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

[siderea]

Swordfish is trafe? What's wrong with it?

I have an original Palm Pilot, on loan from the office. I love it. I used to carry a date book and a little ruled blank book (well, a series of such) in which to take random notes. (I'm always taking random notes.) Now I just carry the Palm, which is vastly better. I can catalog my notes as I go, so I can find things by some means other than rifling lots of little books. And there's a backup. I once had my purse and current little books stolen.

I primarily use the Palm for the datebook, phone book and notepad functions, but sometimes use the check list functionality and the calculator. I don't have wireless internet on it, I've never even loaded more software on it, and I still find it very useful. I carry it in a fanny pack.

I am planning on upgrading to a more recent model soon. I covet the MBTA's system-wide schedule application. No more carrying paper bus schedules! Also, I am thinking about learning to write my own palm aps, because I have some ideas...

Since carrying the Palm (well over a year ago), I've started compiling and using some personal information which I always thought it would be great to have, but I didn't want to have to carry more little books. For instance, I've started making notes about important things about food vendors -- both groceries and restaurants -- which are hard for me to remember at exactly that time I need that information most: when I'm hungry. I've started lists of restaurants organized by geographical center, so when I'm somewhere and starving and wondering "where is there to eat here?" I can look it up, along with useful information like "Thursdays is the corned-beef-and-cabbage special".

I use it for shopping lists; its very convenient that whenever I think of something I need to pick up, my shopping list is always right there. I have a list called "food I like to eat" because -- no kidding -- when I'm not hungry I forget, which makes grocery shopping a real challenge.

It's fantastic for notes for travel plans or event organizing. I have a note category called "Wedding" which seems to get a lot of use. :)

I keep all sorts of trivia on it, such as the shopping list for the dish I make for Thanksgiving Dinner, the dimensions of various of my furniture, a log of my blood pressure as taken at every drs. visit, handy IP numbers for when DNS is down, etc. Sometimes I take class notes on it, but Graffiti is slow for that.

[cellio]

Swordfish is controversial (as is sturgeon). I don't actually know what the issue is (something about the scales being funny). Thus far I've taken the approach that there is plenty of non-swordfish fish in the world and I didn't start out with a craving for swordfish in particular, so investigating it and making a decision isn't all that high on the priority list. So it's not so much "swordfish isn't kosher" as "I don't know if swordfish is kosher and so far I've been too lazy to find out". :-)

Thanks for the usage info. I tend to accumulate pockets full of little pieces of paper too (you're more organized if you use actual notebooks), so this is an area where a PDA would help. Well, one important consideration: I need to somehow organize my notes in such a way that I see them all. If I reach into a pocket and find three pieces of paper I deal with all three; if I pop open the PDA and find the top note I'll need a prod that there are two more. I assume this is a solved problem.

I covet the MBTA's system-wide schedule application.

That does sound handy, yes!

Since carrying the Palm (well over a year ago), I've started compiling and using some personal information which I always thought it would be great to have, but I didn't want to have to carry more little books.

I've found that collecting information is easy, but indexing is a bitch. For example, given your restaurant info, you might plausibly want to answer any of the following questions: Where's nearby food? Where can I satisfy my craving for corned beef in the next hour? Where can our group of twelve people get lunch? Where can I get adequate food quickly, 'cause I only have 45 minutes including travel time? How do you organize your data for these various sorts of lookup?

This reminds me of an app (or set of apps) I would like to have. I'd like to be able to store a recipe, and then say "put that on this week's shopping list", and then be able to edit the list (full list, not just that recipe) because maybe I already have garlic and milk, and so on. (It should be smart enough to merge quantities for things that are already on my shopping list -- e.g. adding more milk, not listing milk twice.) But I'd also like the recipes to be indexed by key ingredients, so when I discover in the store that the squash looks really really good I can ask the database what I can do with squash and what else I need to buy to make that happen. Too often I pick up the unplanned ingredient without getting everything else I need to go with it.

I use it for shopping lists; its very convenient that whenever I think of something I need to pick up, my shopping list is always right there.

That would be a big improvement over the paper list in my kitchen, for two reasons: it's always available, and I could automatically organize it based on location within the store (all the produce at the beginning, etc). That's harder to do on paper in one pass.

[siderea]

Aig. Typed long msg and browser crashed.

Summary:

No db, text files, with categories. I find that mostly completely adequate. Simply being able to put all the notes on the same topic into the same file is the main advantage.

[geekosaur]

I don't think I've ever seen a recipe database like you describe even for desktop computers. It does sound interesting, though.

Re notes: the first line of each memo is used as a title, and the "top level" memo display is a listting of these titles. Additionally, you can replace the ROM Launcher application with other launchers, some of which (SilverScreen, at least) support "sticky notes" of various kinds.

Someone I know is working on a PAT schedule application. (The basic application is done; the hard part is parsing PAT's schedules to produce usable Palm databases.) However, I find that bus.maya.com is quite usable in Blazer. :)

Earlier you commented on just wanting an editor that handles text files. As far as I know, Documents-To-Go can do that; if not, TealDoc can edit both text and Palm DOC files, and there are other text editors available, including replacements for the built-in minimal text editor (mostly useful with the Note Pad in later versions of PalmOS; the 4k limit in Memo Pad makes it essentially useless for serious work).