Palm, Mac
=========

I don't use this combination too often but there are situations when it
is useful. I  have several Apple devices, one of  them is the Powerbook
G4. I also have several (well over 10) Palm handhelds. Most of my Palms
are Palm Pilot or Palm III ones  (and their clones like the Handera 330
or the  TRG Pro). All these  devices use serial port  for connection to
another computers.  This is  OK and they  can work with  my old  SGI O2
without issues (and they can  communicate with more modern devices with
use of USB-serial adapters).

But some of devices use an  USB connection thus they are not compatible
with  pre-USB  computers. Such  devices  can  be  connected or  to  the
Powerbook (or other semi-modern Apples)  or to Linux computers. Not all
Palm works  with all  these computers. For  example, the  Palm Tungsten
W  can  work with  my  PC-compatible  laptop  but  not with  my  POWER9
workstation (the issue might be in software  as I use the Fedora on the
POWER9 but the Ubuntu  on x86 and ARM ones). It  works happily with the
Powerbook, though.

So now I'm using  my Apple PowerBook G4 to synchronise  data on my Palm
Tungsten W  communicator. It works  as expected. It is  somewhat slower
than I would expect from device connected through USB but it works.

Today I  also installed updated maps  form the Metro program  [1]. They
are still updated! If you don't know the Metro it is a program which can
find metro/tram/bus connections  in many cities. Of  course, it depends
on data provided by  volunteers so some cities aru up  to date and some
are horribly outdated. The Wien, for example, was updated yesterday but
my home city (Ostrava, Czech Republic)  was updated about 16 years ago.
Even then it  included only a part of city  transprt network. Prague is
not  much better.  It's amazing  anyway that  people in  many countries
still use this software.

To get these data  from my Prague I have used  the TenFourFox [2] (last
update was  few days ago,  excellent!) The  speed of the  TenFourFox is
still good.  Even these  days. I  read the Dex's  Czech article  at [3]
about his problems with the  PowerMac G5 and speed/compatibility of the
TenFourFox. I think that a decent  G4 machine can offer better services
than the big and noisy G5 workstation these days. I'm not sure if there
is big speed advantage for tasks like  WWW browsing if one use even the
latest G5 box. The last PowerBook  (1.67MHz one with HD display) is not
much worse  in my opinion, An  it is incomparably quieter,  smaller and
much more portable.  And it offers many of expansion  ports that the G5
has: the Firewire, the USB 2, the DVI and more. There is also a CARDBUS
(PCMCIA) slot for some more expansion.


Written in the Vim on the PowerBook G4 with OS 10.5.


References:

[1] http://metro.nanika.net
[2] http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com
[3] http://dexovo.cz

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