Re: Adventures in TeXas

Thanks for the apps and the post.  I am drafting a list of things criteria for a device that might replace my Palm TX.

Best Regards,
Dwight...


________________________________
 From: dmccunney <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] 
Sent: Monday, April 8, 2013 3:56 AM
Subject: [peditors] Adventures in TeXas
 

  
While the group has been quiet for a while, I suspect at least some
folks still have it in their email configuration, and people here are
likely to appreciate the story.  (Warning: long post follows.)

As some folks might recall, I'm a Tapwave Zodiac user.  My production
Zodiac finally gave up the ghost.  It's possible I can resurrect it,
by doing parts swapping from the other units, but I haven't gotten to
it.  Meanwhile, I was given a Palm T|X by someone who had moved to a
Nexus 7 tablet and no longer needed the T|X for the primary use case,
which was reading ebooks.  (And reading dbooks was about half the use
case for the Zodiac, with about 1.9GB of them on a 2GB SD card, and
another reason fior wanting a larger screen.)

So I had a like-new TX, hard-reset to factory default, and started
trying to recreate my configuration.

One bit was pedit/ptoolset.  I'm fussy about record keeping, and have
a file where I record user names, serial numbers, reg keys and the
like for software I buy.  Oddly, the entry for pedit had the user name
but *not* the reg key.  I can't imagine how I left it out, but...
Paul is still around, and was able to provide a replacement within a
day of my email query.  Thanks, Paul!

Other things were less simple.

One bit I had problems with was Hotsync.  I could do it, but more
often than not, the PC I'm hotsyncing with, running Win XP Home, would
crash with a Blue Screen of Death partway through.  I updated to the
most recent Palm Desktop version (6.2) hoping that would help, but it
didn't.  Poking around on-line revealed that Hotsync is apparently
allergic to multi-core CPUs, and the suggested fix was to set the
affinity of the process to lock it to one core.  I did so, but haven't
fully verified it fixes things.  (EDIT: It hasn't.  Now Hotsync
crashes when run, and I have no idea what's going on.  I simply get a
Windows message that Hotsync has encountered an error and needs to
close.  This has persisted through a remove and reinstall of Palm
Desktop. This is not critical, as I can Hotsync to another Windows
machine running Win2K, but it's like having an itch I can't scratch
when I don't understand what's going on. )

I still had pretty much my complete Zodiac setup backed up.  I formed
the habit long ago that anything that *could* live on a card, did, and
had backup archives of my SD cards.  I had an "everything *including*
the kitchen sink" combo, because I could.  Apps were classified by
function, and lived in specific directories of the card.

The standard for PalmOS is that expansion card aware things all look
in /Palm/Launcher.  I had way too many things to keep there, but
fortunately, I didn't have to. I use on the late Bozidar Benc's
LauncherX.  LauncherX can run apps from the card, with an additional
feature: you can configure a list of directories on the card where it
will look aside from the default /Palm/Launcher directory.  LauncherX
is a tabbed launcher, so my tab assignments map to app categories and
hense to card directories.  The first tab is called Main, and contains
the most used apps.  Apps that are kept on the card for that category
live in /Palm/Main.  Unclassified apps live in /Palm/LX, and there are
directories for Games, Media, Utils and others.  Rebuilding the LX
config is simplified: after installing and running LX, I create a tab,
add the directory where that tabs apps live to the LX list, and do a
Refresh Apps to populate the tab, repeating till done.  /Palm/Launcher
is reserved for things that are hard coded to look there/live there,
like the components of Docs to Go which can be kept in a card.

LX has another nifty feature.  A problem with keeping apps on the card
is that Hotsync doesn't see them.  To get around that, LX lets you
create Shortcuts for apps on the card.  These act much like the
Windows shortcuts of the same name: they are smal RAM based pointers
to the apps on the card.  Hotsync *does* see the shortcuts, and things
behave as expected.

LX works fine on the TX other things didn't.  Several things I run on
the Zodiac crash on the TX, and I even found myself having a crashing
app triggering a *hard* reset.  I hadn't seen *that* happen before.
It's stable now, but getting there took some doing, and I learned some
things and discovered some things in the process.

One absolute lifesaver was Alex Pruss's NVBackup.  NVBackup is a free,
open source backup utility for Palm devices.  It assumes you have an
expansion card, and does backups to the card.  You an choose to do a
complete backup to a new backup set, or an incremental backup that
backs up changed files to an existing backup set.  Backup sets are
written to the /Palm/Programs/NVBackup folder on the card, in
directories whose name are based on the date/timestamp of the backup
process.  NVBackup uses a Palm port of Zlib to do gzip compatible
compression on files as it adds them to the backup set to reduce the
space the set takes.  It copies itself to the /Palm/Launcher
directory, then does the backup.
When I had a hard reset, getting back to where I was was a matter of
running NVBackup from the card and doing a full restore.

In the process of getting the TX configured to my liking, I found a
few things I hadn't seen before.

One was CardReader, which was on the TX when I got it.  Card Reader
implements an interface which makes Windows see the expansion card as
a drive when the TX is plugged in via the USB Hotsync cable.  I can
copy and move files between the Windows host and the TX card without
needing to use a USB card reader or remove the card from the TX.

Another was MemHack.  MemHack is a freeware utility from a Japanese
author, that reproduces a capability I had back when on my old Visor
Pro using a commercial PiTech package.  One issue Palm users encounter
is that RAM is finite.  The application may be able to live on the
card, but what about data it uses?  For instance, I still use
BlueNomad's old Wordsmith word processor for Palm devices.  Wordsmith
can run from the card, and see and edit documents stored on the card
in the /Palm/Programs/Wordsmith directory.  But Wordsmith offers spell
checking and thesaurus facilities which require data files, and those
can't live on the card.  They must be in RAM.  MemHack addresses this.
You can put things like that in the /Palm/Programs/MemHack/<appname>
directory.  When you run the app, MemHack first copies files it finds
in the app directory to RAM, than runs the app.  When you exit the
app, it deletes the files from RAM.  The time required to copy the
data files to RAM from the card is minimal, and several megs of RAM
are freed when WS isn't in use.

A complimentary program is Folder, by Patrice Bernard, principal
author of the Metro public transit mapping program for Palm and a
variety of other devices.  Folder automatically moves data files you
hotsync to the device to the location on the card where the
corresponding application will look for them, like putting Plucker
documents in /Palm/Programs/Plucker.  There is a config screen where
you define things, giving the Creator ID of the app and the directory
on the card where its files will live.  It comes preconfigured for
Metro and Cabine, a French airline flight tracking program.

MemHack and Folder install as Preference Panels, and are configured from there.

The pick of the litter is probably Apt, an open source application
that is a sort of control panel on steroids for Palm devices.  Apt can
control things like screen brightness, sound volume, auto-off time and
device orientation, and can do so on an app by app basis.  It Apt is
enabled, you run the app and Apt applies the desired settings.  This
is a killer capability for me because the TX has a 320x480 screen, and
there are things I always want in portrait mode, like LX, and things I
always want in landscape, like the TCPMP media viewer or the Wordsmith
word processor.  I can set those defaults by app in Apt, and they are
applied automatically when the app is run, and reset to default values
when it completes.  Apt is one of those "Why didn't I know about this
*before*?" applications.  It's a power user's tool that takes some
time and doc reading to understand, but once you have all manner of
things are possible.

I'm putting copies of the distribution archives in the Peditors group
files area for convenience, but follow these links for things like
docs.  (Critical for Apt!)

Apt: http://apt-palm.wikidot.com/

Folder: http://metro.nanika.net/index-en.html

MemHack: Home page no longer available

NVBackup: http://handypalmstuff,sourceforge.net

So how have *your* lives been?  :-)
______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

 

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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