Posted on by mwhybark

Futur passe

I don’t really know if this is interesting in the least, even to my self, except that it must be to me since I just spent the last hour fiddling with gadgets in order to realize that maybe I had something worth the hour I’d just spent.

A few years ago I picked up a weird, japanese-market private label (IBM, for god’s sake) Palm V and entertained myself trying to figure out what the heck one could do with an ancient 8mb Palm.

A fair amount, as it happens. Games, for one, though they are old-skool in spades. Offline AvantGo, for another, though getting the increasingly creaky Palm sync conduits to play nice with Mac OS X was painful at the time.

Since the whole Palm hardware line was undergoing a series of very rapid changes, a great deal of remaindered hardware appeared on ebay for under $10, and I picked up this and that, including a folding Palm keyboard, which works but not so well that I ever used it much, although this blog entry is an exception.

Anyway, long story short, the device worked as a test case and convinced me that I would enjoy a Treo as a phone when the time came, not so long ago.

I retired the Palm V as a bedside clock and handheld reader, and chronicled it here. I read a few Project Gutenberg and Manybooks.net

argh, just lost a whole bunch of this entry due to fumblefingers. I lack the patence to recover it. Looks like I’ll just delete the entry. so sorry, never mind!

Posted on by mwhybark

Futur vague

I’m reading again, finally, suddenly

I’m nearly through Charlie Stross’ 2001-2005 epic ‘Accelerando.’ It’s growing on me, I’m surprised to report. I couldn’t stand the neo-Wired infotopian independent agent bullshit Stross opened the book with and it was an effort to wade through the spurtwangled neo-randian tcp-orn nonsense to get to something that interested me either literarily or as a genre fiction fan.

Somewhat aggravatingly, the material that finally caught my eye is disappointingly derivationist holodeck cyberscape fantasy with the lightest dusting of hard lightspeed S!F! atop it, literal stardust over princesses, BEMs, and sultans. Still, it’s witty enough.

Viv and I watched Stephen Frear’s 2002 emigrant melodrama ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ tonight and while we both really liked the first act I became distracted as the film progressed. In the end we both liked the film but I’m still puzzling over my own relative declension of interest over the film’s run time.

By now, I’d like to think I’ve pretty much given up expecting to find prose or film that makes me feel similar to the way I did the year I first encountered punk rock, or sex, or the internet. I just don’t care about it, and I’m pretty sure it’s not because the folks creating the material are less creative or even for that matter using a creative grammar that confounds my comprehension.

It’s that I really just don’t give a shit and can’t be bothered to try to clinb inside those pretty pretty heads any more.

This also underlies my ongoing radio silence here, as my I find own critical insights deadly boring these days, and the act of recording them seems venal waste of time, in the absence of revenue.

So, um, expect more non-posting, I guess!

Posted on by mwhybark

Phon

The ability to stream internet radio on my Treo has me unwarrantedly fascinated. It’s inadvisable to do so if not plugged into a powersource, but I am fascinated by the idea of tuing into WFHB late at night.

The Treo’s built-in speaker is crisp and does a decent job with music, as I would expect based on the impressive sound quality the unit’s predecessor provided.