Category: Technology

Revisiting the Handheld Issue

So while snaking through the security line on the way home from Miami, my knapsack/laptop case got dropped on the floor somewhat hard. Once I’d booted my laptop and discovered that the laptop was OK I promptly forgot all about the incident. I also forgot that my Tungsten C was in the bag and was not as padded as the laptop.

I powered the T|C up today and discovered this:

busted screen

Fortunately the T|C can still sync, so if I choose to pay $125 and go without my TC for about 2 weeks I can once again have a functioning T|C. Right now I’m not convinced it’s worth it.

However, I’m a bit annoyed by the news that, as rumored, Palm is indeed going to be making a Windows Mobile version of the Treo, and that’s affecting my judgment.

My Last Palm PDA?

As the semester has started to pick up steam, my calender has started to fill up with classes and study group meetings, due dates and reminders, as well as regular non-school stuff. Normally I’d be loading all of this into my trusty Tungsten C, but this semester I’ve been strangely reluctant to do so. In fact, for the first time in about a decade, I found myself yearning for a simple paper calender to write my appointments down in.

Then today, I found out that PalmSource, makers of the PalmOS, has been acquired by a Japanese software company. What exactly that means for people who care about PalmOS-based PDAs is unclear right now, but my guess is it doesn’t bode well.

My Tungsten C is a couple of years old now. It’s still chugging along quite nicely, but eventually it will need to be replaced. What’s going to still be on the market when I go to replace it? And will what’s out there meet my needs?

I’ve pretty effectively reduced my dependence on Microsoft products over the past year. Thunderbird has been working well as my e-mail client, and the Palm Desktop as the PC side of my PIM. In addition, Firefox has replaced Internet Explorer as my browser of choice, and iTunes does a fine job of managing my MP3s, although those apps are not going to be affected by my choice of PDA. If I were to buy a Microsoft-based PDA, I’d have to switch back to Outlook, and I never liked Outlook. I used it because I felt that I had to.

Microsoft’s PDA OS has improved significantly from what I saw when I used it back in 2000, but I’m just not very enthusiastic about the idea. Given the choice of getting an MS-based PDA and going back to Outlook, or going to a paper solution, paper looks like a much better choice.

There are other alternatives. By the time my Tungsten finally rolls over and dies, Apple may well have come out with an iPod capable of being an effective PIM as well as a music storage device. Or other new devices may come out that work for me. We’ll have to see.

UPDATE: Amid a bunch of self-congratulatory “I told you so’s”, David Berlind at ZDNet agrees that this is definitely not good news for the PalmOS.

Comment Spam Woes

Even with MT-Blacklist, the amount of time I have had to spend dealing with comment spam has been annoying lately, and apparently I am not the only one who’s having issues.

I am trying to decide how to manage the problem. SixApart says they are working on a solution but apparently it will involve upgrading my installation of MT and of MT-Blacklist. That’s a fair chunk of work on my part because moving off 2.x will entail not only the upgrade but a bunch of hours tweaking templates to put my customizations back in, and I am a little pressed for time these days.

I may try to implement the system Pandagon uses for its comments section, which is a patch that generates a random 6 digit number and requires users to type it in before a comment will be posted.

I can, of course, just turn off commenting entirely, but I really don’t want to do that.

Blogger hosed?

I can’t get through to any of the Blogger-hosted blogs in my blogroll today. I hope they get their issues straightened out soon, because web traffic to blogs is likely to increase significantly for the next week or so.