New, well, new to me, shiny

[julesjones]

I was gifted with a replacement Psion 5mx by one of my writer friends who is no longer using hers. It gave me a bad moment by not turning on when I put rechargeables in, but as soon as I fed it some nice fresh alkalines it happily booted. I am happy to report that the keyboard is in much better nick than the two I already own, and I tested this by typing a couple of hundred words on the bus this morning. It's slow but usable, whereas the previous incumbent was getting too erratic on a couple of letters to be worth the bother of correcting bus-induced typos. I'm disinclined to use it at work itself, because I really should take a break from keyboards in the middle of the day, but it makes it ever so much easier to jot down a hundred words of notes on the bus.

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Alas, I have Sinned.

I have fallen for a Viliv N5. And lo, it is the reincarnation of the Psion 5MX as a palmtop PC running Windows 7. It's got the same rubbery coating as the original Psion 5, albeit more durable, the build quality is amazing, and it fits my old Psion 5 cases -- albeit slightly snugly (it has a tendency to stick inside the lid of the Proporta foam-lined hard-shell case).

I'm still provisioning the 32Gb micro-SDHC card I stuck in it, but it runs OpenOffice and Firefox acceptably well, Scrivener sluggishly (with one crash so far -- on the beta), and other stuff like Dropbox. Oh, and it has a SIM slot for data.

[julesjones]

Expect a demand to play with the keyboard the next time we're in the same con bar. :-)

A project I might try when I have more functioning brain cells is to use The Previous Incumbent as a test object for playing about with dual-booting Linux on a 5mx, essentially as a way of dipping my toe in the Linux water. (Since I was brought up on RSTS and VMS, any sub-species of *nix is a mystery to me.) If I get on with *that*, reports on dual-booting a Viliv will be of great interest, although I imagine your first task will be to strip the Spawn of Redmond from yours.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I imagine your first task will be to strip the Spawn of Redmond from yours.

Actually, no.

It can be hackintoshed, but there's no wifi support and I know from experience how dire OSX is on a netbook class processor with 1Gb of RAM.

Ubuntu is apparently rather better supported, but it still has a GMA500 graphics chipset -- read: a pain in the arse to configure.

And it only has a 32Gb internal disk, of which 8Gb is a recovery partition. (There is allegedly a 64Gb model, but it doesn't seem to be available in the UK.) That kind of puts the kibosh on dual-booting, and I'm not going to risk switching OS until I can do so to one with full hardware support.

So I've contented myself by upgrading to Win7 Home Ultimate (rather than sticking with Win 7 Starter) and installing CygWin, a UNIX command-line environment that runs under 32 bit Windows. When Dropbox finishes hauling in bazillions of files over wifi -- the one drawback is, it doesn't do 802.11n, so wifi feels sluggish (compared to a current generation Mac) -- I'm going to go through the crapware that came with it with fire and the sword (Adobe Flash can get lost, for starters) but then I'll probably leave it on Win7 until a decent turnkey Linux shows up.

[julesjones]

You *must* be in love if you're willing to leave Gatesware on it in order to use it. :-)

[neyronrose.livejournal.com]

It's nice that you got that as a present from a friend. I'm glad it's working for you.

[julesjones]

I'm very glad to get it. :-) I could have readily afforded to buy another one on eBay if necessary, but this way I knew that it would genuinely be in good condition.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad it worked! That was my only worry really because I haven't used it for such a long time. It never did get very heavy use so should be OK for a bit longer I hope.

[julesjones]

It's so nice to be able to type on the bus again, even if at slow speed. I love my Palm's handwriting recognition and can use it just about anywhere, but it does have the problem of if I forget to check the battery charge level, I can lose what I've put in. A Psion's much better for both speed and longevity of files.

I'm probably not going to use it much for fiction other than notes so I don't forget a good idea for the next couple of paragraphs, but it will be extremely useful for composing "what I thought of last night's Torchwood" stuff at a time of day when I have more than two functioning brain cells to rub together. (And that, together with notes on the Who play, was exactly what I used it for yesterday. :-)