Palm OS PDAs Part Deux

2023-04-21

Capsule Update Announcement

I did a big update to my Palm OS apps page. Quite a few new apps and games have been added.

Recommended Palm OS Software

Using a Palm OS PDA for real

Were you to scroll down a bit to my older gemlog posts you'd find some posts about my Palm m500 PDA. You can also go to my Retro Computing section in my capsule and read some of my thoughts on PDAs or find all of my favorite Palm OS software that I mentioned above. I love PDAs and Palm OS PDAs specifically. I used my m500 pretty much daily for quite a while back in 2021. For probably 6 months or so I used it intensively as part of my daily routine. While I did kind of trail off from using it daily I never stopped using it completely. Probably on average I would grab it once or twice a week for playing a game in bed in the evening or plugging it in to the slim keyboard out on the porch to write a gemlog post or work on smolZINE.

Well for unknown reasons I got a hankerin to work the m500 back into my daily usage. What can I say, I'm a sucker for Palm OS PDAs. So I'm giving it another go round, this time by swapping my wallet out for the Palm in a wallet case. This way I don't have to carry another thing with me. My wallet just got a little thicker but gained a lot of utility. I'm still deciding what exactly I want to do with it in regards to hotsyncing things back and forth from a computer. Importing my cardDAV contacts to the Palm is pretty well figured out and my contacts don't change very often anymore so I'm thinking I'll leave that as a manual process. The time I'd spend getting a likely finnicky script to automate syncing between the Palm and my nextcloud server and phone is probably not worth it. I would like to get some sort of daily or weekly gemini digest and some webpages setup to sync to the Palm for offline reading. I'm currently mucking around with pyplucker and my poor bash scripting abilities to see what I can get working for that. The Palm is pretty great for quickly jotting down todos and notes, however, syncing them between the PDA and computers is I think unnecessary for my usage. 98% of the time I just need to jot something down or add a todo item to my list and reference it later. Getting the text of a note to the computer is just not something I need to do very often. Having my PDA on me all the time covers 98% of what I do without any syncing so I think I'll leave it at that. On occasion when I want to do something on the computer with the contents of a note I can do that easily by popping it into the cradle and saving the note text with the pilot-xfer tool.

The main reason for syncing will be getting some offline reading material and occasionally manually importing some new contacts or extracting a note. I really like having a little digital assistant that is self-contained, offline and efficient. I end up doing more useful things on it when compared to a smartphone while also using it less overall.

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