This used to be my go-to toy. It’s my Palm Zire 71, purchased new. It has the neatest camera ever. You slide the front up and the camera lens is exposed. It took pictures just the right size for webpages and you could be pretty sneaky about taking a picture. I have a 2gb SD card that I backed up all my programs on, and saved some free books and an album of music. I had a prepaid phone at the time, one of the green screen kinds, so I didn’t have anything that was always connected to the internet.

My Palm was like a time capsule of 2008. I had it with me when Jeffrey went into the ICU. I did not have any way to charge it. My co-worker was supposed to bring the charging cradle and never did. It stayed dead until I was finally able to get back to work after Jeffrey died. It left me distrusting digital solutions and I made sure that I always had a paper backup of important phone numbers somewhere. I just put it away. And I moved on to smart phones. But I really don’t enjoy them very much. I do use them a lot for the internet. I picked up an iPhone SE as I don’t really care for the large screen phones. I’ve noticed that they’ve re-written iOS for the larger phones now and it’s getting harder to type accurately. I’d go with something else, but I’ve never cared for Android. I’ve got two Kindles and an Android tablet. I just am not impressed.

I have a couple of Tungstens I picked up second hand, an E and a C. They both work. They don’t have cameras. The C can connect to wifi but can only use WEP encryption. And it has a keyboard. I like Graffiti a lot and I’m fast. I have a program called Teal Script that will let you use old style Graffiti letters and you can train it to recognize exactly how you write. I haven’t really done anything with the Tungstens, but have charged up one of them sometimes. I didn’t have a good charger for the Zire or the E. I got the wild idea to get charging cables last week, just for fun. I got the Zire working, but needed to get the backup program off the card to reinstall everything.

And that lead to great fun. I have a Thinkpad that runs Linux. I’ve used Palms on Linux before, but couldn’t get the conduit to work. I have an HP running Windows 7. I installed the Palm Desktop, but the conduit was 32 bit. There is a 64 bit driver another company wrote, but I needed to track it down. So..I pulled out my iBook G4, with OS 10.4 installed. I installed Palm Desktop. And I was able to sync and get the backup program installed. It’s not pretty because the conduit crashes regularly. But it worked. And when it restored from backup, it was all there. My carefully worked out system of memos in Pedit and Memoleaf. My copy of Bejeweled still works (and I keep playing it just to be sure!) I have used a LOT of Palm software and I have registrations for the programs I used most. I reinstalled a couple of them. I especially wanted to use Teal Auto again. We want to track mileage on the truck. (I can do this in Quik Budget too, but Teal Auto has nicer reports.) I found a copy of Carla Emery’s Checklist for Homesteaders, which doesn’t seem to be online any more. (I haven’t checked archive.org for it.) It has been an interesting experience.

I’m in the process of archiving and purging a lot of the old stuff and adding new addresses and memos. I am carrying my iPhone and Palm. I’ve taken a few pictures with the Palm but they aren’t as high resolution as the iPhone. I transferred a few new pictures over to the Palm and they look great. I even picked up a second hand Zire as a backup. I think I’m going to keep using this. So here are a few thoughts: I like writing much better than using my fingers. I can be more precise and I think faster when I’m writing than when I am tapping things out on the iPhone. I’m a fast typist, but you don’t really type on a smart phone. Steve Jobs was wrong. Styluses work much better. The Palm software community was amazing and some of the programs still blow me away. I wish Pedit was on another platform. It is such a great text editor. One of the lessons I learned was to use text files. It’s a format that doesn’t change and can be read on any platform. Pedit even has a scripting language. I’ve forgotten most of what I learned, but still have a few scripts I can mess around with when I have more time.

I’m actually enjoying my time off the internet. If I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep, I can play a quick game of Bejeweled now. And, I set an alarm on my Palm for my doctor’s appointment. I’d forgotten that my alarm tone is the Canteena music from the original Star Wars. I’m still carrying some paper with me and I am still using my iPhone. It’s just nice to have obsolete technology to mess around with for a change. And I like using my old iBook. I should upgrade it to OS 10.5 one of these days. The problem is that old technology that uses the internet is the tech that is obsolete first. When you can’t find a browser to use, it’s dead.

Lon’s birthday today! I hope he has many more.