I inherited a hand me down Compaq iPaq 3650 at work. I've been losing sleep playing with the damn thing. It's been exciting because the device leads me in all different directions networking, programming, project management etc. I wanted to reflect a little bit of that spirit here and share some of the things I've been sleepless over...

First things first, you gotta have net otherwise it's a glorified rolodex/gameboy. First I threw a linksys WPC11 wireless 802.11b card in there. Linksys is kind enough to provide drivers on their website. That's a really sweet setup for the home user (or anybody on WEP), but at work we use Cisco's LEAP authentication which means you either have to have a cisco card or have third party drivers to provide LEAP. I couldn't find WinCE drivers for anything. So, I got an aironet 350 from work. The aironet cards are more expensive, but they are quality and there are drivers for everything known to man, including wince. The driver's are awesome, intuitive, and offer articulate control. Highly recommnded. Hopefully with recent accusitions the gap will narrow between linksys and cisco (same company now).

We're on the net. Here's my list of tools on the PC

• Adobe Acrobat Reader 1AT
• Cambridge vxIPConfig and vxUtil - Nice TCP/IP tools ping, traceroute etc. vxUtils can even set the clock via NTP.
• Cisco Wireless LAN Adapter - drivers and utilities for my Aironet 350
• Flow Simulation Calc98 - A nice scientific calculator. Not as good as palm's EasyCalc. I miss that.
• Kenny Soft dbView - Let's you view the contents of databases (german page). A must have.
• Logical Sky CEdit - ($$$) A nice programming project editor. I got it because it is the best text editor, but the project stuff is decent.
• MSN Messenger for Pocket PC 2002 - Why not? Chat at 3 words per minute.
• Microsoft Internet Explorer Tools for Pocket PCs - Cache control. How novel.
• PHM Device Manager, PHM Pocket PC PowerToys, PHM Registry Editor, PHM Task Manager - Just good tools. Task manager and alt-f4 are particularly useful as hardware buttons.
• PocketMind PocketMusic - free mp3 player. ogg/wma & extras cost $$$.
• Resco Explorer 2003 - ($$$) Nice 2 pane file explorer. Can map network drives to foldrs. Can import .reg files!
• Sun Microsystems Java - let's you compile and run java. It's being phased out. We'll see what happens.
• SymbolicTools PocketCMD,PocketConsole, Poetry, GNU GPG, PocketConsole - Must haves for GNU-ish command line types
• OpenSSH

My apps on the Windows Desktop

• MS Active Sync - For connecting to Windows
• MS Embedded Visual Tools - Components for VC++ to build PocketPC applications (ARM, SH3, MIPS, x86)

Apps on my Apple Laptop

• Missing-Sync for PocketPC - ($$$) A mac synchronization server. Works with the iTools suite (iCal, AddressBook, iPhoto, iMusic). It can also mount the device.

Cool links

• Registry tweaks -some cool stuff
• CS's Pocket PC - found some good proggies listed here

The WinCE environment is doable. It's a bare bones piece of hardware so you can't ask for too much anyway. There are plenty of linux ports out there and even a debian distro called intimate. I look forward to trying it, but right now I'm just trying to get my basic PDA functions together before the fall semester starts.

I'm really enjoying the PocketPC as a hardware platform. The palm gave me most everything I needed in both a PIM and something to hack on, but this device is just so much more comparable to a desktop PC, plus the integration isn't so "third party". I was really strong on a Palm for a while, but I just don't see how a proprietary OS is going to compete against the windows monolith and the linux culture. I think their (and handspring's) stock is testament to that. Either way intel is getting their money because it seems like everybody is porting to ARM.

I converted one of my geeklog themes to a format that is much more condusive to the pocketPC browser. It's really simple and seems to work good. The palm site and my normal sleepless site are just lndir's of each other and feed off of the same MySQL database.

Finally, some cool snappies. A narcissistic story wouldn't be complete with out some braggart screenshots.

Some really bad fuzzy shots of the iPaq w/ expansion pack & cisco PCMCIA card

My today page using the MS Horizon Theme

Rainer's OpenSSH port public keyed into my linux server

My sleepless template running on an apache virtual host that's sharkfishing of the main jimweller.net db

Complete masturbation about my hardware button layout, very OS-ish

Source editing with CEdit

Resco Explorer in my /unix/bin directory

PocketMusic playing my 12,000 song M3U off of a network share mounted via Resco Explorer. Oh and it's wireless network.

Anyway, it's loads of fun. I expect it will be as helpful as my palm was, but with mp3's and net!