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PDA-to-blog test
One thing that I hope to do with this blog is use it to keep notes. Or, rather, observations, taking notes in the field.
What, you may ask, the hell am I going on about?
See, the plan is to take notes on my PDA, and then upload...sorry, transfer them to my computer, and from there to the blog. Yes: PDA. I bought a used PDA for a remarkably reasonable price. Ostensibly to take notes in meetings and the like. Actually, that's what I will be using it for. I have notebooks full of nigh-illegible notes, and it's a pain to search through page after dog-eared page, trying to find a few notes I took about a particular process, concept, or application. Plus, I type faster than I write. And I have a much better chance of being able to translate it a month or two in the future.
Plus, someone recommended this PDA model as a decent e-reader. Given the amount of stuff I read online, and the greater amount of stuff that I would read if it was more convenient to do so, that feature was quite appealing.
The PDA has a built-in keyboard, although it will be a while before I can use it to enter text with any appreciable speed. So I bought a nifty little folding keyboard which, although doubtless an ergonomic nightmare, is a nifty little item itself. And I don't think it's really much worse than many of the keyboards that ship with computers. And that don't fold into a protective case.
Anyway, that's a theory (the "using this thing to blog" one). Given that I need to break out the keyboard if I want to type anything more than a paragraph, I'm not sure how much more convenient it is for jotting down "as I think it" entries. But, darnit, that's not really what it was intended for. At least not by me.
It also seems to have somewhat crap battery life. Which, of course, is probably why it wasn't expensive. But I honestly wasn't expecting any last-gen PDA (or last-last-gen) to still have a pristine battery. If I could change the battery in a used iPod, then I can damn well change the one in this thing. I think. I haven't actually looked into that.
No, I can't do that right now. I would need to use Bluetooth to connect this to my cell phone to be able to access the Internet, and that falls well into the "cannot be arsed" category at the moment.