Fetish

I will forestall the sexual jokes, first of all, by referring you to these parts of the (dictionary.com) definition of fetish:

1: An object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers, especially such an object associated with animistic or shamanistic religious practices.
4: An abnormally obsessive preoccupation or attachment; a fixation.

I will concede that I like my little bits of shiny geek wizardy, certainly more than my bank manger thinks is healthy, but I don’t wanna hump them, or anything. Having cleared that up, I can move on to talking about my shiny new toy, a Palm Tunsten C, which I acquired most for the joys of wireless networking it bestows upon me. I was resigned to having to wait until next year to be able to abuse that facility in the office, where we are not yet wireless (although we plan to be), but it turns out that actually there’s someone nearby with an unsecured wireless network that I can gank bandwidth off, should I develop a burning need to. The house, has, obviously, been wireless a while now. I discovered this morning that the range of the network just about covers the bus stop outside out front door, which is great because it means I can get my emails as I’m waiting for the bus in the mornings..

Slightly annoyingly, the keyboard I bought to use with it doesn’t seem to work. The thumb keyboard is fine, but the one I was planning to actually, y’know, type on just produces gibberish. Specifically, gibberish I’m not telling it to type. But I’ve got a ticket in with Palm’s support people, who have been helpful to other of my acquiantance in the past, so I live in hope. If all else fails, I’ll send it back to Amazon, and think about getting a different one.

I have discovered something odd, though, in the browser that comes installed. It’s CSS implementation is, erm, quirky, but I can forgive that, given that it’s trying to cut web pages designed for screens that are three times as large down to a useable size, but there’s a very odd quirk if I look at 9A that doesn’t seem to occur anywhere else, to whit: everything renders properly, exactly in line with what the stylesheet is demanding, except the navbar on the left, which just doesn’t render at all. No sign of it. Very strange. (It does, however render my friends page just perfectly – the content column is exactly the width of the screen, provided no-one has stuck any whacking great pictures on it…

Expect more of my adventures with the new toy over the next few days. Because I hate you all, and want to bore you to death.

5 thoughts on “Fetish

  1. Your cunning ploy is doomed to fail, I’m afraid, because I’m contemplating buying one of these (with keyboard) myself, and am very interested to hear how you get on.

    Have you tried playing movies on it yet?

    Charlie Stross () has an excellent keyboard for his – really scarily good. You can even type with it on your knee.

    The only thing that’s holding me back is the price. After all, an Axim from Dell is nearly £100 cheaper for the top of the line.

  2. You don’t happen to have more details on exactly what keyboard he’s got, do you – I bought the ulta-thin one http://www-5.palmone.com/uk/en/products/accessories/palm_tc.html#peripherals (bottom of the list of keyboards there on the right)? Only that after my saying they’d helped other in the past, they’ve been 14 shades of useless with me, and are now talking about replacing my otherwise perfectly functioning handheld in order to fix a problem with the keyboard, which seems a bit cracked to me, and I don’t want to be without my new toy.

  3. From Charlie:

    It’s a Palm Folding Keyboard XP — buy it from Palm.com or any Palm dealer!

    Note that Palm make *two* folding keyboard and an IR keyboard. You want the XP folding keyboard. Note also that Dixons’ sell ’em for 100 quid, but the US dollar price is only $99 and some of the big UK-based online PDA stores sell them for about that in GBP (I paid about 75, inc VAT and delivery, for mine).

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