[geeks] Palm III, not quite rescue material

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

About three years ago I bought a used Palm III for 50 NIS (about $10) and
gave it to my son, Paul, who had aspirations of being the next Bill Gates.

The Palm lasted about 2 weeks and ended up in a drawer. A few days ago I
found it and decided to try and "rescue" it. I asked Paul why he abandoned
it and got a surprisingly lucid answer from him. 

He stopped using it because it ran through a set of AAA batteries (about $3)
in a day or two. He simply could not afford to use it.

Times have changed and we have Google. What did I find, but a page
dedicated to fixing the cradle to prevent battery drain. Seems that leaving
it in the cradle used up the batteries 6 times faster than using it. 

So I fixed the cradle, downloaded the latest Mac software to use it and
started playing around with it. 

It almost works using my Wallstreet PDQ running Panther (10.3) and XPostFacto.
I have to go into the Palm Desktop and using the HotSync setup select a
baud rate for it to work. Even if I just deselect the one I'm using and
reselect it. This needs to be done after each boot, and wake up from sleep.

I use Mozilla's calendar as a coloabrative calendar. The calendar itself
lives on a WebDAV server and people who need to see or change it can use
Mozilla. It is pretty nice, it automaticaly downloads the calendar, merges
any updates as you make them and republishes it. So you can really have
multiple people update it and it won't break.

The bad news is that there is no Palm interface (yet?) for it. Apple's 
iCal often (it's supposed to be 100% compatible) will share a calendar
with Mozilla or any other similar application with WebDAV. But it works
by publisihing the calendar on your local machine, not by merging it
with the remote one. If you are not careful, you can lose a whole lot
of updates. :-(

I set it up so that iCal reads my calendar over WevDAV as someone else's
publihed calendar every 15 minutes. Anoying as it is not instant and
I need to leave iCal running (but minimized is ok), while I make changes
with Mozilla's calendar. 

The I can wait for the next timed update or force one with iCal and 
sync it onto the Palm. Now, if only I could get updates made on the Palm
back.

I also found a few eBook readers that are free, but the main Palm one is
$10. Trivial if you just bought one, a lot of money if you are out of 
work and are playing around. Does anyone know if you really need it or
can you download books in Palm format and read them with the free readers?

Any software recemondations? Keep in mind this is a 2meg ram version.

Does anyone have any interesting eBooks they want to share? 

Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance, 

Geoff.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem Israel gsm at mendelson.com 
IL Voice: 972-544-608-069  IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 
I may be an old fart, but I'm a high-tech, up to date old fart. :-)