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Maybe I’m missing something but it appears that Leopard Mail removed the old preference to prefer the plain text version for incoming messages over fancy HTML formatting. It still seems to be implemented, it was dutifully transferred when I updated to Leopard, but I can’t see any way to actually set it in the Preferences window.

For anyone who wants to enable this feature you should be able to do it by opening a Terminal window then type the following command followed by a RETURN:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -int 1

or to turn it OFF:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -int 0

Hope this helps.

A new version of hotTunes, version 2.3, is available on the hotTunes page. The Info window is now displayed properly on Mac OS X 10.4.11 and I’ve also simplified the process of saving and loading custom hot key sets.

More vintage computer photos. This time it’s a Z80 processor based CP/M system that started life as another unfinished Franklin project. Bob Grieb was designing the hardware and I was developing the software for what would have been a portable CP/M machine. The cool thing was that we were so totally under the radar and had essentially complete control over all aspects of the design. We had a working hardware prototype at Franklin but the bulk of the software was written after we’d left.

A vendor at Trenton Computer Festival had purchased a large amount of Franklin stock but had no idea what some of it was. Bob discovered the bare CP/M PC boards, populated several and coded low level disk formatting routines while I wrote the boot firmware, CP/M BIOS, ZCPR and assorted utilities. The end result is actually a slick little CP/M machine that includes two floppy disk drives and a sizable RAM disk made from extra RAM banks.

I think I christened it the BoGUS board, as far as I can remember it stood for Bob Grieb’s Unusual System or something like that. I’m sure it’s in the source code somewhere.

Here are photos of Franklin Computer’s unreleased Apple II compatible computer dubbed the CX (code named “Kite”.) Not exactly a lightweight machine at about 25 pounds, the official term for it was “luggable” rather than portable.

Franklin went into bankruptcy before it shipped, but about 20 or so were built from available parts and given to some of the last people out the door, of which I was one.

I donated this machine to someone’s collection so I don’t have it any more.

Just a quick update on the state of the next version of “Remember?”. I’ve got several significant new features in the works:

• Extending the cut-off year for events from 2018 to 2134
• Safer occasion file updates
• Automatic occasion file backups

The coding for these changes is essential completed but will require extensive testing before I’ll let it at anyone else’s data. Occasion files that contain events beyond 2018 won’t be compatible with previous versions of Remember? and can’t be opened by them.

These are fairly extensive changes so I’m not sure when this version will be ready for public consumption. I’ll post a pre-release test version for the more adventurous after more testing.