The Future is Now

I've often seen Dippin' Dots, the "ice cream of the future". Yesterday I saw a Dippin' Dots cart simply labelled "ice cream".

This can only mean one thing.

The future has arrived.

If I were one of the cool kids, I'd have pictures to go with this post, but I'm not.

Minor Palmistry

Here are a few more Palm applications I recommend:

• ChangeName, by Collin Mulliner (useful when you need to set the device's HotSync name without ever HotSyncing)


• Shadow Plan, from Codejedi


• TealMaster, from Tealpoint


• TealLaunch, from Tealpoint

Life Balance

Although it doesn't do everything quite the way I'd like, I've found nothing better on PalmOS to manage my todo list than Life Balance from Llamagraphics.

Trust but Verify

I can't very well put my trust in a computer that isn't backed up, can I?

BackupBuddyVFS Professional from Blue Nomad looks like it'll do. But there are a few preliminaries to take care of first.

Being the kind of procrastinator I am, I have a tendency to download and install time-limited demo versions of software to evaluate and then let the evaluation period lapse before I've done any evaluating. So before I install anything else on kushiel (that's what I've named my Centro) I will install the excellent Uninstall Manager from Northglide, which can help out in that sort of situation. And of course, I wouldn't dream of using it to continue using shareware without paying for it and neither would you.

Since I virtually always install software on a PalmOS device by using some kind of file manager, I think that I need to have Uninstall Manager's "Smart Monitoring" option turned on, but the documentation is slightly less than clear on that point.

Next up is the fabulous Explorer 2009 from Resco which is worth buying just for its handling of zip archives. They helpfully have a naked .prc file on their web site to install, but it is unhelpfully not working right now. However, that's not a problem thanks to this trick, which involves composing a message with the builtin email program, attaching a zip file to the message, saving it as a draft, and then viewing the draft, which will allow you to extract files from the zip archive attached to the draft.

Having installed those two packages, I installed BackupBuddyVFS and told it to back up on power off, to back up as zip files, and to verify the backups.

I hope it works. There are few things worse, I think, than thinking you're protected when you're not - and I don't just mean backup software.

A Logical and Trusted System

In my quest for total world domination, presently foremost among my evil plans is the construction of an artificial intelligence that wants the same things I want, and will do all the hard work of figuring out how to get them. It's going to take a bit of work, of course, but I'm hoping to minimize that.

To teach it what I want I will need to "[capture] all the things that need to get done... into a logical and trusted system outside of [my] head and off [my] mind" (Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, p. 3). Said system being the aforementioned artificial intelligence.

For now, though, I'm just going to use my Palm Centro.

Suggested listening:
George Carlin: On the Road ("A Place for my Stuff")

My Shiny New Blog

This is my new blog. Do you like it so far?

Perhaps it will be of some use to you. I don't know yet.

At any rate, I'm going to use this blog to blather on about whatever I feel like blathering on about. For the next few days, I expect it'll be pretty tedious reading, so you might want to skip ahead a bit.

Suggested reading:
David Allen: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity