What to do with a Palm Z22?
My wife was working a street fair on sunday and as per normal I got bored after about 30 minutes and started wandering the side streets looking for stoopsales and flea markets. Sometimes I find some good stuff, books i haven't yet read and would like too, old computer parts and stuff I have no idea what it is but looks cool. This time I found a pair of Palm Z22's and after a bit of haggling I ended up getting them, two palm usb cables and a palm charger for nowt 
getting stuff free, gratis and for nothing is probably my 3rd favourite thing in the whole world 
-- One of the Z22's was perfect, nary a scratch on it (a few worn spots on the touch screen but you don't really notice them unless you look for them) and the other has a dead touch screen and is now in pieces as i learn how to take it apart, put it back together and see what's what.
I do now have a problem. what on earth to do with the working Z22? I have messed around with it and put a BASIC interpreter on it (hotpaw) and a few other bits and bobs but i'm now at a loss what to do next with it. Anyone have any ideas on what I could use it for?
Checkpoint UTM-1 Appliances for sale
A friend is selling his old Checkpoint UTM-1 Appliances on ebay as they are just sitting around doing nothing and gathering dust. If you are interested the auction is here
Samsung Netbook modded with a Pixel Qi Display on ebay
A few weeks ago Hunter Davis modded a Samsung N210 netbook with a Pixel Qi display. Well now he has tired of it and wants it out of his house as it is just cluttering up the place. Not really but he has decided to sell it on ebay. If you want to buy a completly unique netbook, only one in the whole Galaxy then follow this link to the ebay auction.
Disclaimer: I might bid on this myself if I can find a way to deal with my paypal problems and the wife opens the household purse to my sticky mitts but other than that I have no personal motive in posting this other than it is pretty cool..
Wireless charging for the Zipit® Now™ device (previously known as the Z3)
Apparently the new Zipit Wireless Inc. two-way pager device that is aimed at doctors and other staff in hospitals is to get wireless charging ability using a battery cover made by wiprowess.
You can find a press release about this here or a post on wiprowess's blog.
I've also found another photo of the Zipit® Now™ device.
Possible photo of the Zipit Enterprise Critical Messaging Solution (the Z3)
It's not a very good photo but I was googling today and found an article in pcmag about the Zipit Wireless Inc. ECMS and it included a possible photo of the "Z3" hardware. I'm asking around to see if this is in fact a real photo of the Z3 but so far no response. you can find the actual pcmag article here.
Update: Just had it confirmed that it is the "Z3" otherwise known as the ECMS (and probably alot of other things too) -- here is a larger image of it. Images copyright 2011 Zipit Wireless Inc.
Finally joined the Twafia
I was going through the list of all the old, alpha and beta accounts I have signed up for over the years and noticed that in the micro blogging category i've had a twitter account for over 3 years (not used my identi.ca either) and apart from a few test tweets I haven't ever used it.
Rather than just let it exist I decided that it might be worth adding twitter functionality to an IZ2Se/EZ2S standalone application i wrote about 18 months ago that works sort of like http://startty-config.com/ and pushes a clock, weather and email notifications to the Zipit Z2 (with pretty graphics) every minute or so. To do this I actually need a twitter account that is populated with a few followers, followings and tweets so i've decided to start using twitter. I'll be posting mostly about stuff i'm interested in, along with my blog posts and some general bits and pieces, so probably really boring stuff but if you want to see what i'm upto the you should follow @ukscone ( http://twitter.com/ukscone ).
can bloggers and the twafia turn a VR museum into an RL museum?
The Centre for Computing History in Suffolk (bordering Essex, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk in the UK) is trying to raise £1,500,000 so that they can go from being a virtual museum to become a physical museum. To those ends they are asking the twitterverse/blogiverse for donations.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/13891/
The centre for computing history is a very important cause especially because they will be preserving working (and alowing people to use them) computers from the heyday of the British computer industry, the 80s, where anyone with 50 grand and a dream could become a computer manufacturer and anyone with 10 quid and some programming skill could become a computer game software publisher (or software house.)
The lowest form of life.
I just woke up, kicked the "trouble and strife" Â out of the house and off to work, fed the cats and made coffee and sat down to trawl the web as I do every weekday morning. However this morning I stumbled across a blog post that made me want to take a baseball bat to the author's head or at least to his computer. Adam Roberts posted an article on "the amateur gourmet" titled "How To Always Get A Seat at a Crowded Coffee Shop". Being British I know that there are rules that apply when queuing, especially when waiting for a bus or in a coffee shop/cafe, and that even after over twenty years in the states I am fighting a losing battle when trying to educate Americans about these rules. (I still can't get the wife to queue properly although I am doing slightly better with my son but I was able to get to him early). Apart from the fact that people who go to places like Starbucks, or the coffee area at Barnes and Nobles, or any local coffee shop/cafe and whip out their computer and sit there for hours and hours nursing one or two beverages are the lowest form of life and will be first against the wall come the revolution I take particular umbrage to his point three.
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(3) If they say "no" and the seat's available immediately drape your coat over the back of the chair and deposit your bag on the seat. This, obviously, secures the seat as yours; then go stand in line and order your coffee and keep an eye on your stuff. But congratulations: you've scored a seat at a crowded coffee shop!
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NO! NO! NO!
That is not what you do. In fact it is the complete opposite of what you do. You first of all queue to purchase your drink THEN you look around for an unoccupied chair (and table). Coffee shops are not an extension of your house/office, they are not places where you write blog posts, they are not places to pose with your macbook pretending to write a screenplay, they are places where you go to have a drink, maybe read a few pages or a chapter of the book you are currently reading, relax for a few minutes or maybe have a political or philosophical debate with your friends, in other words use a coffee shop as they were first intended NOT as your private poser kingdom of obnoxiousness. DRINK YOUR BEVERAGE AND LEAVE ALREADY. If you want to do some work or browse the web do it in your home or office.
I need as many USB Bluetooth adapters as I can get hold of
I need to get hold of as many USB Bluetooth adapters as I can. Especially Class 1 and those that have an external antenna. If anyone has any lying around surplus to requirements I could really use them.
Saving pennies when compiling
[ Seventeenth in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 13/10/10]
My build systems are basically anything that I can get via freecycle, from the street on garbage day and what people send me (hint hint ). I am currently using an UltraSparc 5, a couple of dell dimensions and 3 or 4 trashday specials. These are all powehogs, especially the UltraSparc which doubles as a room heater during the winter. These systems when combined with the 2 tv's, 2 cable boxes, 2 main computers, 3 routers, 1 monitor , 1 printer, lights, fridge, air conditioners and other miscellenous bits and bobs makes for a very hefty electricity bill each month, ConEd also charges one of highest electricity rates in the country so i'm always looking for ways to lower my bill. I'm also always on the lookout for methods to streamline my developement process especially as i currently compile for a variety of processors, x86, ARM, MIPS, Z80, 8085...
I currently use lots of VirtualBox Virtual machines scattered across several systems along with Scratchbox1/2, Aboriginal Linux, Buildroot, Code Sourcery, Qemu and some homebrewed toolchains and scripts. One of the things i've been mulling over the last few months is rather than using the various desktops I have scattered around the aprtment is using several wall wart servers like the pogoplug, guruplug... They are pretty cheap, very low power and if you throw enough of them at a build job they'd probably work pretty well. I haven't done any number crunching but i am willing to exchange time (build time and setup time etc) for money (electricity bill) as I think that i'd recover the costs of a few wall wart servers in 6 months or so (if i halve my current electricity bill). Hunter Davis has a very interesting post on his corporate blog about this and he's got some "believeable" numbers too that seem to back up my thinking so I think i'll start actually doing something about it rather than just thinking about it.