I found a new use for one of my grayscale Palm Size PCs: Digital Recipe Book

I'll start by saying I actually got a... how many is it now... 5th? Palm Size PC, one of the first ones from the time I had my Palm Pilot Pro, it's actually the one I wanted to buy but it wasn't yet available in Canada and I didn't want to wait longer to I got the PalmPilot Pro instead. The one I'm talking about is the Casio E-11 with 8 MB RAM and CE 2.01.

Well I just got an idea for a great use for one of my grayscale PSPCs: A digital recipe system for the kitchen. I currently have hundreds of webpage recipes printed in a pile in a kitchen cupboard and it can take a long time to find a recipe since they aren't in any order and the sheets often get wet or dirty. I can simply copy them all to text files on a CF card and use Note Taker on a PSPC to both find and read recipes in the kitchen in seconds instead of going through paper.

I'd probably take the one I care the least about and that's easiest to replace, which would be the grayscale Philips Nino 300 since my other Palm Size PCs are rare and hard to find. Another advantage of the Nino is that its AA (vs AAA for other PSPCs) batteries last forever so I'll be able to leave it in a kitchen cupboard for weeks between chargings. Its screen is also horrible so if I accidentally break it I won't care as I wasn't using it until I got this idea and I'd probably get another on eBay which likely would have a better screen as I hope they aren't all as bad as mine.

I keep finding more and more uses for these old things

Edited by aab 2011-11-02 7:51 AM

E11 is a nice machine...I've owned several of those. Using it as a digital recipe book is a good use for it too.

I admit the screen on the Nino 300 is less than stellar, but I suspect most of the first Palm-size PCs were just as bad. (I had an Everex Freestyle - also CE 2.01 - whose display was actually a little worse. Casio always seemed to put out better-quality devices in those days.) I still like my Nino 300 - in addition to installing .NET CF 1.0 SP3 on it (a bit of a tight squeeze in that 8 MB of RAM), I've actually gotten several non-.NET CF MIPS CE 2.11 and even CE 3.0 apps working on it by hexediting the OS version to 2.01. And I like the smART suite on the Nino, including the smARTcommand voice-activation program, which works quite well.

I can't keep but thinking my Nino 300 has a worst than normal display, maybe I'll take a photo soon but to me the screen quality wouldn't even be acceptable for a prototype, so I'm hoping my Nino's screen degraded from its original condition because if it's this bad new it's really bad. The E-11's screen is impeccable next to the Nino 300's even though they are the same specs.

I also have the color Nino 500 which has a great screen and that one is my everyday organizer, I just wish it had a built in backup app so I wouldn't have to keep backing up over serial to the Windows XP emulator. BTW the handwriting and voice recognition are MILES better on the Nino 500 VS the 300, they replaced smart writer with Calligrapher and a new much easier to use version of the voice command software where you no longer have to say "start... solitaire" you now just say "solitaire".

What exactly does the .NET framework do? I put it on my E-100 only to never use it. Isn't it to run Pocket PCs apps on it? But most Pocket PC apps are for ARM CPUs only, so how does that work? Do you need to find the very rare apps that are for Pocket PC and MIPS? Such combinations existed for only months before MS moved to ARM only if I remember well.

Also, where do you find Palm Size PC apps? I'm having an extremely hard time finding the good apps I used back then and actually mostly only use the apps that come with Windows CE.

Apps I remember and miss:
-Pocket Player 1.2 I think it was (I found 1.0 which isn't as good)
-Startap to have that classic Windows background, the one I find is a date limited version that forces you to set your date to 1999 or something, has anyone cracked this to use it with the real date?
-Lots of games like Jimmy games

Does anyone know where I can find these and other PSPC apps? I could do so much more with them if I found apps for them.

Thanks


Edited by aab 2011-11-02 8:50 PM

Programs written for the .NET Compact Framework aren't processor-specific. Even if a download site says ARM, if it's .NET it'll work with any processor. See here for more info:

http://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=12404&posts=69&start=1

Usually the download site identifies the app as needing .NET CF, but not always. A quick way to find out is to double-click the exectuable on your PC. If it starts to open (even with an error message), then it's .NET CF. (If it's not .NET CF, you'll get the error message that it's "not a valid Win32 application" if you have XP or earlier.) That won't tell you which version of .NET CF it needs, though; however, you'll find out soon enough if you try running it on the Nino - if it requires .NET CF 2.0 or later, you'll get a .NET CF error dialog that says it needs a newer version of .NET CF.

That is a good idea. I actually have been typing up a bunch of recipe books lately too. I think I would personally use a Palm tho, since I have a spare M500.