At times wonderful, and at times totally frustrating too. That’s technology, my experience of it anyway. I do a lot of stuff with technology and I suspect I will continue to do that.
If you’ve been here before then you may have heard me mention the Pebble smartwatch and have some idea of what seems to be some kind of obsession with making a pebble device useful again. Well, I’m sad to say that I am still trying. I had previously given up, but I couldn’t resist and picked up another one of these on eBay for a few pounds.
I have some ideas for how I want to use it, but I kind of want to get back to seeing how things are going at Rebble. Especially after their hackathon.
I suppose that this is really about an unswerving love of old, and even obsolete tech. I have a few ideas of what I’ll do with this one, and as things develop, I’ll probably post about how it works out.
I like technology, although in recent years my relationship with technology has changed in a lot of ways. For a start a rarely buy new technology unless I have a real reason for it and a real use for it. In fact I have sold off a lot of technology. Mainly music technology, but a lot of other stuff too.
However, at times I end up with a piece of technology that I really don’t know what to do with. The HomePod Mini is one such piece of technology. Don’t get me wrong. It is a nice thing in itself. It works well. It does what it’s supposed to do. I Just wish it would do some more.
I’ve had speakers before. I had an amazon echo and really had no use for that at all. The HomePod is better, but aside from using it as a speaker it does very little for me. Perhaps I just need to try harder.
Over the last few years I have sold off almost all of the PDAs I once owned. Probably a good thing overall, I had way too many of them to do anything with, and, for the last few years most of them languished in a drawer or cupboard for most of the time. I like to think that the ones I have sold off have all gone to good homes. Who knows.
What I have left is a handful a what I like to think of as select and somewhat unique devices. More about those another time perhaps.
One of the devices I have kept is a Palm Treo 750. A device running the Windows Mobile Operating System. I originally bought this with the thought that it would replace a Palm Treo 650, which runs the original Palm Operating System. However, not too long after I bought it the iPhone emerged and the smartphone era arrived in earnest. I kept both Treos and I still have them today.
I have often thought about reviving the 750 to see what I could use it for. To see how I could put it to real use, something I actually need it to do.
The first step is to see if it actually boots up. After all, it is old. But sometimes old tech lasts a lot longer than new stuff. It booted up fine. Which was great. However, I remembered one of the issues with the Treo 750 was the casing. For some reason the outer casing had become tacky and sticky. Very unpleasant to handle. For that reason I have this white case for it.
It makes it usable anyway. As you can see, the device is up and running. The next step was to get a SIM in it and establish if it could even send texts. Well, after some messing around with SIM card holders, I got it working and sending texts.
So far this has all worked well. Next comes the more interesting part, but that will require another post.
This device has been with me for seven years now, and so far I have never found a reasonable use for it. Most recently I tried to get it working again with a few ideas of what I might use it for. I bought this, or rather funded it on Kickstarter, and now, sadly, the company that made it has long gone. These things happen of course, all too frequently.
As a device it has a lot of potential, but potential doesn’t always equate to actual usefulness, or at least that is always the case with me. I have a few ideas about using it, or possible uses for it, but right now, as I’ve decided to revive it, I cannot seem to get it to work at all. Which is somehow typical.
I have a sense that this happened the last time I tried to revive it. I will continue to try and get it running again, but it may be that it has simply had its day.
I noticed a Rex device on eBay the other day and was sorely tempted. In the end I resisted though. Which is probably good. But it got me thinking about these kinds of devices. I’ve posted about these before, a number of times and there is a page dedicated to all things PDA as well. I wonder why credit card sized devices never took off.
I know that smartphones have taken over almost every use case of mobile computing, but I do think that the result of that is that everything is a little dull. Sure we have smartwatches and phones, but the lack of a variety of form factors makes everything a little too uniform in many ways.
I find myself inextricably drawn back to the Pebble ecosystem, if indeed you can call it that. I had the original Pebble, then the Pebble Time. I got rid of both. The I decided to try something different with an original Pebble that I put on my key ring. I tried that for a few months, but in the end I really had no need for it, it had no real use at all.
Then I heard about this Rebble Hackathon, and once more, my interest is peaked. Why? Well, I have no idea really. For a start I don’t currently even own a Pebble device. However, I’ve been looking on eBay for them again. Once more, why? I do not know. It is probably just an obsession of some kind. I even tried using a Pebble on my key chain.
Sadly that little experiment was never really a success.
Anyway, I’m interested in what comes out from it. The event is running now (18th – 20th November 2022). If you want to find out more here’s the event page.
It’s not much, but it is kind of interesting that it can do this. I keep thinking that maybe I’ll try and write some code to run on it, but if I’m honest I’m unlikely to get around to that for a while.
You may remember that I posted about this a little while ago. Finally it has arrived, in a somewhat inauspicious package, but arrived nevertheless.
Of course, it is tiny, really tiny. Actually thumb sized.
And it comes in a tiny box too. Yes I bought two of them.
I had thought that it would be so small that I wouldn’t be able to read the screen at all, but I can, just about, and I even managed to play one of the games that comes pre-loaded.
This gives you an idea of the size of the thing.
It even makes a very tiny sound too. At this point I have no idea what I will do with it. I had been trying for a very long time to not buy any tech that I had no use for, and this is certainly a piece of tech that I have no use for. I am no gamer at all, so playing games is not something that I will be doing much of, but perhaps I will find a way to make it useful. If not it’ll find it’s way on to eBay in a few months.
I have had an iPhone 8 for a few years now, and, as with these kind of devices, the battery fades away over time. I decided that I would rather keep this device, as, for the most part, I have little or no need for anything more right now. So I thought I would try to get the battery replaced. I got booked in to the Apple store at Covent Garden and took it in. The staff told me that it would take about an hour.
I went off and got a drink and wandered back to the Apple store to pick it up. Sadly though, Apple had managed to break the phone whilst trying to replace the battery. I was a bit shocked to be honest. They had said when I left it that they might end up wiping the device, but not that they could break it.
However, to make up for this, they have replaced it entirely. Not with a newer device, but with a new iPhone 8. Which is nice. Of course this meant restoring everything to the new device, and that takes time.
Overall this was a good experience, although for the most part a little annoying as I am still restoring things to the new phone, but for the price of a new battery I got a new phone. Not bad really.
A little while ago I posted about trying to make old technology useful again, and specifically, useful to me rather than in some general sense. The first device in my list, was a Sony Clie NX73V. This is a lovely device, a lovely piece of engineering, and, in its day, an incredibly useful.
I tried a variety of things (mainly software) to make it useful, but, in the end, I had to concede that I had no real use for it whatsoever. Which is a shame. However, on the upside, I sold it to someone who had always wanted one. Which is great.
I am Ashley Elsdon 