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Tech: Pocket PC email and ssh (or lack there of) and general woes
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

Alright, so its been one of those weekends. This will be one of those rant postings, so feel free to just ignore it entirely - but let me summarize and say that Pocket PC should be good as a temporary replacement for a laptop, but it isn't so far..

Updated July 25th 2005 - see bottom.
Updated July 26th 2005 - see bottom.

So heres some of whats irritating me 'right now':

Alright, so after having wasted a good three hours or so, maybe I'll just sit at my desk and do support mail there. Or maybe use ssh or snappermail on my trusty Treo 650 -- they both work out of the box. Just the Treo 650's 2" square screen isn't what I'd hoped to stare at for the evening...

Technology sucks. I'm glad I sat in the sun and burnt myself to a crisp yesterday.. goal, process, achieved. No failures :)

Update:

Alright, now that I've gotten less into the "smash technology by Crom!" mode and into the "trying to get on with it" mode, thhings are getting a little better. I've dropped off the laptop with a repair fellow and have lines to a couple cheap replacements, and perhaps can trade it in for something, or perhaps replace some of its parts with junkers from other similar models... we'll see in a few days.

I installed OzVGA for PoPC to get the PDA into "real VGA" mode, which can be sharp. Normally I push specific applications into VGA mode by using a 'mui' trick, which I should document here in case others need to know it.. but putting the whole device into VGA mode can be pretty nifty. In this case, it lets Pocket Putty get the whole 80 character width when in landscape mode, so I'll give that a shot.. SSH and IR wireless keyboard should turn this into a passable mini terminal perhaps, so I can maybe catch up on some email?

Oh, I should note that OzVGA didn't really work well for me when I installed it -- only a few applications actually worked. In a thread on Aximsite someone pointed out that maybe SE_VGA would repair OzVGA (silly to need both, since they're 'competing' freeware tools) so I installed her .. within SE_VGA everything seems to work well, so I've not bothered yet to try out OzVGA.. since well, when in SE_VGA, you don't need OZVGA right? (OzVGA has some additional features mind you.) Anyway, web browsing on the PDA in real VGA is pretty swank..

Update:

OKay, so after installing SE_VGA along with OzVGA I got proper high res mode going. Getting home I pulled out the IR wireless keyboard (from PalmOne no less, with driver from Think Outside), fired up Pocket Putty in real VGA and was finally able to get a decent font size and manage an 80x25 screen as Crom intended. See pic..

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