Writing from a Palm m500 - Unofficial ROOPHLOCH entry?

2021-09-24

I know, I know, ROOPHLOCH stands for Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging Challenge. This is gemini so I'm going to call this an unofficial entry. Out of love and just for fun maybe we can call it a ROOGLOCH entry :-P. I'm outside on our back patio, a bird with a particularly pretty song serenading me, a battery operated fan keeping me cool and my little monochrome PDA. Outdoor, check. Off-grid, check. Goph..er Gemini, check. Challenge? Umm, this wasn't really that hard but..check?

So I just picked up a like new Palm m500 PDA bundle for chump change on ebay that included the PDA, a folding portable keyboard, case and a couple tiny (by today's standards) SD cards. Actually, when not dealing with media files these 128MB cards are more than big enough.

Currently having fun fiddling with various software. I've turned my TV on and off with the infrared port. A number of games have been installed and played briefly. Spending more time than I probably should mining the depths of old palm software sites and good ole archive.org for various applications that sound useful.

This is just going to be some initial thoughts but I want to use it for a while and see what sticks out to me and whether or not there is still a viable use case for a device like this now. Some things I have noticed so far are that good golly these things were/are quite useful despite the severe constraints. When you're forced by these constraints to cut all the extraneous fluff and bloat it takes very little in the way of resources to do a lot of the things we use computers for. I'm not going to go as far as saying we never should have moved on from this technology but I do think it could fill a large portion of usage if you want it to.

When I think about the things I do on a computer 80%, maybe even 90% or more of what I'm doing is text based. Reading and writing things is the bulk of it. Gaming and media you say? Palm OS games are plentiful and can still be quite fun despite the 20 year old display technology and 33MHz CPU. Best for casual and slow paced gaming but I'll grab a gaming handheld if I want something more involved. They can view images too which may not be all that useful at this point at least on this monochrome model.

A PDA's primary purpose is being an organizer so unsurprisingly it is very well suited to managing your contacts, calendar, todo lists and things of that nature. All text based functions. Thanks to Palm OS being so popular in its heyday there is a lot of other useful software out there too. Unit converters, budgeting apps, ebook readers and all manner of things. A great little program I found is CardTXT which is a very nice text viewer and editor. It is very responsive and has all the features I can imagine needing in a basic text editor. Combined with the Palm portable folding keyboard it is quite a good experience for writing.

I am writing this very post on this setup now out on my patio in the sun with no backlight and it is glorious. Instead of trying and failing to outshine the sun it says hey, you go ahead and do the work for me. The other great thing about this is that it goes to sleep on its own and really sips the battery in general. So I can leave it setup to write and then come and go without worry that I'm draining the battery. Just a tap on the keyboard and it wakes up instantly and I'm typing again. I'm not sure what the true battery life will be but so far I've been really playing with it a lot since taking it off the charger 24 hours ago and the battery gauge has yet to fall from completely full.

This has not only been a fun nostalgia trip for me but also a great way to get thinking about computers and how we could be doing what we need with so much less energy and impact on the planet. Our modern computers have a place but I think we've crammed them into a lot of places that they are unnecessary.

You will definitely be hearing more about this in the near future once I spend some more time with it. That's all for now.

Photo of my Palm m500 docked to the portable keyboard

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