I gave my brain a heart transplant

[elfs]

An open brain

Last night I gave my brain a heart transplant. My poor Palm m500 is over five years old now, and the battery was seriously crimping my style. In heavy use (i.e. when I was using the E-book reader two or three hours a day) it would die after only two days of use. I've always been good about battery discipline, making sure not to do half-assed charges that cyst the battery, but after five years it was time for an update. You have no idea how it is to be twenty pages away from the end of a Bujold novel only to have the OS tell you, "You have less that 2% of battery power left. Shutting down to preserve on-board memory." That's happened to me twice in the past few weeks.

As it turned out, the update was pretty trivial. The new battery cost about $24, not unreasonable for a high-tech custom use thing, and it came with four different sizes of torx screwdrivers as well as a non-marring prytool. I tried the torx in order and the third one fit, the screws came undone, and the Palm pried open without a hitch. With a pair of tweezers I worked loose the connector and lifted out the battery. Putting in the new one was just the reverse of that process.

The Palm's memory restored from backup just fine, and I left it in the cradle for eight hours to get a full charge, and viola', I have a Palm that doesn't drop from 100% to 92% in the first ten minutes of life, and seems to be holding a charge very well.

It's gonna take some seriously compelling technology to make me give my Palm m500 up. It was one of the last of the black-and-white screens, which use very little power, and with the 512MB SD card in the back it's got serious room to grow.

Comments

[areitu.livejournal.com]

The battery may be an off-the-shelf item that many tech companies use in similar devices. iPods look like they use something similar as well.

Have you tried using an iPhone yet? :)

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

I find "network access" to be sufficiently compelling. It's very handy to be able to use online informational resources on my Treo 700p. The keyboard is also very handy for data entry.

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that reminds me -- I should get a replacement battery for my Tapwave Zodiac, just in case...

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

It's been a seriously long time since I bought a "kit" for anything.

Which is maybe why I was surprised to hear that the kit included the necessary tools.

[statreed.livejournal.com]

I realize this is a slightly old post, but with regard to compelling technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770
http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=3349

I was, for a long time, dependent on my m505 for ebook reading (having moved up from a Palm IIIxe), then moved to a Tungsten T3, which died on me. So I went and got a Nokia 770 ($150 shipped with 1gb RS-MMC on eBay.)

You have to see the screen on this thing to believe it. 800x480 in four inches - text is razor sharp, and given my predilection for small fonts I can fit pretty much the equivalent of a paperback page on it. Battery life, as long as all you're doing is reading, is obscene given the screen - six hours, maybe more. And the battery's a removable standard Nokia phone battery, so carrying around an extra costs something on the order of $5.

Also, Linux! It's kind of surreal to pull out this tiny little tablet thing and play around in xterm. The only problem, for your apparent uses at least, is that the PDA software which has been ported for it isn't really up to par with Palm's (at least what I've tried), but even if you only use it for reading it's worth it. See if you can find one somewhere to play with.

Finally, I think it's worth noting that every one of the abovementioned devices has had a full copy of The Journal Entries loaded and read through on it. *grins* I remember at first, when I concatenated them all into a huge text file, I stripped out the M/M stories, being as I was a naive straight teenager. I pretty quickly realized that I was missing a lot of the story that way, so I put them back in, started over, and read the whole thing with nothing cut out - and I feel like that taught me something important. Not sure what, but I eventually ended up in my current rather rewarding LTR with a guy, which was the culmination of a long slide off the straight side of the equation that began with putting "The Courage Of My Convictions" back into that textfile. So thank you for that learning, and for an excellent body of work.

Sorry. Long comment. My bad!