Posts from February 2006

So, I finally get my pictures up, and not even a week later, my Palm dies. Yes, dies. After attempting to power the damn thing on, it spontaneously reset. Now, I’ll admit, this isn’t the first time this has happened (stability has been… okay. Not what I expected, but I’m guessing about average), so I took it in stride and waited for it to boot back up. But, instead of booting… it just hung at the Palm Powered logo. :/

Well, the next natural step was to perform a hard reset, which should reformat the NVFS memory and restore it to it’s factory defaults (I’ve done this once already, for other reasons, so it wasn’t an unusual procedure to me). Things seemed to work… it asked me to confirm the hard reset, to which I said ‘yes’, and then… it hung at the Palm logo again. Piece of shit.

Of course, my next move was to search Google and see if there was a solution. Thus, I ran across this forum discussion where a person described the exact same symptoms. The consensus? Get the unit returned. ASAP. And don’t return it to Palm, if possible, lest you be stuck with a refurbished unit.

So there you have it, my first Palm adventure. It was going so well. I’m just glad I didn’t become deeply reliant on it before this all happened.

Anyway, the next step is to head to Future Shop and see if I can get this damned thing replaced with a new unit (shouldn’t be a problem, but we’ll see). OTOH, if they attempt to get me to return it to Palm, I may just tell ‘em to fuck off and give me my money back.

Ugh, finally home. It was a good trip, I have to say… nice and relaxed for a change, rather than heavily regimented. And I got to spend money. Too much money. :)

And speaking of spending money, I’ve finally got some shots of my new toys. First off, I have a couple pics of my Palm:

Left-to-right, there’s a shot of it off. Second, an image of Blazer (the packaged web browsr) rendering this website. Lastly, we have ScummVM playing The Secret of Monkey Island. Pretty neat, eh? :)

Next, I have a pic of my newest toy, my snazzy earphones:

After using them for the drive back, I gotta say: awesome purchase! The noise isolation alone makes them worth every penny. Heck, for a while I just used them as standard earplugs. With the foam inserts, they drop high- and mid-range frequency noise dramatically (Shure’s claims are around 15db noise reduction), while still making it possible to listen to conversations when the music is off.

With the music on, the sound is excellent. High- and mid-range frequencies are really nicely articulated, and, with the plugs properly installed, the bass is surprisingly good. And I’m still amazed at how little power I need to drive these things. They literally require half the volume, as compared to my cheap Sony buds. This is, I suspect, a combination of noise isolation, relatively low impedence, and significantly reduced leakage (due to the plugs and the fact that the drivers are completely enclosed).

The gist: these are, hands down, the best pair of buds I’ve ever used. Very sweet.

Well, as it turns out, apparently I have money to burn, so on day 3 of our fateful trip, I bought myself a new pair of earphones. 130$ earphones. Though, I must admit, they are mighty sweet!

So, what did I buy? A pair of Shure E2Cs! Sound fancy? Well, damnit, they are! They’re referrered to as canal-phones, because, rather than just sitting outside the ear like standard buds, they actually fit into the ear canal. Moreover, they come with sleeves which cause them to act like ear plugs. The result is excellent sound reproduction (including bass, unlike typical buds) while providing incredible noise isolation (at low volume I can’t hear a conversation next to me), meaning you can drive them at lower volume, thus protecting my hearing. Good stuff!

Of course, that ain’t all. Lenore picked up a pair of sweet Sony cans for 100$ which sound incredible (though, I have to say, my Shures are pretty comparible). So, yeah, it’s been a decadent trip! And, tomorrow, the drive back… which should be a good chance to test the sound isolation capabilities of my new earphones.

Location	Granville Island (this entry was started in a store called Rhinoceros)
Weather	Cool (but not -20C) and sunny

Image of the Day:

Apparently it was cold enough today for water to freeze in the ponds down around Granville Island, hence the ducks appearing to walk on water.

Anyway, we spent the afternoon wandering around the island, generally wasting time (woo woo, more shopping!), giving me further opportunity to fiddle about with my PDA and invade more WAPs (allowing me to start this entry).

Speaking of which, the PDA is generally working out well. I’ve had some odd stability issues here and there (eg, Pocket Tunes now freezes up whenever I play anything, hence me switching to AeroPlayer), but I expected that, to some degree. Other than that, it’s been good. And, if anything, it’s provided plenty of distraction (not to mention a useful blogging tool).

The number of unprotected WAPs never ceases to amaze me. Here I am, blogging from a diner in North Vancouver on someone’s unprotected AP (yes, I know, questionable behaviour), and, frankly, loving it! If this keeps up, ‘net access will be ubiquitous in no time!

Man, I just keep finding cooler and cooler stuff for my Palm. First up, ScummVM. This thing lets you play those old LucasArts games, like The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, etc, on your Palm! As if I don’t have enough games, now I have more! I’ll have to take some pics of some games running on my Palm… it’s pretty sweet, and with the bright colour screen, they look gorgeous.

On a more esoteric front, I came across OmniRemote. Believe it or not, it turns your Palm into a fully programmable IR remote control! Sound useless? Well, for me, it probably is, but it’s still pretty neat… although, it does have some issues that make it impractical for day to day use (button presses are kind slow for no discernible reason, and, for some reason, it sends a double-power signal to my cable box when I hit the power button).

Ugh. It’s 1:18am, and I’m only now finally ready to put my Palm down and leave it alone for a bit. Stupid thing, being as cool as I expected! A quick run-down of the apps I’ve installed:

• AeroPlayer - Audio player.
• brightnessFix2 - Hack to remove lower limit on screen dimming.
• CliFrotz - ZCode interpreter.
• Filez - File Manager.
• IBM JVM - A Java Virtual Machine.
• Little John - Multi-system emulator.
• MemUnfragment - A hack to reduce fragmentation of the TX’s memory.
• NetChaser - 802.11 scanner (for wardriving… good times. :)
• Opera Mini - Opera’s java-based mini-browser.
• PalmFiction - E-Book reader.
• PalmPDF - A nice PDF viewer based on Xpdf.
• PalmVNC - VNC client. You’d be surprised how useful this has been, already.
• PilotGOne - Go software.
• pssh - SSH client.
• Quick News - An RSS reader.
• SgfMan - Go game record manager.
• SmbMate - Windows file share browser (extremely handy, and I found an actual freeware copy).
• SoftwareUpdate - Tool for installing software via URL.
• Sudoku - Name says it all.
• TCPMP - Video player.
• UDMH - Another memory hack (makes SD storage look like RAM).

Yeah. All that. And that doesn’t include the time I spent acquiring stuff to play on Little John, populating my SD card with music, copying over zcode files, the odd e-book (including Shape Up and Alice in Wonderland), and lord knows what else. I think it suffices to say that, thus far, I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it. It should be interesting to see how long the novelty lasts. :)

Anyway, in the next couple days I’ll see about posting some pictures and initial impressions (which are, BTW, quite favourable, by and large). Meanwhile, I really gotta go to bed… unlike Lenore, who’s psychotic enough to try and watch the Olympics when they start broadcasting live at 2.

My Palm has arrived! Definitely speedy, since I placed the order on Saturday, leaving Monday to prep order, Tuesday to ship, Wednesday morning to update the damn order tracking website, and Thursday at lunch time for arrival.

So now I wait for it to charge. What then? I have no idea… though I really should be doing something work-related. Maybe I’ll figure out how to check my email or browse the web.