COR 12: The Final Setup
This seems to be it. My Palm has achieved indepndence from the desktop and I am ready to hit the road. Here is the final setup:
Hardware:
- Palm m125 in Palm Glove®
- USB cradle (just in case)
- Logitech™ foldable keyboard
- 2x 32MB SD cards (the m125 can not read cards >32MB unaided!)
- Kingston USB card reader
Software
- Keyboard drive
- Wordsmith (Bluenomad)
- BackupbuddyVFS personal (ditto)
- WSconvgui (graphical interface for Wordsmith-RTF conversion script)
Both WSconvgui and BBVFS are installed on either card.
WSconvgui replaces SyncWizard which Mark Moxon used; documents can be directly converted from the card, using WS’s own WSconv script. You can download a free version which allows conversion of memos, but this useful tool costs a mere 5€ and registering it releases a key which allows conversion of databases (files) greater than 5k. The site is in German, scroll down to the English download button. The ReadMe explains all you need to know and the guy who programmed it will answer email queries.
For backups, BBVFS ‘Professional’ would be a better choice than my ‘Personal’ (formerly ‘Lite’) version, because it lets you back up individual files as well as perform scheduled backups, but after my experiences with various programs—including Palm’s own—I did not want to take any chances. The more complicated the software, the more can go wrong. John may have raised his eyebrows at this, but the minimum that works is my motto. Important files (carefully constructed plots, amazing flashes of brilliance, detailed technical notes) will have to be moved individually from card to RAM (and then to a specific category, if desired) before backing them up along with everything else. Most of the time I’ll leave the Palm behind anyway and just take the card reader with me to upload my scribblings. I might occasionally duplicate a file, then move the duplicate to RAM if I’m particularly paranoid about dropping the card on the way, but it is possible to be too paranoid. When I collected my malaria pills from the pharmacy, I caught myself wondering how to back them up (I’ll keep some in a separate jar, but they are widely available over the counter in SE Asia).
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