I recently got back from a week’s vacation in Europe (to Antony: the trip cost less than your iMac, MacBook Pro, or PowerMac G4), but I’m not in the mood to talk about that just yet. Later this week, when I’ve mostly recovered from jet lag, I’ll give a better description. I can say now that I took 1157 photos and a bit over 110 minutes of video.
My replacement screen came in the mail while I was away, so naturally within two hours of getting home I tried it out. It turns out the seller actually gave me an XGA screen instead of the advertised SXGA+ screen, and at that the CCFL backlight didn’t work. So much for a $79 miracle screen that fixes my monitor problems - I’m in the process of returning it to the seller and obtaining a refund. Meanwhile, there are now nine or ten multicolored lines through my screen, making this a very expensive portable desktop.
In other news, I found a set of directions for a Handspring Visor Deluxe battery charger. Seeing as the VisorPhone can run through a set of AAA batteries in a few days (one pair usually lasts two weeks without the phone attached), I decided that it would be worthwhile to implant a battery charger inside the Visor itself. The design uses two switching diodes to drop the voltage and limit the charging current to appropriate levels. Rather than running the risk of charging 2.4-volt NiMH batteries at too high a voltage, I’m using Rechargeable Alkaline batteries, which have the same cell voltage of 1.5v as regular alkalines. That coupled with a 5v power source charges the batteries at 3.27v (according to the very useful BatmonPanel), which is just about what is needed. Now I don’t have to take the batteries out every few days for charging, and I would like Antony to note that this cost less than ten dollars to make.
I rediscovered AvantGo earlier today, whose Palm OS client apparently still runs on the archaic Palm OS 3.0. When I still had my now-sold Tungsten E, I used AvantGo to occasionally read CNet, Wired, and some of the other free journals they had available. Now I’m using it for weather forecasts via AccuWeather.com’s channel, to sync my RSS feeds to my handheld (making it a nice complement to Eudora, which I use for e-mail), and to keep logs of my Craigslist posts for when buyers come by to pick up items. Even after installing Eudora, AvantGo, OmniRemote, and a Paint-like app, I’m still using under 2MB of memory. That said, I admittedly wonder why the Visor Deluxe’s big brother, the Visor Pro, shipped with 16MB of memory… Time to test my luck and shove an NES emulator on it?