As you know I am taking with me a lightweight computer with all the necessary bits & pieces to blog on the walk. The equipment list I need to do this is set out below:
Palm PDA with 2Gb expansion card in aluminium case.
Palm Wireless Folding keyboard (2 x AAA battery powered)
Palm Charger
Palm Sync cable in case I need to download it on to a PC enroute.
Mobile phone (for when no WiFi connection)
Mobile phone charger
The Palm keyboard is a little miracle of engineering, and looks like this, folded out:
Folded up, it looks like this:
The PDA (Palm TX) sits on it like this:
Another view:
All folded up it looks like this together:
The PDA needs to go in an aluminium case for protection, so the bundle looks like this!
The whole shaboodle together with it's charger and sync cable along with my phone & its charger looks like this!
The all up weight of that lot all together is 795 grams or 1 lb 12 ozs in real money.
Not too bad at all! So with a bit of luck I will be able to blog away most evenings where there is WiFi or a mobile phone signal.
Page takes too long to load. 106 seconds on a broadband connection. Images very slow.
ReplyDeleteJust to let you know.
Hi Anon!
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for that - Novice blogger here - so I am going through the pictures trying to put smaller file sizes in their place.
Call back & let me know if I have succeeded?
Thank you!
Hi Alan.
ReplyDeleteMmm, your PDA looks excellent - a much sleeker version of the ancient Palm m125 that I took on my LEJOG walk! Colour screen, landscape mode, loads of RAM, wireless connection to your keyboard, wifi... lovely. :-)
Are you using a word processor or any other software (mapping, that sort of thing?). I'm going to upgrade mine one of these days, and it would make sense to get a walking-friendly model to replace my old workhorse.
By the way, the page loads fine for me, but I am on an 8Mb broadband, so it should...
Mark
Hi Mark
ReplyDeleteGreat to see you. (Note for readers who don't know - Mark did his Lejog a few years back and has an excellent site describing all you ever need to know about Lejog! - I will put up a link to it!)
I have just got my new Anquet GB software, and loaded it up onto the laptop - from there I will try to get it onto the PDA - but I won't be using the mapping on on the walk - I reckon it will gobble up the battery too quickly - and I like the challenge of using just a bit of paper and a magnetic needle to get me from end to end.
I am still in the very early days of working out how to get everything onto the blog from the Palm at the moment. So far I have just typed on the blog while online - it will be much easier to type it up on a Word document, or whatever software the Palm runs best with, and then upload it to the blog.
I have yet to sort picture posting out from the Palm - but I reckon I could be halfway there now as I now have a camera with the same SD card as the Palm, so all I need to fathom out now is how to get them onto the blog from the Palm! (You can see from this that I really am a techie virgin!)
All this must be sorted! As must the route!
However, if this is the sum of all my worries, life isn't so bad!
Hi Alan
ReplyDeleteI see the problem with your images being too big. I'm on broadband and some of them still take a little time to appear.
I opened a couple in Photoshop and the actual pixels are 640x480 and the blog software is constraining that to 400x300. If you could resize to 400x300 before uploading the files, they would be less than half present size.
Hi Des
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for that - I just need shoving in the right direction now & again. I will try to resize them in the morning and then it should load a whole lot quicker.
Alan
Hi Alan,
ReplyDeletedid you also consider instead of carrying a mobile phone plus a pda to carry only one unit like e.g. a Pocket Loox T830 which does both jobs? One item less to carry, only one charger etc. Danger is of course if you break it you loose your pda, phone, MP3-Player etc. all at once...
Roman
That looks like quite a piece of kit, Roman. How come I always find out about stuff like that after I have gone out and.......
ReplyDeleteAnother nice one I have subsequently found is the Palm Treo. The only downside to these two devices is the very awkward keyboard - I went with the Palm TX as I could use Palm's fold out keyboard - extra weight, I know, but easier to type on. Having the phone incorporated looks very good though.
Thanks Roman
Alan
You are right Alan, the usability of the build in "keyboards" in the Smartphones tends to be akward whereas the one from the Palm Treo is considered to be one of the best but you surely don't want to use either of those for lengthy typing. Nevertheless companies like Thinkoutside produce fold out keyboards for almost all models available if they have either Bluetooth or IR incorporated.
ReplyDeleteAnother alternative quite popular in the US but workable across the world is the unit from Pocketmail. It is intended to write text and send them via acoustic coupler of any landline and mobile phone. Runs with AA batteries forever and is pretty usuable as long as you are only interested in sending plain texts with no attachments.
I agree...a lot of options and still not the perfect combo around..;-)
Roman