Saturday 7 September 2024
ROOPLOCH 2024 phlog
===================
After reading the announcement of the ROOPLOCH 2024, I started
thinking about a way to parpicitate. Just walking with a laptop into
the garden and write some text on it is hardly a challenge and I
actually do that from time to time.
I thought about using my old Palm TX. The Palm was easely found in a
drawer in a cabinet on the attic. Of course, the battery was
exhausted. It took more time to find the charger. I connected the
charger and let it alone for a few hours.
When I came back, the device was alife. It showed a screen to enter
the date and time. After this was set, I started playing with it.
Writing on the Graffiti area was hard, because the touch-area was very
in-accurate. I remembered having .discussed this with a
Palm-enthousiast, who suggested to remove the screen protector.
With a small knife from the kitchen, I could eventually remove the
protector, after this I could indeed enter text using the Graffiti
method. It didn't took long for my Grafitti skills to come back. A few
things I have still problems with are writing a comma and doing copy
and paste. Commas I write by switching to the keyboard, enter a comma,
and switch back again. Typing single and double quotes works the same.
Copy and paste I do using the top menu.
Next challenge
--------------
Now that I can write on the Palm, the next challenge was, how to get
the written words off the Palm. I cloned the source code of
pilot-link, but could not build it on FreeBSD. There was no SD-card in
the slot and I guess that modern SD-cards will not work on the device.
Getting a Wifi connection turned out to be another hurdle. The device
doesn't see the Wlfl accespoint. After several experiments I got it
working using an old crappy Wifi extender that was laying around in a
drawer.
Now that I could get a network connection I still had no idea, how to
get the words off the device. I opened my snippet server in the web
browser and entered some lines in the text area. This could work but
felt like cheeting, you can't call that "offline". Playing with the
device I discoved it comes with an email client. There were even some
email messages in it from my previous job. Oops, hadn't reset the
device properly.
IMAP
----
I created a new account on my IMAP server and with some trying was
able to get the email client working. I discovered that it can send a
memo from the memo applicatlon as attachment. With this I think
everything is set up. Of course I can not actually publish a phlog
post this way, but the writing process can be done completely offline,
outside, and without any wall connection.
Actually doing the challenge
----------------------------
This post is written on the Palm, sitting in the garden. Next to our
tent, we have set it up to let it dry completely. We returned from
camping yesterday and we expect the camping season to be over for this
year.
Experiences
-----------
The Palm is small!
Now that our phones have grown to the slze of small tablets, the
dlsplay of the Palm is incredibly small, both to hold as well as to
display text.
Graffiti is brilliant, but terribly slow.
I remember that once, around 1999-2000, I have written an entire
column for a magazine on a Palm while lying in bed suffering from a
hernia. I think it must have been using my Palm III. But I must have
forgotten how aganizing slow it is. It still beats typing with the
stylus on the small virtual keyboard.
As I saw this text growing I was afraid it might be too large for the
memo app and was preparing myself for disaster, but everything went
fine, without any crashes or such.
No spelling checker
-------------------
English is not my native language and writing without a spelling
checker is hard and scary. And a part of the challenge I guess. I
decided to keep the text as it is.
The same goes for the formulation of sentences. Writing with Grafitti
alone is already a challenge and sometimes more like an Echternach
procession -one step forward two steps back- let alone taking parts of
a sentence and re-order those. Also the small number of chars make it
harder to see what works and what not.
No RCS
------
I am used to commit my wrltings every few minutes, both code as well
as proza. This provides a safety net and a super undo on steroids. It
is scary to write without it.l
One problem left
----------------
The memo turned out to be too long after all. Everything went fine,
until the memo was attached to an email message. The email client
only took the first 4k of the memo. I had to create a second email
message with the remaining text.
Fun
---
Apart from the time spent searching for the charger, which I had for
some .reason stored in the wrong place, the whole process of getting
the device up and running and working on a solution to get the writing
out of it and on a system to get it on Gopher, was a lot of fun.
I was already thinking about some scripting to pipe the email through
using Procmail, and automate the publishing part ;) But let us wait
and see if I will write more often on the Palm. I don't expect to use
the Palm for anything else.
Closing words
-------------
Thanks a lot to Solderpunk for his marvelous idea! Without the
ROOPLOCH challenge I would have not tried this and left the Palm TX
in the drawer on the attic.
Happy ROOPLOCH-lng!
---===---
The text above comes from the Palm TX. I have written it yesterday on
the Palm. using the org-mode header indicators `*' and `**'. On my
FreeBSD system, I copied the text into a Denote org-file, and let the
lines wrap at a lenght of about 70 chars. After this I published it
the usual way, with an Elisp script converting it to my Gopher post
format, adding an entry in the Gophermap and creating the RSS-feed.
Last edited: $Date: 2024/09/07 07:57:22 $