using Microsoft products??

Hello everyone, I hope this gemlog finds you well, I thought I'd continue with my bad habit of only writing new posts for my gemlog when i buy new old hardware.

Jornada 680

To make a long story short, i am currently writing this on a HP Jornada 680, in "Microsoft Pocket Word" of all things, because i have not yet gotten Linux or NetBSD, both of which currently should support this device, running, mostly because i do not have any CompactFlash cards to install them on.

In case anyone that reads this has read my older gemlogs or chatted with me on IRC they may know that i was considering getting one of these small palmtop devices with a "proper" keyboard for a while.

A few days ago someone posted a picture of their HP Jornada 680 on the Fediverse, posing the question if it would run Linux, to which i answered with yes, referring them to the old jlime website on the WayBack Machine. The same day i saw one for for sale for just 35€, i think it even contained a decent number if accessories, but decide against buying it, because i thought that i don't really have nought time at the moment anyway. All this in turn got me curious about the current state of Linux and NetBSD support for these little devices. While poking around on kernel.org i found out that apparently someone put in some work recently to make modern kernels boot on the 680 again. That information of course did nothing to quench my desire for one of these machines, so when i saw one on sale for 40€, even with less useful accessories include, i decided to bite the bullet and buy it, and a few days, it arrived, with a random universal power brick and a way too large stylus, since presumably the old ones got lost at some point. Luckily it was well packaged, and decently clean, so a quick wipe down with a moistened paper towel, and some qtips with isopropyl got rid of everything, including the goopy remains of the rubber feet on the battery, one of which, concerningly, is not where i wiped it off the screwdriver anymore and i can't find it anywhere. As far as how well it works I'd say it is in good condition, there is a slight crack in the plastic below the hinge, just above the battery, where someone failed to put it together properly at some point and bent over a plastic catch, the CF card door is missing one of its teeth so it is always trying to open up a little, but as i understand that mechanism was failure prone even when new, so that's not not much of a surprise. The battery, which i was concerned about, since the machine was sold as "battery doesn't charge anymore" still hold enough charge that i this far in the text and it still is about half full, the plug on the universal power supply just seems to be a bad fit, and it needed a new CR2032 backup battery. Considering the size of the original battery (1500mAh) and the fact that it probably holds less than half the charge it used to, a re-cell with modern 3500mAh 18650 cells could get me more than 4x the current battery life, with potential for even more savings if i ever swap the CFL backlight for some LEDs. As far as using the Jornada, it is not too bad, the keyboard as expected feels not as good as the eeepc but if you mostly use it for some quick notes and other PDA stuff, and don't try to used it as your main computer it is probably not too bad. The screen is perfectly fine for writing, especially if you use sans serif fonts, because serifs look horrible at low resolution, touch input with a stylus works most of the time, the operating system sometimes takes amazingly long to draw the icons on the desktop, but the programs are decently responsive considering the hardware they run on, and, being from just before the millennium, it handles current dates fine, so you can use it as a calendar without problems. My two biggest annoyances currently are the center of gravity that is quite far back/up and means you should hold it when you poke at the touchscreen (there's a reason Psion got to patent their mechanism from the series 5 i guess) and a slight electronic whine when it thinks too hard.

This is where the Windows 2000 Professional that i got "peer pressured" into installing on my Thinkpad 600x comes in to save the day, Since i need Windows and an IR port (i didn't get a sync cable with my Jornada), I just installed ActiveSync 3.8 on it, now i just need to put the two machines close enough to each other to transfer files, which i already tested to get NetBSD onto the Jornada, but while the file transfer worked i couldn't get it to boot, if you read this file transfer off of the Jornada works too (PS: It worked, but omg was it a pain to find out how to convert the file to UTF-8, not because the conversion command is especially hard, just because i didn't know what the encoding i started out with was named, for reference, for use with iconv it is WINDOWS-1252). The Thinkpad has a USB port so i can easily get files from my Linux machines onto it with a FAT32 USB drive.

Get a CF card, why are they so expensive *sob*

Get a 16bit PCMCIA Ethernet card that is still supported by Linux

Find out if NetBSD 9 or 10 even still works, potentially try older release

Try Jlime

See if i can get a recent kernel running

Make some new rubber feet

Re-cell the battery

Make/Buy a protective sleeve for it