General, Personal

PalmIIIxe – Part 1 – Setting up the Vintage Hardware so that it is useful again

I miss the simplicity of the Palm Pilot. Maybe I’m getting old, but there is something about it that I can’t help but to feel that its exactly what I need. No distractions of a modern GUI, and just straight out text. However, I no longer have a unit anymore. In progressing from the various PDAs, handhelds and mobile phones, I have either sold off all my units or had them break down on me. As such, I set out to select and purchase a Palm series PDA in 2018.

The selection criteria as follows. It had to be (1) easy to maintain, (2) easy to fix, (3) fun to use. This meant that no has Li-ion battery, with primitive parts to replace or change. Straight forward to rip apart and replace parts and to hack too! I ultimately settled on the Palm IIIxe. Its AAA batteries, push buttons and a screw on back meant that it met all my above criterias. (You can probably find the Palm IIIxe specs somewhere on the internet). The vintage set cost about USD$50 bucks. And just a fun project, I bought it with the intention to make it useful again, one way or another, and make it fit with the modern world that we live in.

PalmIIIxe Box
Continue reading PalmIIIxe — Part 1 — Setting up the Vintage Hardware so that it is useful again →
Personal

Singapore Park Connector Network Notices

For the cyclist in Singapore. If you are riding the damn Park Connector Network (PCN), its not easy to find a closure notice of the various segments of the PCN. I’ve been pissed off multiple times riding on the PCN and getting to a section thats closed and having to do a unwanted detour. I have therefore created a RSS feed that will show all the notices from NParks. This scraps information from NParks notices using Feed43.com RSS creation service. Its not perfect, but it works.

So if you use RSS, subscribe to https://feed43.com/0648841305680252.xml and you should see which are the sections that are closed. I hope it helps someone out there.

Sample PCN notices output

 

General, Personal

Shikashima Lesuire Ride

A short round of riding to help break up the monotony of sightseeing. Nice bayside ride with a couple of simple cafes along the way. The bike rental was OK in price but it was surely worth the experience.

While I didn’t ave the chance to cycle round the entire route, I can certainly see why this would be a very enjoyable ride to experience if done in full.