIGS equipped with Uther or LANceGS cards access to the Internet. Tools include IRC, Telnet, Web Browser, send-only e-mail, FTP and other functions.
Look for a more detailed look at the Uthercard and Contiki in an upcoming issue of the leading Apple IIGS print magazine, Juiced.GS.
The Annual Banquet Awards and Roast was up next. “Master of Ceremonies for Life”, Ken Gagne was this year’s victim, er… Roastee. No expense was spared, no joke too tacky or humiliation too sacred as he was not-so-gently raked over the coals by his good friends Tony Diaz, Ryan Suenaga, Geoff Weiss and via iChat, Eric “Sheppy” Shepherd.
KFest 2006 was announced for July 18th through 23rd, 2006, at Rockhurst. We’ve been enjoying this campus a lot. While we’ll always fondly remember our times at Avila, we aren’t looking back.
Afterwards, some of us went out to see Fantastic Four, and then made the pilgrimage to Dennys, as the IHOP was too full. By the time we returned around 2:30am, there was still serious geek-out activity going on.
What a great day…
Wish you were here!