I bought a new toy. A Palm Zire 72. I needed something to help keep me a bit more organized, and carrying scraps of paper around just doesn’t cut it when one is prone to losing important scraps of paper.
I’ve owned a Palm before, but was never really happy with it, and couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. I just found it – uncomfortable. It was an M125, and using the stylus was always a pain. It never quite hit the right spot when I tried to do something, and my ‘graffiti’ skills were worse than my regular handwriting.
After messing around with the Zire, I found that this model seems to be a lot more comfortable, I can write fairly quickly as there have been some obvious improvements in recognizing letters via graffiti, and the screen is nice, bright, and far more useable.
The other neat thing is that it’s also got a built in camera and voice recorder. While the camera feature doesn’t take the greatest of images, considering this is a Palm, it’s not bad.
I was looking for something from the Open Source world that would convert jpg.pdb files to jpg images, so I wouldn’t have to use Windows in order to take advantage of the camera on the Palm. Sure enough, I found Par, a command line utility that will not only convert from Palm format, but will also convert to Palm format. And with the latest KDE Desktop, including Kontact, I still don’t need my Windows box except for one thing… and I hope one of these days, there will be a business accounting software for Linux as good as Quick Books.
Then I can say “Bye-bye,” to Microsoft forever.
The image above this post is of my 19 month old son, taken with the Palm Zire.