Schinckel.net

Well, it didn’t seem to completely fix it. Ages ago, after reading some book (called something like “How to do Everything with Your Palm (TM) Handheld, Third Edition” (Dave Johnson, Rick Broida) I stuck some tape over the Graffiti area, and I think this was causing (or contributing to) the problem. Since some of it was almost under the lip surrounding the screen, it was a little hard to remove. Almost all gone now, and the problem seems to be gone. Or nearly, anyway.

I love my Palm Zire - I keep all of my contact details, expenses, etc on there. The only thing I don’t do with it right now is email - but that’s only because the Mail.app conduit doesn’t handle emails sent properly - and it’s usually easier to use Gmail. Imagine my chagrin, then when weird stuff began to happen - extra screen taps (that I didn’t make) interfering with my use of the handheld. It meant that I couldn’t read my eBooks under certain lighting (halogen downlights seem to worsen the problem). Same with driving at night - perhaps there is some flickering, or the sodium lights affected it too. It came to a head when it began to mark my To-Do items as ‘Done’. This is unbearable - how do I know if I’ve cleaned the car or not, if my Zire says I have? I searched through the PalmOne site and forums (by the way, they still haven’t acknowledged the Zire 21/Digital Mobile Phone resetting issue, apparently!) and finally found a post that said to re-calibrate the screen. Easier said than done, since the problem had become so bad as to cause other programs to be run, and when I finally managed to get into the Prefs, and then the Calibration section, random taps were causing the little red circles to jump willy-nilly from top to bottom. Eventually I got in three presses before the gremlins, and bingo, problem solved. Moral of this story: if you start having problems with extra screen taps, run the calibration program sooner, rather than later!

I seem to write differently lying on the couch using my Palm to how I do typing at the keyboard. I wonder if anyone could read the novel and work out which bits were written on Palm, and which on Mac.

I have downloaded Books, but only entered about one section of my library into the program. Entering ISBN codes is just too much fun. Now, watch out for Delicious Library. iSight barcode scanning. iPod Sync support (hopefully with PalmOS as well as iPod - I’ll put in a feature request!). Finally, a chance to totally catalog all of my books. Instead of doing real work! GRIN.

I thought about another improvement for BwE today. It really only occurred to me when I created a new blog for nanowriwo 2004. When a new folder is created, I wonder if it is possible to add a folder action (of the same folder action script) to the created folder. This way I could just attach the script to the .Blogs folder, and then when I create special purpose blogs, I only have to create a folder on the Palm with the right name. I also wondered if I should use the “Journal Entry” feature of Agendus for blogging. Must look into this. I placed a Blogger bug report about post times not being respected by the server, but haven’t heard back. At least they fixed up the timezone error. Update: I’ve updated the script so that when a new folder is created, a “Blog with ecto” Folder Action Script is automatically added to the sub-folder. The latest version, as always, can be found at Blog with ecto.scpt. Thought: I should also tell ecto to update the account cache, but I need to know the server details, I think.

Letters & Symbols I keep getting wrong on my Palm. Comma - becomes a J, or S, or even a CR or BS, but mainly a J. D - often becomes an A. T - either an F followed by a space, or an L followed by a <menu swipe>. 2 - 7. ( or ) - 1. E - Q. (If slack!) I also run into problems on words ending with L, or when 5 is followed by a 1. (I’ve changed the $ setting in Graffiti Prefs.) And every now and then, H doesn’t appear.

I just went shopping for SD cards, expecting to have to pay around $90 for a 256Mb one. My Zire 31 has an SD slot, and I thought I might need more than the measley 16Mb internal RAM it comes with. Anyway, after spending an hour or so searching through every shop in Rundle Mall, I went into Diamond’s, on Rundle Street. The girl behind the camera said “Oh, about $105 for the 512, and about $70 for the 256”. That put the price as 74 less than a 256 from DJs, for a card with twice the memory. So, I went out, checked out Ted’s ($119) and returned. The guy who served me said the computer showed $130ish, but she had quoted me at $105. Since he’d kept me waiting for about 10 min while he dealt with a customer on the phone, he knocked it down to a round $100. Woo-hoo!

I went through a couple of revisions of Blog with ecto the other night. I’ve now added the following feature:

• Allows posting to multiple blogs, where the closest match to the folder name is used as the blog name.

There is a small issue - the date I set (using set entry_date to date date_stamp) doesn’t seem to be respected by ecto when it posts. I’ll do a bit more testing, and possibly issue a bug report. Anyway, the link for it is Blog with ecto.scpt.

I found a heap of Palm TEXt REAd documents, but I don’t like the way they appear as (Doc) in PalmReader. So I wrote a script to convert them to PML, the format used by DropBook to make PNRd PPrs documents.

Basically, I found that on OS X the translation of txt2pdbdoc -d (decode back into text) wasn’t so good; a heap of characters needed to be changed.

I did have them all listed here, but if I edit them, ecto fucks up the encoding!

I also changed the === to an 80% horizontal line.

The [[[ - ]]] blocks were indented, and a footer line [* <Text>] is indented also.

I assumed the only use of a / was for italics, and _ for underlining.

I also assume the first non-empty, non === line is the Title, and the Author line starts with By. I use this info to create a ‘Title Page’.

The tricky bit was getting the Chapter Heading sorted, I needed to break the text into a list of strings to do this, and scan through. This slows the script down a lot, but it still works okay. I might profile it a bit and see where the slowdown is.

Anyway, here’s the latest version I’ve uploaded: txt2pml.py

I plan to make a version to process Project Gutenberg texts, but that’s on the back burner.

Well, using my limited AppleScript skills, I’ve created a system for blogging via ecto from my palm. Using the MacNoteTaker Conduit, and a Folder Action Script, ecto creates & posts a new post for each new file in the monitored folder. Now all I need to do is ‘fix’ the Conduit so it handles deleted files a bit better. However, since the Conduit was written for a different development environment, I’ll have to get the original working first. Oh, and this post was done directly from my Palm. Well, the paragraph above was, anyway. Bugs to get rid of:

• Doesn’t do much parsing of the data. Paragraphs don’t seem to exist. Fixed: Used property body text instead of entry body.
• Use an alternate form of getting the date. MacNoteTaker date-stamps all new files. I’ll use this. Done.
• Parse the first line to get the post title. Done.