💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20181116 captured on 2022-01-08 at 13:47:11.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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Last night, after reading Leveck's week long blog on his trip (written on his Sony Clie PEG-UX50)[1] and tfurrow's commentary on writing offline being "more productive, more introspective, and more fun"[2], I went downstairs, dusted off a very old box, and pulled out my HP Jornada 680. I've always been careful about storing the battery properly, and it seems to have paid off. I put the battery and the backup coin cell in, and it fired right up. There, in all it's glory, was the calibration screen. So I calibrated it (poke, poke), set the date and time (it's not 1998 anymore, Toto!) and left it to charge overnight. This is why I find myself sitting at the dining room table, having a drink, and typing to that charming faux-typewriter sound. The Jornada was always a bit of a strange but intriguing little device. The first time I saw one was in 1998. I wanted it badly (it was so ... pocketable!), but I was a student and it was well over $1000 CDN. So I just looked. At Christmas several years later (2006, I think), I stumbled across the HPC:Factor and HPCNEC websites and the fascination started all over again. A few years after that, an NEC MobilePro 900 appeared on eBay for a reasonable price and I snapped it up. It was a fun device. I spent hours setting it up, installing a custom ROM created by a woman named cmonex (you can still dig up her very gopher-esque website on archive.org[3]), and even streaming internet radio with it. But then I drifted into Palm devices again, the MobilePro was sold to some anonymous character in Chicago, and life went on... Until the HPC bug hit again. This particular little Jornada was put up for sale on eBay by someone holding an estate sale. It was long enough ago that you could still find miscategorized items (eBay suggests the proper categories now) and it was definitely miscategorized. I got it for $5 and about $10 shipping. Since I'm a tech hound, I already had a PCMCIA WiFi card that worked with it, and the first few nights after I got it were spent sitting out on my porch, drinking beer, and reading the Paxil diaries on Kuro5hin.org and Slashdot. The author, McGrew, was the only good thing ever to happen on Kuro5hin, and has since compiled the diaries into a book. I highly recommend it. Very Bukowski-esque. You can get it (free) at mcgrewbooks.com[4]. Anyways, the Jornada's WiFi days are long since over, since it only supported WEP encryption. But it seems fairly good for hacking out phlog entries. I must confess, though, that the little keyboard is cramped and is taking some time to get used to again. The ancient Palm LifeDrive and the Palm IR keyboard might be better, even with that hinge in the middle of the space bar, exactly where my thumb usually makes contact. Who designed that thing anyways? The other news of note today is that I've discovered that running an "e-mail, web, news or other similar server" or a "relay server" is a violation of my ISP's terms of service. They've even blocked all of the typical ports (not on the router, but rather system-wide for all residential customers). But they didn't block gopher port 70 ;) I doubt they would care much about a gopher server, but it throws a bit of a wrench in my home server plans, especially as regards XMPP. A business account, which permits servers, is another $240/year. So I might just get one of those little $15/year VPS's. It's irritating though. The internet was invented to allow bi-directional communication. I guess that's it for me tonight. Keep writing, people. I'm really enjoying your phlogs. [1] gopher://1436.ninja/0/Phlog/20181113.post [2] gopher://grex.org/0/%7etfurrows/phlog/latest/adl_roadtripGopher.txt [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20110108205750/http://hpcmonex.net/ [4] https://www.mcgrewbooks.com/Paxil/index.html