MICROPENDIUM Microreviews for February 1996 by Charles Good The three products I am reviewing this month are closely related. If you use one of these products you should seriously consider obtaining the other two. --------------------- REMIND ME! CALENDAR by R.F.W. Enterprises There are only a few TI products I review that I actually use on a very regular basis. Remind Me! Calendar is one of them. It is a commercial supplement to Remind Me!. Remind Me! is a public domain program that is the best appointment calendar program there is for the 99/4A and Geneve. The Calendar is a template of already entered daily Remind Me! notes and monthly notepads , a whole year's worth. Included are holidays, famous people's birthdays, highlights of United States history, and other neat stuff. Each month's notepad includes the month's holidays (including some you may have never heard of), and the gemstone and flower typically associated with that month. On the day in which each state was admitted to the union you are given the year when this happened along with the state's bird, tree, and flower. At the lower right corner of each day is the astrological sign for that day. Scattered throughout is interesting information about all United States Presidents. To use Calendar you boot Remind Me! which comes as a freebe on the Calendar disk. If you don't have a clock card you then manually input the current month. If you do have a clock card in your 99/4A or if you run Remind Me! on a Geneve then the current month and day are automatically selected. Once a month and day are selected Calendar notes for the entire month are then automatically loaded into memory and you see a display of the month's calendar with the cursor on the current day. Just press to see the day's notes and reminders (they are different for each day of the year) or press the space bar to see the monthly notepad, which is the same for all the days of a particular month. Use the arrow keys to move the cursor to any other day of the month and see the notes for these other days. You can also back out of the current month and load in a calendar display and notes for any other month of any year. At any time you are free to add your own personal daily reminder and monthly notes to those presented to you by Calendar, if necessary overwriting Calendar's notes to make room for your own. From within Remind Me! these changes are easily saved back to disk. The Calendar is set up for 1993, but since most of its information is not 1993 specific so you can use it for any year. A famous person's birthday is on the same date in all years, not just in 1993. Just use the Calendar files as a template, renaming the 12 files from "1/1993" to "1/1996" etc for each of the 12 months of the current year. Here are the Calendar's daily and monthly notepad for February 28, the day many of you will receive in the mail the issue of Micropendium containing this review: --Notes for February 28. Birthday: Bernadette Peters 1948. Note: Republican party founded 1854. Note: Indians attack Deerfield Mass. 1704, kill 40 carry off 100. Pices. --Monthly notes for February. Stone-Amathyst. Flower-Violet. Holiday: National Freedom Day 1st. Holiday: Australia Day 1st. Holiday: Boy Scouts Day 8th. Holiday: Lincoln's Birthday 12th. Holiday: St Valentine's Day 14th. Holiday: President's Day 15th. Holiday: Washington's Birthday 22nd. Holiday: Ash Wednesday 24th. All of the above birthdays and notes are valid for any year. Some of the holidays, like President's day and Ash Wednesday, are not on the same days in February 1996 that they were in February 1993. Remind Me! is public domain, but the Remind Me! Calendar files are commercial. They cost $7 including postage from R.F.W. Enterprises. The Calendar files come on a flippy SSSD disk complete with hard copy and on disk documentation and the Remind Me! files. -------------------- MBP REAL TIME CLOCK CARD by Cecure Electronics. Modern personal computers have built in battery operated clocks. Now 99/4A owners can have this feature too. The MBP board is a public domain design that includes the potential capability of analog to digital conversion along with a real time clock. Almost no software exists to take advantage of the MBP's analog to digital capability, but there are a number of 99/4A applications that make use of a clock, if it exists. Cecure manufactured a bunch of MBP boards and originally sold them as kits. Now the company and has built up the remaining boards as fully functional 99/4A computer clocks. Just add a button battery from Radio Shack, drop Cecure's MBP card in your P-box, and you have a very accurate and useful computer clock. Most software that can utilize a Bud Mills Services' Pgram clock or a CorComp triple tech clock will work with Cecure's MBP clock. In my opinion the most useful such software is Remind Me! and the Remind Me Calendar described above. Boot also recognizes these clocks and will display the time of day on the Boot start up if a clock is in the P-box. You can also access the MBP clock from either Basic by using a series of CALL PEEKs and CALL LOADs. This is not as convenient as with a Pgram or triple tech clock which can be accessed as device CLOCK. With these other cards you can OPEN #1:"CLOCK" and then INPUT #1 the time of day, day of the week, and date. Software is provided with the Cecure MBP clock that allows you to set the clock, display the time and date in basic command mode, print disk catalogs and disk labels with time and date stamps, and do some other potentially useful things. You also get some hard cover docs with the Cecure MBP card, but you can ignore most of them. The docs describe how to build the kit which Cecure has already built for you, and give suggestions for analog to digital hardware and software. I understand that such TI hardware and software exists, but I have never seen any of it. You can ask Cecure for details. What you can't do with any 99/4A clock is automatically time and date stamp files as you create them. The Geneve and other PCs have this feature. The 99/4A doesn't. The inability to do this is due to basic limitations of the TI, Myarc, and Corcomp disk controller's DOS. The DOS is in rom and cannot be easily altered. With other clock cards that respond to device name CLOCK it IS possible to manually time/date stamp all your text files, but you can't do this with the MBP clock. To do this with other types of clock cards including the Pgram and Triple Tech clocks, from any version of TI Writer type LF (load file) and press . Specify 0 1 1 CLOCK for the file name (zero, space, one, space, one, space, "CLOCK"). This will put the current time and date in line #0 at the beginning of the document you already have in the word processor's edit buffer. When you save this document to disk the time/date notation is saved too as line #1 of the document. If you don't already have a clock in your 99/4A I highly recommend one. Combined with the other software reviewed by me this month, a clock card can be very practical. Triple tech cards are no longer in production. Only limited numbers of new Pgram cards remain unsold, and they are kind of expensive if all you want is a computer clock. Cecure sells their MBP clock for $34.95 plus shipping. -------------------- REMIND ME! by John Johnson This software was reviewed many years ago in Micropendium and I have partially described its operation in my reveiw above of Remind Me! Calendar. I feel the urge to add additional comments. Remind Me! is one of the most useful practical day to day applications ever written for the 99/4A or Geneve. Because of its speed and ease of use it is, in my humble opinion, the best calendar and daily reminder software I have seen run on ANY type of computer. The key to a good computer calendar and daily reminder program is speed. What you are competing against are notes stuck to the refrigerator with magnets or scribbled on a monthly calendar hanging on the wall, or hand written entries in a calendar notebook carried in a purse or pocket. Seed is the key! How long does it take to boot up a computer calendar reminder program? If it is quicker and easier to make a written note of an upcoming event in one of these paper and pencil ways, or to find the location of a paper that contains written notes about what is supposed to be happening today, then you are not going to use a computer calendar reminder program. My 386DX40 takes what seems to be an eternal amount of time to get to its first menu. When I turn on the PC it checks its memory, 3 times. Then it boots MS-DOS, loads its hi-mem memory manager and checks its memory yet again. Then it loads all its device drivers and sorts them out into obscure memory locations so they won't interfere with each other. These device drivers include the VGA video, mouse, sound card, cd-rom, and modem. This whole process takes 65 seconds just to get me to the first menu. It then takes an additional 10 seconds or so before my PC's calendar daily reminder program is loaded. It is much quicker to glance at a note stuck on the refrigerator. On my 99/4A system I have a clock card and Remind Me! on a Horizon ramdisk. From a cold boot takes me 15-18 seconds to turn on my 4A, load Funnelweb from the ramdisk, load Remind Me! from a Funnelweb central menu, and pop up on screen the reminders for the current day of the current month. This can be done almost as fast from a cold boot by selecting extended basic with Remind Me! and its monthly reminder files on a disk in DSK1. It takes 35 seconds this way, still much faster than it takes to fire up my 386. It is often said that the 99/4A is slow compared to modern computers. I guess it depends on how you define speed. The 4A's ability to quickly boot Remind Me! is a major reason this software is so practical. Remind Me! can be used without a clock card and without Remind Me! Calendar. However the three products together make a winning combination. Just as 80 column Funnelweb by itself justifies the hardware upgrade to an 80 column TI system, so Remind Me! and Calendar by themselves justify the purchase of a clock card for the PE box. Remind Me! is public domain. If you don't already have it send me $1 (for the disk and postage) and I will mail it to you on a SSSD disk complete with on disk documentation. ----------- ACCESS: R.F.W. Enterprises (for Remind Me! Calendar). 111 Oakridge St., Chicopee MA 01020. Phone 413-593-6951. Cecure Electronics (for MBP clock card). P.O. Box 22, Muskego WI 53150-0022. Order phone 800-959-9640. Info voice phone 414-679-4343. Fax 414-679-3736. Charles Good. P.O. Box 647, Venedocia OH 45894. Phone 419-667-3131. Internet cgood@osulima1.lima.ohio-state.edu or good.6@osu.edu