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What have you done with an H/PC today?

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Ameowli Page Icon Posted 2021-12-07 9:23 PM
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There's not many of us left, but the few are all powerful with our H/PCs. I'm kinda surprised a thread like this isn't around, so, inspired by a similarly-titled thread in the PowerPC Mac space, the floor is open.

I'll start: Though not necessarily today; over the course of about a week I brought my z50 to the desk and I typed up a review on it about a modded version of OS X Leopard for those ppc Macs. Despite its size, the keyboard felt quite roomy and I could type on it for hours!
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WallyB110 Page Icon Posted 2021-12-07 11:02 PM
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Ive been messing with my Nec Mobilepro 450 today. Wish there was something you could put over the glossy screen to make it a matte. Hate glossy screens lol.

But thats what im up to ;-)

-Walt B
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joval Page Icon Posted 2021-12-08 3:48 AM
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Last evening I was working on Devuan Linux running on a Jornada720 which has really given it a new lease on life when combined with the diminutive RasPi Zero 2 for full internet access (through which I am posting this message now).

I learned how to automate start up of a terminal window, and the main menu, and battery level display by setting up in the IceWM window manager a "startup folder." (This after experimenting with Devuan Linux /etc/init.d, insserv, and local.rc approaches). Now, after the Jornada720 boots up Devuan, it is so easy to ssh into the RasPi and surf the net and write out these posts.

Yesterday afternoon I was creating disk images with the newer modules Stefan and Timob0 created that permit sound/mp3 playing, and use of compressed Zram to virtually expand the Jornadas meager 32 or 64 Mb giving a snappy response now, including a fix for the lack of mouse right click (needed to control the RasPi desktop, audio output, etc). These are now uploaded/hosted for anyone wishing to easily reproduce the performance, portability, and utility of the Jornada720/Devuan/RasPi symbiosis. In the process I continue to learn more Linux CLI commands: init 0-- for shutdown, cat /proc/swaps-- to check Zram swaps, Top-- to monitor cpu activity, modprobe-- to load modules, free-- to check memory,

Needless to say, I am learning a great deal in the process, often very comfortably with my Jornada720 and its great form factor and nice keyboard as I watch youtube videos on a large screenTV, as I am doing now. A rather pleasing hobby... much like others enjoy gaming on a nintendo switch or such.

If I am too long and windy in my posts... blame it on the lure of the Jornada720 for its ease of use!!!

joval... on a J720/Devuan/RasPiZero2/Firefox hybrid
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null1024 Page Icon Posted 2021-12-10 2:43 AM
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I usually end up using my LG Phenom at night to type stuff up when it's super, super late. The dim green backlight doesn't keep me awake like a brighter or more modern system does, and the fact that I can't just go on the internet means I have less reason to stay awake until 4am.
I wish the machine was just a bit faster though -- it's REALLY sluggish on batteries, so it's plugged in all the time since it runs like twice as fast (which means just updating the screen in Word isn't so bad, and games under PalmGB are almost, if not entirely playable compared to on battery).

I have a Jornada 680, which does just about everything better with a nicer keyboard, a color screen, a way faster processor, it even can almost reasonably run Doom even if the port is a bit awkward... but the screen is too bright to be used in the way I use the Phenom, and I end up using my more modern computers and phone over it during the day. Also, the touch screen freaks out if I touch it too softly, probably some dust or something causing issues.
I'd probably use it a bunch more if I had an internet connection on it (since I'd be able to run Linux, have actual SSH, have a better browser than PocketIE, etc). I can't even use the serial connection for internet stuff since I don't have the cable, unlike on my Phenom, where I can do some ridiculous setup where I share my gaming desktop's internet (at dialup speed) with the software running in a Win2k VM.
The Phenom isn't useful for the internet because of the speed+OS, and I can't even use it to telnet into my computers (reasonably at least) because the VT100 emulation simply doesn't work that well, but it is fun to mess around with. Seeing pages load at all on the machine (through a proxy to bypass https, at least) never fails to bring a smile to my face.

Edited by null1024 2021-12-10 2:43 AM
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null1024 Page Icon Posted 2022-02-16 7:57 AM
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Tried to get PocketDOS going on my Phenom today since that's the machine I use more due to the above reasons, but it really is just far too slow to work.
The fact that I have a serial cable for the Phenom really makes it more useful vs the Jornada with the other things I'd want to do with an HPC, and I'd have been able to use my HPC for serial comms under DOS... but again, speed.
I really need to see if I can get a J680 cable from somewhere. If I were some kind of electronics wizard, I'd just add a straight serial port to the device and call it a day.
I'll also be immensely disappointed if my Phenom's cable goes on the fritz, because there's basically no hope of me finding one ever again, I'd probably just end up selling the device and buying a more common B/W and green-screen machine, heh.
(actually, can I use a PCMCIA serial port? I'd need to check lol)

After that, I had the goofy idea of putting music on my HPC, despite the audio quality from the device being atrocious (which is fair -- it's made for recording voice messages and nothing musical at all). Messed around a bit and figured out how to do it, it's really easy.
There are now five 8-bit 22kHz .WAV files on my CF card, which are about the same size as a reasonable quality .MP3 file. Double-clicking the .WAVs doesn't work, I had to put them in \Storage Card\My Documents\ and open up the Voice Recorder program.
Converting the files is super easy, I just opened them all in Audacity, mixed them down to mono, set the project rate to 22050Hz, and exported them as WAV.

You get way lower quality than a proper 44-48kHz .MP3 at a reasonable bitrate of course, although 22kHz isn't quite unlistenable, just a bit muffled.
A higher bit-depth than 8-bits is wasted on the hilariously noisy DAC on this thing (if the device enables the speaker, you can hear all kind of buzzing in the audio based on whether the backlight is on, if you're pressing a key, if you're using the stylus, etc, etc, even when there's just silence being sent).
I taped over most of the speaker to provide the tiniest bit of low-pass filtering and clean up the sound (hahaha), and it has the added benefit of letting me boost the output volume without it getting too loud, which makes it sound better vs playing it at low volume. I'm pretty sure volume control is just shearing off the bottom few bits of the signal. I'd be amazed too if it actually does output 22kHz instead of just skipping every other sample to emit 11kHz, and I'll eat my hat if it actually plays back 16-bit files instead of discarding the low byte from each sample, hahahaha.

I kinda wish I could plug headphones into this thing and see how it fares with that vs the onboard speaker (heck, I have two pairs of desktop computer speakers right in front of me, it'd be fun to put it through those for kicks), but I'd need to attempt to find or build some adapter for the headphone/microphone port. If that jack was standardized across HPC devices, that'd be nice to know, but I suspect it's yet another proprietary port, because having a 3.5mm jack is far too nice for any company making non-gaming handhelds before like 2005, haha.
Speaking of audio out, it feels odd that my J680, despite having the nifty slider-locked voice buttons on the front, doesn't have a headphone jack of any description. Alas. Probably should see if it sounds better, but it's like almost 3am.

Being able to do this is a total gimmick and it sounds terrible, but it's fun and is putting a big smile on my face right now.
It stutters when I'm navigating in Explorer (also, everything slows down to an absolute crawl), but I can type in Pocket Word just fine while playing a song, and it's very smooth, at least when plugged into the wall adapter. On battery, it stutters a little when scrolling.
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null1024 Page Icon Posted 2022-03-07 10:57 PM
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null1024 - 2022-02-16 3:57 AM

I kinda wish I could plug headphones into this thing and see how it fares with that vs the onboard speaker (heck, I have two pairs of desktop computer speakers right in front of me, it'd be fun to put it through those for kicks), but I'd need to attempt to find or build some adapter for the headphone/microphone port. If that jack was standardized across HPC devices, that'd be nice to know, but I suspect it's yet another proprietary port, because having a 3.5mm jack is far too nice for any company making non-gaming handhelds before like 2005, haha.


So, I've looked into this, and it turns out it's a standard 2.5mm jack. Very nice.
I used one of these and it just works.
AFAIK, that particular adapter is audio output only, so if you plug a microphone in, you won't be able to record from it.
The sound is still a bit tinny (probably a band-pass or high-pass filter on the output, since this was again intended for voice memos), but it works just fine, and the output from the device is actually a LOT clearer than I expected it to be, most of the noise seems to be from the machine itself causing interference with its built-in speaker.

Also, I'm hoping I'm not breaking any rules with this triple post -- most places, I would just edit the above post, but edits stop working after some time here.
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hipacky Page Icon Posted 2022-05-31 9:44 PM
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I regularly manage my tasks using my Cassiopeia A-20. Today I just noticed I have way to many delayed tasks
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null1024 Page Icon Posted 2022-08-18 10:58 PM
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Today, I am struggling with the terror that is FAT16 on a 2GB CF card, since my LG Phenom does not support FAT32.
I noticed that I was rapidly running out of space, and it turns out that I have lost at least 200MB strictly due to cluster size nonsense.
I expected most of my storage space to be eaten up by the gigantic .WAV music files (that, despite being downsampled to basically radio quality, still take up more space than a 320kbps MP3 lol) I have on the device.

Nope!
I'm using a script that makes static HTML directories to be able to easily navigate between images... and it makes a TON of small files. Thumbnails for each picture, per-image pages, etc, etc.
https://github.com/bmdeeal/to-gallery-py
Dead useful on a CE2.0 device since it has no dedicated image viewer that I know of, but it's a bit flawed of a concept.

Each thumbnail and page should be like 1-2kB, but are taking up a whole 32kB cluster. Probably going to just end up getting multiple CF cards and dealing with it that way, but it's just a bit miserable to lose hundreds of megabytes on literally nothing.
Wasn't a big deal when I was on the smaller (and MUCH slower 512MB) CF card I had in there, but now the overhead means I'm not really able to make as much use of the 2GB card as I'd like.
That 512MB card is REALLY slow though, especially when doing a lot of file operations vs copying a single large file on. It's just kind of ancient.

I could zip the files up, Total Commander/CE makes it really convenient to work with stuff stored in ZIPs on the device, but it defeats the purpose since the pages can't hyperlink to each other.
I really do wish there was a way to do multiple partitions on the CF card, bleh.

Like, my Jornada 680 CAN use FAT32, but I've already mentioned why I prefer using the Phenom day-to-day, even if it's slower (no headphone port, I don't have a serial cable for it, I like using the dim green screen at night since it doesn't keep me awake). It also feels a lot more rock solid in terms of build quality, the Jornada has stuff like that awful CF card slot that dangles. I already had to do some miserable superglue field repair after one of the clips popped off, that wasn't fun, and I dunno what a proper fix would entail.
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fantablium Page Icon Posted 2022-08-19 8:08 AM
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I use my 728 everyday for client records (done in palnmaker) and organisation as well as writing reviews for my youtube channel
I also use a PPC/Palm as an ereader most days
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torch Page Icon Posted 2022-08-19 9:23 PM
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I’m so glad this thread was resurrected! I didn’t know we had one like this and was actually thinking of creating one - I’m glad I didn’t duplicate this one.
Anyway I’m looking to get back into writing, so today I started my second day of a “journal” of my thoughts for the particular day. I use Textmaker 2002 (when it’s not being slow) on my MobilePro 790.
When I get my 700 all fixed up, I intend to use that one more often.
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Karpour Page Icon Posted 2022-08-20 9:29 PM
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Not much lately, too busy with other things. But I think one of the nicest actual use cases was writing a big part of my Master's thesis on my Jornada 820 a few years back, perfect writing device
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null1024 Page Icon Posted 2022-08-22 4:41 AM
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Used my Phenom a fair bit today.
It's a fun device to just type on, no distractions (well, the keyboard sucks, but it's not unusable). A bit of a pain when you want to reference something and don't have internet (and even though I can use the internet on the thing, it's very slow and kind of painful and I really do wish I had an ethernet card since I can only connect over serial at dialup speed). I'm also still quite impressed with just how much multitasking you can do (and have to do if you don't just want to be stuck waiting around) on the devices -- had a Palm back in the day, and although it was quite a bit more responsive, if you were doing something, you were fully committed, stuff didn't run in the background.
Played some Game Boy games on it, listened to some music, mucked about some more with using that image gallery thing I mentioned earlier.
I tried to use the VNC client available for CE2, but it doesn't connect to any of my systems. I think it's not actually the client's fault, rather, I think it's how I'm connecting to the internet via the MochaSoft PPC->serial bridge running in a Windows 2000 VM.
My desktop machines see the device trying to connect, but then data isn't sent after that.

Also, I got a CF -> PC Card adapter today so I could use two cards at once on my H/PC.
Makes it so that I don't need to swap out the card that all my programs and regularly accessed documents are on, I can just pull the other card out and use another.
I currently have the old 512MB one in the PC Card slot, and the 2GB one that most of my stuff was on in the on-board slot.
Moved a few things (mostly music) over to the 512MB card, which freed up a bit of space for me to be able to waste with yet more sub-2kB files that will be expanded to 32kB, lol. Still feels unreasonably cool being able to play music on this thing, even if it's very low quality. Not unlistenable, but literally 1/4th of CD-quality.
On that note, one thing has made itself very noticeable lately -- the H/PC plays audio files at the wrong frequency. Maybe a semitone or two down, which makes a handful of songs sound really, really wrong. Most stuff, it doesn't matter that much and sounded just fine with the pitch down... but when it sounded wrong, I just simply couldn't get over the song sounding a bit out of tune.
Given that the audio playback features on the device were made for simple sound effects and voice recording and not at all for music playback, I can't blame them for not caring too much about sample rate accuracy, but it is occasionally annoying.

I kinda don't feel like buying another 2GB card (they're quite cheap, but I've overspent a bit this month lol), especially since I have multiple good CF cards here -- a 16MB and a 256MB one in addition to the 512MB... but those old cards are all really slow, so getting data from my desktop onto them is a total PITA.
Alas. Probably will end up getting another next week anyway. lol.

Also, I was hoping to not need to muck about with copying files on my desktop, especially since I should be able to just copy from disk to disk on the H/PC, but doing the copy on the H/PC itself is incredibly slow -- which makes sense, but man, I really forgot how slow file copying could be.

On a vaguely-related note, I'm increasingly convinced that we as a society should have never made storage smaller than a CF card.
I have probably lost like 4-5 microSD cards. I have lost like 1 or 2 regular size SD cards. I have never lost a CF card.

Edited by null1024 2022-08-22 4:44 AM
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torch Page Icon Posted 2022-08-22 5:39 AM
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Have you had any luck with the CF to SD card adapters under CE2.0?
The type I adapter I have from Digitech doesn’t work on CE2.0 (my MobilePro 700) (just prompts for a driver) but the same device works perfectly under CE3.0 (my MobilePro 790)
Fortunately I de-listed my 2GB CF from eBay so I can just use that one with my MP700.

Anyway ,
I am at the airport right now waiting for my flight onward to Puerto Rico. I brought my MobilePro 790 along with my Spanish quick study paper chart I’m typing into a Q&A flash card app from the SCL (SuperMemo CE). Oddly enough , the developer claims it’s freeware and also listed in the SCL as so but the program states it’s a trial for 30 days. It’s a shame because I really like this program. It’s simple and efficient.

Edit:
Fantablium:
Have you ever tried SpreadCE for those records? I like it because it also works with .xlsx. Also frequently updated. I’m not trying to interrupt your workflow if it works. Just curious.

Edited by torch 2022-08-22 5:43 AM




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null1024 Page Icon Posted 2022-08-22 7:01 AM
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I am currently discovering the wonder of Wodeon on my Phenom. I never expected to actually get real video playback working on this thing. I have a massive smile on my face. Full 320px tall video is too slow to play with in-between frames even with audio off, so I'm just playing keyframes only but with audio on.
Just spent a bit of time figuring out how to convert videos to work with it, and I got it, ended up leaving a comment on the application page with the info.

Quote
torch - 2022-08-22 1:39 AM

Have you had any luck with the CF to SD card adapters under CE2.0?
The type I adapter I have from Digitech doesn’t work on CE2.0 (my MobilePro 700) (just prompts for a driver) but the same device works perfectly under CE3.0 (my MobilePro 790)
Fortunately I de-listed my 2GB CF from eBay so I can just use that one with my MP700.


I do have a CompUSA SD to PC-Card adapter in my Jornada (actually, it came with the unit when I bought it), with an old 2GB SD card that used to be in my Wii. It works on my Phenom just fine.
Haven't used an SD to CF adapter on my devices.
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torch Page Icon Posted 2022-08-22 5:11 PM
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I do have a CompUSA SD to PC-Card adapter in my Jornada (actually, it came with the unit when I bought it), with an old 2GB SD card that used to be in my Wii. It works on my Phenom just fine.
Haven't used an SD to CF adapter on my devices.

Do you mind submitting it to the HCL with its exact model number and submit your Phenom test result whenever you have a chance ? I want to start keeping an eye out when one comes available for sale whenever my 2GB CF card goes bad. I’m trying to convert over to SD cards because they’re easily accessible.
Edit: also does CE2.0 ask for a driver .dll when you insert it?

As for me, I’m passing time on an airport layover playing Scrabble against the computers.

Edited by torch 2022-08-22 5:15 PM




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