Palm & Linux ancedote

[Jason Clinton]

   Well, I've been playing around when I should have been working, again.

   This time, I've been playing with a Palm m100. I've never owned a PDA
   and I just received this one from someone that wasn't using it. The
   m100 has 2 mb of memory on board. For Linux, the excellent jpilot
   management software was a great first experience -- it can do
   everything the Palm official software can do, and more.

   While searching for software I found lost of great stuff including
   instructions on using AvantGo with Linux and your Palm. AvantGo allows
   you to download promo content and MapQuest maps to your Palm. Some
   other things I downloaded: SciCalc, a scientific calculator with
   mathlib; a world clock; a measurement converter; a file manager; a
   check book; a GNU encrypted password manager; a prioritization
   manager; a TV remote emulator and Plucker.

   Plucker deserves more time being covered than all of the others
   combined. First, a little history: the closest I've ever come to
   owning a PDA is a TI-92 Plus scientific calculator with 2mb of memory
   and the Motoral 68K processor. While the specs were nice and the
   qwerty keyboard was a plus, the TIOS leaves something to be desired.
   All of the applications and games written for TI calcs are written in
   assembly. This means a higher learning curve and less overall software
   available for download. For three months, I tried to find a way to
   efficiently convert documents stored in HTML or TXT in to a binary
   that a text viewer on the calculator could parse to no avail. Plucker
   is just that for the Palm.

   The Plucker text browser weighs in at 187kb and features fully
   customizable rendering and a very intuitive interface. It has a cross
   platform python-based utility that's very similar to wget's "web suck"
   ability. Basically, you give it an HTML file, a maximum spider depth
   and other restrictions and it goes, collects all documents and
   compiles them in to a zlib compressed binary for download to the Palm.

   I happened to have a copy of the excellent book Applied Cryptography
   on my system. I pointed plucker there: three minuets later I had all
   650 pages of the book in a 800kb binary. It's fully linked, includes
   all graphics and displays quite nicely.

   I'm impressed. I'm going to keep looking for the other books I own in
   HTML format. It would be nice to have some of the references I use on
   a weekly basis in my pocket all of the time... I'm going to need more
   memory, though. :)
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Just my three trits. GPG Finger Print:
7A81 0A2F 1ABE DC38 DABC  7C22 B2EE 2304 4A89 46BF