If you have played Doom 3 you have obviously seen the PDA.
When I showed a friend my newton a few years back it's the first thing he recognized it as. It does close to the same functions, mail, notes, voice recordings, etc. One thing the Newton lacks however is wireless security credentials.
I thought about this for a while and eventually commodity RFID became cheap. I bought a dozen blank 13.56mhz 1K cards off ebay for peanuts to play with and remembered the idea of a PDA acting as a key.
You could just tape the card to the inside of the screen cover and call it good but I wanted something a bit more secure. I thought it would be cool to shim the card inside the newton but I had no clue if it would fit. I was thinking perhaps I would have to melt the card down in acetone and extract the antenna/chip assembly and route it around the inside.
As it turns out there is a perfect spot near the top that can accomidate an RFID card as-is and it won't get in the way of the expansion knockout at the top should you of added a serial port there. The back of the Newton is thin enough that you can lay it down on a slotless RFID programmer and it should work no problem.
Again, the newton closes up no problem with the card in there, just don't lose this plastic thingamajig.
There you go. Your newton is now an RFID equipped PDA. sure you can't rewrite the card on the go unless you hack up some really weird PCMCIA writer and code it but simply wave your newton by your preferred RFID reader and you'll be able to enter your preferred secure area without ever having to show your card. It doesn't need to be for security either. If you wanted you could also shim in an RFID transit pass or even your bank/credit card. }
Might put a COMPASS pass in my Newton if the recharge kiosk doesn't require to put it in some sort of slot.
When I showed a friend my newton a few years back it's the first thing he recognized it as. It does close to the same functions, mail, notes, voice recordings, etc. One thing the Newton lacks however is wireless security credentials.
I thought about this for a while and eventually commodity RFID became cheap. I bought a dozen blank 13.56mhz 1K cards off ebay for peanuts to play with and remembered the idea of a PDA acting as a key.
You could just tape the card to the inside of the screen cover and call it good but I wanted something a bit more secure. I thought it would be cool to shim the card inside the newton but I had no clue if it would fit. I was thinking perhaps I would have to melt the card down in acetone and extract the antenna/chip assembly and route it around the inside.
As it turns out there is a perfect spot near the top that can accomidate an RFID card as-is and it won't get in the way of the expansion knockout at the top should you of added a serial port there. The back of the Newton is thin enough that you can lay it down on a slotless RFID programmer and it should work no problem.
Again, the newton closes up no problem with the card in there, just don't lose this plastic thingamajig.
There you go. Your newton is now an RFID equipped PDA. sure you can't rewrite the card on the go unless you hack up some really weird PCMCIA writer and code it but simply wave your newton by your preferred RFID reader and you'll be able to enter your preferred secure area without ever having to show your card. It doesn't need to be for security either. If you wanted you could also shim in an RFID transit pass or even your bank/credit card. }
Might put a COMPASS pass in my Newton if the recharge kiosk doesn't require to put it in some sort of slot.
