I'd estimate that about 90% of the traffic that gets referred to this website is due to the palm related posts. In particular, this post about getting Netfront working on a Palm TX gets the majority of hits. I didn't notice this when it came out, but it seems there is a much easier method of getting Netfront on your Palm than described in the previous post.

I was catching up on some palm news over at Tam's Palm and saw a post describing a very easy method of getting Netfront v3.1 on your Palm device... Basically everything in the forum post I had previously linked to has been automated in an installer package. See this thread (in German) for more details and a link to the installer.

okay, in case you didn't know... I'm a huge calculator dork. I have been one ever since my high school calculus teacher Ms. Henke required that all her students buy TI-81's for her class.

We used, and abused, these calculators all throughout highschool. We programed games into them, saved class notes and formulas as files in the computer's memory, etched our names (among other things) all over their outsides... These calculators, with their ability to create programs, save data to memory, and enter equations as expressions were a major inspiration for my current fascination with computers. Forget that you could use the thing for math homework...

Over the years I've owned several of Texas Instrument's calculators. After my TI-81, which I used throughout highschool, I got a TI-85 for college. This was the "engineers" TI calculator at the time. I used and abused this one for a good 3 years until I got the grand daddy of calculators at the time, the TI-92. I still have it sitting in my basement.

The TI-92 pretty much sealed my fate as a calculator dork. I mean, this thing is big. It has a full qwerty keyboard! There is no hidding the fact that you are either a math or engineering dork when you pull this out at the library. I really didn't care though.

After getting into upper level math courses, I found less need for calculators. I was no longer adding lots of numbers or having my calculator compute integrals for me, I was doing more abstract mathematics like trying to figure out properties of abelian groups.

When I quit grad school and started taking actuarial exams, my calculator obsession came back to life. Once again I was computing. A lot. The only problem I found was that only certain calculators were allowed in the exams...

This brings us to my current favorite calculator: the TI-30X IIS. It's thin enough to fit in your pocket nicely, has expression based equation entry on a two line display, has five variables that can have numeric values stored to them, and is solar powered. oh hell yeah. I abused my first one so bad I'm already on my second... by the way, If you haven't been able to tell yet, I'm a huge calculator dork.

Being such a big calculator dork, when I got my Palm TX, I started looking around for calculator software for it. I figured there had to be some crazy stuff out there seeing as how advanced the palm hardware is compared to most calculator hardware. Right now I think EasyCalc is about as good as it gets (which is actually pretty good). I'm still getting used to it...

Then today I found Robert Hildinger's project page. This guy is going to emulate the TI-89, the TI-89 Ti, the TI-92, and the Voyage 200 PLT within PalmOS. He has already done this for several HP Calculators. To make things even better, he is releasing his programs under the GPL. THANK YOU!!!

a bunch of links nobody will probably find interesting... well, we'll see...

• Mad City Broadband - Madison's city-wide wi-fi keeps getting closer; still not a lot of info on pricing...
• Secure Your Server - saw this on the o'reilly network today... and no, not the evil o'reilly... nice list of tips to secure a linux box.
• Using your Palm in Linux - tips on using your palm device in linux.
• NetSync in Linux HowTo - a HowTo on using pilot-link to do a NetSync with your palm.
• Another Palm/Linux Sync HowTo - name says it all... references pi-csd...
• ScummVM for PalmOS - again, name says it all... don't know what Scumm is? find info at this link.

some of what I didn't have time to read over lunch today... thought I might want these later.

more links of the day...

• Songbird, the open source iTunes killer - I really doubt it will kill iTunes anytime soon, but this is an excellent idea from the creators for Firefox. Open the format needed to get included within the player and anyone can play: underground bands, indie labels, podcasts... and with all the extensions that are sure to come out, this should be a very interesting piece of software. I liked this quote from the article in regards to Firefox: "everybody knows it's as much of a movement as a piece of software."
• Selling Palm by the pound - An interesting writeup about the future of Palm. The first time I used my Palm TX the user interface experience reminded me of the ease of use that came with using an Apple device: it just worked. This made me think that Apple should buyout Palm in order to enter the handheld market. I have to agree with the sentiments raised by the article though: if palm is going to be sold, it would probably be bought by a foreign company... look what happened with PalmSource.
• Palm T|X Software Compatibility List - the name says it all, nice list of TX compatible software. the author plans to keep the list up to date.
• Internet 'father' calls for neutrality law - okay, I'm really not sure what to say about all this; I really like the idea behind Cerf's proposed law. To me, it make's sense that I pay my ISP for access to the network and that once connected, I should be able to do whatever I want (within the law) and go whereever I want (without impediment). Yet, as things stand currently, if my ISP were to prevent me from going to certain websites, or wanted to make certain activities overly difficult (such as hosting a website), I really wouldn't have any recourse. In most area's of the US, including my own, the provider's have a legal monopoly over access to the network. Where my borther-in-law Joel lives in Chicago, the providers don't have a monopoly... and, likewise, he pays a fraction of what I know most people do for access. Municiple run internet access might solve some of this problem, but hosting personal websites using a wireless connection isn't exactly a reliable solution.

till next time...

trying something new today that I've seen on other sites: links I've been reading today...

• Linux on a Palm Treo 650 Gets Real - there are less boundries to getting linux working on a Palm TX then there are on a Treo so this could be an interesting project. As is said in the comments though, power saving features are probably a long way off still.
• Contrstruction Begins for Madison's Citywide Wireless - They said they will be done with downtown, the airport, and the Alliant Energy Center by the end of March; the entire city should be done a year later.

really looking forward to citywide wireless. still haven't heard much about pricing though...

A few days ago, before I wrote these 2 posts, I read a story over on PalmAddicts about an online petition. The petition was in regards to making the Netfront web browser available for PalmOS. At the time, all I knew about the Netfront browser was that it was created by the company that recently bought PalmSource (the software side of the Palm universe). Being pretty happy with the default web browser "Blazer", and realizing that these online petitions usually don't result in much, I ignored it.

This past Tuesday I was playing around with TCPMP and noticed that it was reporting my heap size as being around 2MB. I'm not getting any errors when playing movies, in fact they display great. I had read that you could find heap size information in TCPMP's "about" menu selection so I thought I'd check it out; they probably include this information in order to track down why you could be getting errors. My problem with TCPMP reporting only 2MB is that this is only half of what it's supposed to be. Initially this led me to believe that one of the (many) pieces of software I've installed in the past few days had a bug in it... after reading around online for awhile, I saw that a lot of TX users were having this same problem; the culprit being Blazer.

It seems that on startup/reset, however you want to look at it, Blazer grabs the amount of memory that it wants and won't "share" it, even when it's not running (see the fourth comment of this post). A post over at Tam's Palm explain's some software that tries to correct this behavior.

Thankfully there is a way to get Netfront on the TX. Having just read about this now, I really want to try it out. Not only could it save me some memory, but it sounds like Netfront is a much better browser. Big preemptive thanks to Tam and Dmitry if I can get this to work.

UPDATE 2006-10-03: Getting Netfront on your Palm is a lot easier than I previously thought. Please see this post for details.

just wanted to post a quick note...

I knew there were probably quite a few pieces of free software that were left out of my previous post. My buddy Cody wrote a post alerting me to one such title I hadn't heard of before and am now very eager to try out: Palm VNC 2.0. This little piece of software turns your Palm into a remote control of sorts for your computer; check out these screenshots for an example. I'm sure I'll be checking this one out, thanks man :)

Another piece of software that I didn't mention previously, but feel that I really should, is pssh. I haven't tried it out yet, but I can see myself getting a lot of use out of this one. It's terminal emulator software, very similar in an abstract sense to Palm VNC, but with out the gui. Anyone running a server should know how much use these kinds of tools can get.

One more before I go, and I'm not going to say much about it: Little John PalmOS or LJP for short. this screenshot should say enough.

Also, before I sign off I wanted to be sure that it is understood: in this post and the previous, when I say free software I mean both free as in beer and free as in speech. there is a difference.

I recently picked up a Palm TX with a 2GB SD card. I really wanted something that I could surf the web with, carry around some of my study materials (which are almost exclusively in pdf format), and still have room left over for a few albums. Not a problem at all with this thing... getting everything up and running out of the box was a piece of cake. The user interface was extremely easy to get used to: everything just seems to make sense. Also, I couldn't believe how small this thing was; much smaller than I thought it'd be. So far battery life is also much better than I expected. There were a few problems though, but they ended up being blessings in disguise...

For starters, it didn't come with pdf support right out of the box. Sure, Adobe's pdf software for PalmOS was on the disk that contained the window's desktop app, but it's complete crap. You have to run any pdf you want to view through a converter program on a desktop and then hotsync it onto your Palm. That's way too much work for such a simple task not to mention making online pdfs pretty much unreadable. In order to do so you would have to first download the pdf onto your desktop machine, use the converter program on the pdf, and then hotsync your Palm. Thankfully there is an open source solution called PalmPDF. This is a true pdf viewer built on the popular open source xpdf. It works exteremely well, exactly as you'd expect any true reader to behave. just another example of why open source software is so awesome... xpdf enabling PalmPDF.

Further proof of why OSS is so cool... The TX came with a nice picture viewer / video player, but I can't get the video player to play anything but the sample videos that it shipped with. In their defense though, they probably don't have the codecs built in for most of the stuff I'm trying to watch. Enter The Core Pocket Media Player or TCPMP for short. Awesome open source video, mp3, and vorbis player software; lots of codecs included.

Another essential piece of OSS for the Palm: FileZ. The Palm TX does not come with a file manager. This is more than likely due to the fact that all files on a Palm device are stored in the same base folder. With only 100MB of free internal memory, there isn't a lot you'd really be able to organize anyway. The problem comes when you have a large capacity storage card (say 2GB) that you have a lot of different document types on... FileZ handles filemanager duty very well. As an added bonus, it has an internal preference viewer, it gives you information about your battery, and it lets you know when you last hotsync'd (sp?).

The last piece of OSS for the palm I've discovered, and the one I want to play around with the most right now, is Plucker. This is pretty much an offline rss/html/ebook/text/??? viewer that converts "stuff" into a format that is easily viewable on palm devices. It's extremely open and well documented so playing around with it after I get Linux set up is going to be a lot of fun.

Eventually I'm hoping to be able to capture TV using my ATI AiW 9800 Pro and have it converted into a fairly compact format for TCPMP. This might be a problem because, as said before, ATI aren't cool when it comes to driver support and Linux. Thankfully, there are people working to correct this shortcoming. I'm also really looking forward to this city-wide wifi madison will soon be getting... until then, I'll be plucking away...

god that sounds stupid :P

it's really too bad that this device ships without some very essential (imo) software. I guess I'm glad it didn't do everything they way I wanted out of the box. If it had, I might not have found all these great pieces of software. Then again, maybe the fact that this software is freely available (and so good) is why it didn't come shipped with something similar. Oh well, really no loss here...

I'm writing this from my pda... Just checking out how easy this is. I just got a Palm TX a few weeks back and I'm still getting used to it. So far I really like it, but I'll talk more about it later.