Priyadi’s Place

Pemakai Palm == Tukang Becak, itu topik yang akhir-akhir ini banyak dibicarakan di forum-forum pemakai PDA Palm di Indonesia. Saya sendiri terlambat menyadari hal ini karena kepergian saya ke Medan minggu kemarin. Sumber dari pernyataan tersebut tak lain dan tak bukan adalah satu lagi artikel ‘berbobot’ dari ReviewLand.com.

Oleh karena itu cukup konyol jika masih ada orang yg lebih berpendidikan dari tukang becak ternyata masih punya cita-cita / berencana memiliki PDA Palm

Saya sendiri pernah me-review Reviewland.com sebelum ini.

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My out of warranty Palm Tungsten T3‘s digitizer has been drifting away since several weeks ago. Just like everybody else did, recalibrating didn’t work. I tried from hard resetting the unit and trying several third party digitizer recalibration program like DigiE but the drift is still there. Knowing a software solution won’t solve the problem, I gave up and let the drift there. I’d just make mental adjustment whenever I was using the stylus.

I’m always reluctant to take apart things like this. I’m not that good with hardware. For example, in theory I know the pinout of an RJ-45 jack. However, whenever need to crimp them, I always end up with more failures than success. However, I’m also getting tired of this digitizer problem and decided that enough is enough. In the Internet, I’ve found some people have taken apart their Tungsten T3s in order to eliminate their digitizer problem with varying degrees of success. There are several take apart instructions, I use ones from gethightech.com and palmbattery.com.

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Now that my digital camera is working, I just created a script to download pictures semi automatically from my digital camera. It currently does the following:

• Camera device scanning, will refuse to run when camera is not plugged in.
• No need to specify the ever changing device node, the script will attempt to obtain necessary information from /proc filesystem
• Mounting and umounting
• Moving pictures from camera to specified directory (big deal!)
• Create two downsampled files from the pictures: a 200 pixel maximum side thumbnail and a 1000 pixel maximum side for online viewing, while still maintaining aspect ratio.
• Pictures are moved into subdirectory named after the current date.
• Open a Konqueror window on the final directory, if running under KDE.

Theory of operation: plug the camera, and run the script (keep in mind the ‘theory’ part :))

Requires:

• sudo, configured to run mount, umount and mkdir as root (security hole I know, this is not designed to run under multiuser environment)
• Kernel 2.6 with devfs
• ImageMagick

To do:

• Hotplug could be configured to run the script automatically whenever a camera is plugged in

Download it here.

After I lost my previous digital camera, the Casio Exilim EX-Z3 (it was stolen at Roxy), I turned my attention to my wife’s Olympus C-4000. In my opinion, this camera is nicer than the lost one. It is a bit bigger, but it is also more comfortable to hold. The picture quality is a lot better and the flash is much stronger.

However, it uses Smartmedia memory cards which I found very fragile. With my old camera, I used to transfer pictures to my computer by removing its Secure Digital and placing it inside my card reader. With Smartmedia, I found out that reading a Smartmedia card with a card reader often rendered it unreadable by the camera, while still readable by computer.

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Some people just have too much time on their hands. They have upgraded and tweaked their computers, their gadgets, their cell phones, their living rooms, their houses and more. This time they feel compelled to ‘upgrade’ their (living) dog.

Before we get started, we should say that we have high hopes for the future of organic dog ownership. Come on, AIBOs have WiFi, a camera and can be programmed to do a wide variety of tasks, and speak in many voices and languages. There’s no reason (besides nature, of course) that our organic dogs shouldn’t at least stay competitive with their robot counterparts.

See the whole story at Engadget.