Messages

31

Deals and Great Z Buys / Semsons battery extender $6.99

« on: May 20, 2004, 09:21:43 am »

You would not get double the run-time if the external batteries were the same rating as the internal batteries!

You have to remember two things. First is plain \'loss\'. You not only go through various connections (each connection has a resistance loss), but you have to go through the charging/power circuit of the Z itself. This eats some battery power.

Second, if you have batteries iin the Z, and who wouldn\'t?, the power from the external batteries would be used to charge them. Charging batteries is always at a power loss. It takes more power to charge than the power return.

I haven\'t done battery electronics in years, so I can\'t come up with any numbers, but there\'s no way that an equal external battery supply can double the run-time of the internal batteries.

Luckily, you can buy batteries with considerable more power than the internals and may be able to approach doubling the life. Maybe there\'s a battery expert out there who could figure it out? Too much trouble for me ;-)

But the Semson\'s units are nice and well worth the money. Even though I built my own for a couple of dollars, I just received the simple $6 Semson\'s unit. I liked the idea of an on/off switch and it turned out to be a bit smaller than the one I made.

I also bought their \"Pocket Power Bank\" with the buolt-in AC charger. This comes with a set of 1600mah  Ni-mh batteries and is quite a bit bigger than the simple battery pack. But it has the advantage of being able to plug directly into any AC socket to recharge. That seemed like quite a convenience to me. I didn\'t realize though that it used an external usb connector wire to plug itno the Z. That\'s not bad, but it\'s an extra piece to get lost....

32

5x00 Hardware / 5600 worth it? Or go with 5500?

« on: May 20, 2004, 09:07:46 am »

Well, nobody asked, but I\'ll offer my opinion on that too ;-)

If the 6000 (or clamshell) came down to $300, I would buy one in a heartbeat and be very happy. I may be a programmer, but I\'m not overly fond of technology. I would dump $300 into a bellows for a 100 year old large format camera long before I would buy another $300 \"PDA\"...

I think the smartest thing Sharp could do would be to keep the 5600 in production at the $300 level. For most of us, that\'s a lot of money for a \"PDA\", but close enough that people would be tempted to buy one. That would get them into the linux arena and maybe \'upgrade\' later to a 6000 or clamshell model.

I bought my 5600 about 6 months ago and love it. Use it every single day for just about everything it is capable of doing, although I have yet to install gcc on it (need a bigger sd card). But I would never spend $600 on a \"PDA\" or handheld computer. That\'s getting too close to the cost of a very capable laptop that would do for me much more.

I am either lucky or plain dumb as I don\'t seem to have any of the problems most people complain about. I easily synch to my Lotus Organiser and run all the software I need, all with Sharp\'s ROM. My complaints about the 5600 are so minor I can\'t even remember any at the moment! Okay, maybe the text editir not being able to create scripts, but that was easily fixed...

The 6000 may be an incredible machine, but it\'s just too expensive for most of us. I see no reason why Sharp couldn\'t keep a less expensive model, like the 5600, to get people interested in their products. After all, you can buy a palm type pda for less than $100 and that does get people hooked on using one! And I would hope the 5600 stays around for a while just in case mine breaks! I would hate to be left with no replacement after all I have invested in it...

33

5x00 Hardware / 5600 worth it? Or go with 5500?

« on: May 17, 2004, 11:36:55 pm »

The 5600 is deffinitely the best!  Does that answer the question?

Of course, I might feel differently if I owned another model! ;-)

In mmy opinion, there\'s not enough of a difference from the user\'s viewpoint to decide which is better between the 5500 and 5600.

The simple reasons I bought the 5600 are:

Much bigger battery.
Newer, including the software.
Supposedly a better screen(? I have no idea if true)
And who knew it would be discontinued weeks after I bought it?
Faster processor (maybe?)

I would undoubtedly be just as hapy with a 5500 as everything I do with mine, people do with 5500\'s.

I have yet to find a Z program written for the 5500 that I can\'t run. I\'m sure there are some out there someplace?

The simple solution is: buy one and be happy with what you have. With the help I\'ve received here, we\'ve gotten roadmap to work just fine, slrn (thank you!!!) and many other programs. So far there is nothing I want to do with my Z that I haven\'t been able to. But I\'m still searching ;-)

The only thing I haven\'t done is run another kernel. I just don\'t see any reason to. The Sharp kernel does everything I want, never crashes and works just fine...

As far as being a \"PDA\", I think the Z is the best I\'ve ever seen and I use it as one. As far as the Z being a computer, it is and works great and I use it as one. Although using it as a VNC viewer to control my dekstop machines may not be in the category of \'computer\'? I don\'t know. But it does a few other computerish things too ;-)

Now if the 6000 would just be discontinued so I could afford one of those.....

34

General Discussion / RSS reader midlet?

« on: May 14, 2004, 04:46:29 pm »

Zepo does rss and web off-line capture/reading. Works fine on my 5600 with Sharp rom. It\'s not free, but very cheap. It also has a couple minor bugs, but the author does respoond to reports and I\'m waiting right now for an update. I use it all the time to read The Onion off-line and quite a few rss feeds...
Zepo at Handango

35

User Request for Applications / Working VT-100 and serial port

« on: May 08, 2004, 10:35:25 pm »

JeTermZ is a serial port controller & communicator (capture & stuff). It doesn\'t do VT-100 terminal emulation at all. As far as I know, Flash has talked directly with the SerialIO folks and they acknowledge the lack of VT-100 terminal in the Z\'s and may work on a terminal program. Until then, we were looking for something that might work that has full VT-100 support in  at least 80 columns...

36

User Request for Applications / Working VT-100 and serial port

« on: May 02, 2004, 04:52:59 pm »

How do you get opie-kionsole to talk to the serial port? I\'m running verion 1.03 here and see no way to make it a serial terminal? Please let us know...

37

User Request for Applications / Pinball & solitaire

« on: April 29, 2004, 02:29:14 pm »

By the time I was capable of doing such programming, none of us would still be using Z\'s ;-)

And by TKC\'s program looks, I would think it would need some serious reconfiguration to run in the vertical 5600 mode, or TKC would have done it to make more money... If theirs ran in vertical and had click & move, I would buy it... And I\'d get my money\'s worth out of it...

Now maybe I should persue Z development a bit more seriously? If I had the time and a high speed connection to download all the stuff needed...

38

User Request for Applications / Pinball & solitaire

« on: April 28, 2004, 03:51:08 pm »

Okay, I got bored and decided to post, but maybe someone will either write it or point me to where it exists...

First, I need a decent pinball game... Don\'t know why? Love to play it on my palm device, but can\'t find anything for the Z...

Next. Would someone PLEASE do a solitaire where you don\'t have to drag the cards across the screen! My all time favorite game and there\'s a couple of nice ones out there but I hate dragging the stylus across the screen...

Anyway... Thanks  

39

Software / RSS client

« on: April 28, 2004, 03:42:54 pm »

Doesn\'t Zepo do rss feeds? I thought so. It\'s commercial, but cheap, and it works great.
See: http://www.killefiz.de/zaurus/showdetail.php?app=683

40

Software / Palm sync to Zaurus

« on: April 27, 2004, 09:59:04 pm »

I\'ve never heard of any direct synch, but I synch both my palm device and my Z to my Lotus Organizer on my desktop using Intellisynch with no problems...

41

Software / Zepo - Off line browser

« on: April 18, 2004, 11:03:52 pm »

It\'s very simple, with a catch.

Click on the little wrench icon on the top right of the zepo screen. The Preferences screen has an option to choose the cache directory. You can choose any directory including ones on /mnt/card or /mnt/cf. BUT, that directory must already exist! I created a zepo cache directory on my sd card, then went back to zepo and selected it in the Preferences. Works fine...

42

Sharp ROMs / Screen Rotate

« on: April 01, 2004, 12:26:07 am »

I would guess that the rotation is helpful for IR keyboards so the sensors can face each other while typing.

That said, I agree with the rest that it would be great to rotate in the other direction. Even better if this could be chosen (in case you have an IR keyboard)...

43

Software / 5600 permissions? nethack and gutenbrowser ...

« on: March 31, 2004, 04:36:37 pm »

The only \'permissions\' I set when I installed it was to hold down the stylus on the nethack icon and set it to run with root priviledges. I\'ve found most of the software written for the 5500 work just fine after setting this option as the original 5500 only ran as root and the software was written to run that way... Give it a try...

44

General Discussion / Only 3 questions...

« on: March 27, 2004, 10:48:13 am »

I just tried Handcom Sheet 1.5 formatting. I tried the number format for 0.00 and currency format for \"$\"#,##0.00 and both preserved the correct formatting for cells, either ones that had entries or empty cells tht I typed new entries into. I selected the column by tapping on the column letter, then selecting the format. This seems to work correctly here? Maybe you are using a different format selection?

And the \".:\' key type a period just fine on my machine...

I also use tkcPlayer for ogg & mp3. Works great. BUT (and someone out there will love this ;-)  ), it does have a problem with some specific files. I never did get the time to investigate further, but it looks like it has trouble with certain encoding rates and will play the file at half speed. It\'s possible xmms might have the same problem as they use the same libraies as far as I know? Other than that, it\'s a great player...

45

General Discussion / theKompany gone?

« on: March 26, 2004, 11:14:54 am »

I fully agree that they should not charge the full price when you upgrade your machine. If/when I step up to an 860 or whatever, I would be quite upset if I couldn\'t run my tkc software. I tend to like the companies that at least offer discounts when you have to buy a different version of the same software you already bought. To charge the full price is wrong in my opinion. But again, we\'re not talking about $600 software here either...

Tkc and their software isn\'t perfect, but it\'s good and far from expensive. Considering what else we have to choose from, it would help a lot if the users were just a little bit gentler in their criticism.

And I do understand \'the other side\'. For anyone from a similar background who may remember, I would still love to get my hands on that idiot who owns Stardock in the OS/2 days! At least tkc hasn\'t left the Z-ship yet...