Sunday, including PDA thoughts

[cellio]

Today we got together with my parents to celebrate mothers' day, our anniversary, and my father's birthday. We took them to Sunnyledge (I think that's the name of it), which does a very good Sunday brunch. Ironically, while the buffet usually includes a couple kinds of fish that I can eat (along with meat, which I can't eat, and other dishes, which I can), today the ocean-based offerings were shrimp, mussels, swordfish, lobster, and lox. So one out of five. :-)

My father recently got himself a PDA. I was curious to know more, because he has the same vision problems I do. He was constrained in also needing something Mac-compatable, so his choices were more limited than mine would be, but for one data point, his looks pretty good. He has a Tungston E, which has a crisp, legible display that can fit a fair bit of text in fonts I can read. The graffiti interface is also much easier than the last time I used one -- this was "Graffiti 2", and most of the strokes look like letters, rather than semi-thematically-related glyphs (like an upside-down "V" for "A", which I remember encountering before). I was completely unable to write a "k", and my attempts at "u" kept producing "v" instead, but I think a small number of hours of practice would actually fix that. And I could write resaonably quickly too without it getting confused, which had not been true before.

My father carries his in a shirt pocket. Women's shirts don't tend to have that pocket, and even if they did the placement would be, err, suboptimal, so I'd need to find something I could reasonably carry in a back pants pocket. I imagine this has constraints on size, heat-tolerance, and durability. (Or are there belt-based solutions?)

I'd also need to think about how I would end up using it; things like the calendar, address book, and standing grocery list are obvious, but can I use it as a text editor to, say, compose LJ posts or edit a D&D character sheet when I don't have a real computer to hand? I know there's a Hebrew calendar out there somewhere, and someone I know has a siddur for hers, both of which would be handy. I'd want some application that supports a table or database of all my books/CDs, so I stop accidentally buying duplicates; I assume that's straightforward. I'm going to assume that music applications are not feasible.

What do people who have PDAs end up using them for after the first few months? (I know that dglenn also asked this question recently.) What's involved in having web-browsing? (What do you pay in monthly service fees?) My father didn't have a browser on his, so I didn't get a feel for whether most web sites even render on such a small screen.

I'm not going to run right out and buy one, but I'm at least entertaining the idea now, which is a change.

Short takes:

Fun stuff: Anton Chekov's book-signing (and reading) in Union Square. Link from nickjong, who got it from Neil Gaiman.

Non-fun stuff: Soldiers in Iraq losing internet access, just in case they want to ship out more photos from prisons or something. (Link from insomnia; see also this one from tangerinpenguin and others.) Feh. Some of my coworkers are in Iraq right now (civilians, on a base, nowhere near prisons); if we stop hearing from them I guess we'll know why.

Comments

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

My Tungsten-E currently has EshSiddur and EshTehillim on it (that last being a recent acquisition.) Neither require a Hebrew reader, but EshSiddur only offers variations on Orthodox Nusach - Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Ari (Lubovitch). I find it both useful and cool because it goes everywhere, it changes for the day (adding Musaf and hallel, for example, on Rosh Chodesh, and al ha-nissim on Purim) and it has everything I need. Tonight it proved very useful - we were at a fund raising dinner with my inlaws, and the bentchers they gave out were in very small print - much too small for my mother-in-law. However, she *could* use the birkat hamazon on the Palm. I use the Tamar date program.

Otherwise - I have addresses, phone numbers and email addresses stored there, I have two games (Bejeweled and what seems to be Library of Congress of Solitaire games, so it's many, many games with weensy cards). I read fanfiction, and use iSilo to reformat them from either html or text files for the Palm. I also download novels (you can get a lot of classic ones for free on the web, since they're public domain. I'm currently reading Mansfield Park.) PalmReader comes standard, and it's possible to make the words comfortably large enough for my mother-in-law. I know. I've tested.

And, as others mentioned, I have www.dataviz.com's Documents-to-Go, which is MS Word. I've written several short stories on it, using both a stylus pen and the wireless keyboard. I also keep a template for my Pakua reports there so I can start them when the sessions are fresh in my mind, before emailing them off to my teachers.

Quite honestly, I'm not sure how I functioned without it. And that's without my using email.

[cellio]

Thanks for all the information! It does sound like this is a useful little tool.

Neither require a Hebrew reader

Does that mean it has its own built in? How is it producing the Hebrew? (Can you change the size?)

but EshSiddur only offers variations on Orthodox Nusach

That's ok. Reform changes to the siddur fall into two groups: ones I understand (and can make the alterations on my own if need be), and ones I don't care about and/or find gratuitious. :-) So long as the software offers actual Hebrew and not just translit I'm fine. (I don't care for translit, and Ashkenazi pronunciation in translit makes my head hurt becuase I learned to pronounce Sephardic.)

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

The Hebrew is part of the program - it produces Hebrew the same way Palm Reader produces English.

You can't change the size, precisely, but you do have a choice between bold and not bold. I find not bold easier to read and my mother-in-law had no problems with it. She had to squint but she could read it.

You can d/l a crippled version to see if it's comfortable.

No translation or transliteration - just the straight text. I have the same problem with Ashkenazi transliteration. Funny thing is that I have no problems when I hear it. Which is good because most of the daavening I hear is Ashkenaz, when it isn't Ashkasphard.