Thursday, October 30, 2003

Things change fast - it's technology! (Or me asleep at the blunt edge)

Suddenly I woke up to find EruWare has changed its name to Athena America.
Okay, to explain - Eruware was/is the maker of the first Compact Flash driver for the Sony Clie Handheld NX60/70 series of handhelds. These handhelds come with a "WiFi" slot, which is actually a CompactFlash slot, but no drivers for CF Cards (because of course Sony would want you to use Memory Sticks)

According to PDANews24 one of the original developers of the Eruware CF driver split from Eruware and started his own company called PDAscent, Inc. , and released his own product, called CF Magic. CF Magic is available at PalmGear.

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Still catching up

I've sorted out my problem with HotSync after upgrading to Windows XP. I had been logging onto my PC as Administrator, and it took a while to figure out how to do that again. All I had to do was disable the "Welcome Screen", and Windows XP logon became like Windows 2000.

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Catching up with technology (or lagging behind...)

(Another interruption to my exciting series "Handhelds I have owned, loved and hated")
Well, I've finally upgraded my home PC from Windows 2000 to Windows XP Professional. My excuse up until now was that I would wait until I bought a new PC, as my current one is underpowered (only a 500Mhz AMD K6!). With the impending upgrade to Windows XP (from Windows 98) at work, it seemed a good time to try Windows XP at home.

So far, SplashId seems to lost my registration information in the Desktop app, and most of my HotSync conduits have disappeared, but we shall see...

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

A (real) Palm handheld

I never expected the M505 to be a perfect handheld, not after all my research.
It had its quirks, and was especially susceptible to static electricity while in the cradle. Quite often I would accidentally "zap" it (and groan), then I would have to do a soft reset before I could HotSync again. There was also the irritating little bug with the Beam Receive setting. It seemed to have a mind of its own, and would reset itself to "On", which meant that the battery charge would decrease quicker than normal. At first I used a Hack (IrOff) to overcome this problem. The problem finally got fixed when I upgraded the OS from 4.0 to 4.1 (which introduced a few minor quirks of its own).
Despite these quirks, I really liked the Palm M505. Its small size and form factor was just right. There had been a lot of complaints on newsgroups about its screen. Even after the bright screen of the iPaq, the screen of the Palm M505 was not that bad. The main thing I had to remember was that the better the external light, the easier the screen was to read. In dim light, when it became difficult to read, it was just a case of turning on the backlight. Pictures really looked good in 65000+ colors, and so did web pages in AvantGo.
The M505 was the first Palm I had bought which shipped with Documents to Go. Being able to view and edit Word Documents on a handheld was great. I did not use the Spreadsheet part much though, because I needed the memory for other programs.
One of the first accessories I bought was a SD card. I used the freeware version of BackupBuddyVFS to backup my Palm inbetween HotSyncs. Once I had put in the SD card, it stayed in the slot - it was just to small and easy to lose once it was removed.

Saturday, October 04, 2003

Back and talking to computers

(Another interruption to my exciting series "Handhelds I have owned, loved and hated")

Back from my vacation I decided to chat to some computers:

Jabberwacky

And a web shrink:

Dr. Werner Wilhelm Webowitz's Office