Palm Pilot Tips

Welcome to my Palm Pilot Page.

Here are a few tips for palm use, and links to some useful software.

Document Reading

If you want to read/edit large documents on you palm, you'll need something a bit more powerful than the in build memo application.

There are two commonly used formats for larger documents on the palm: DOC and the zTXT.

• DOC:there are many free/shareware DOC readers on the market. The best known is probably QED, but there are many others - a search in google will bring several up.
• zTXT: This is used by the gutenpalm reader, and is designed specifically for reading books from Project Gutenberg, which release out-of-copyright works in electonic form, but it can also be used for reading other documents. The gutenpalm website provides utilities to convert text files and zips in xTxts.

NB.Another very useful feature of the DOC format is that it can also be used to store binary data. This allows you to use your palm to store any file you like, or to use it to transfer binary files between computers. I often use mine to transfer files between work and home.

To do this, you need the txt2pdbdoc utility. This is a command line utility, which was originally written for unix, but will also compile under windows. This can be downloaded from a variety of sites on the internet. A version compiled under cygwin is available here.The important thing is to use the -b command line option, which forces the file to be converted as binary rather than text.

Having said this, if you have access to the pilot-link tools (ported to most unix environments), you may find it easier to use pilot-schlep. This program stores a single file of any type (eg .zip, .mp3) on your palm.

Backups

When you use the windows desktop, it backs up only some of the items on your palm. A good way to do a full backup of your palm is to use pilot-xfer.

Pilot-xfer is part of the pilot-link package. This is available for most flavours of unix. You can get it from www.pilot-link.org (and various other sources - a web search will throw up several likely candidates.

It is also available for microsoft windows here.

Pilot-xfer works on the command line. To do a complete backup, you will want a command like:

pilot-xfer -p [port] -u [backup directory]

The port is the port to which your palm is connected. It will probably be COM1 or COM2 under windows, or something like /dev/ttyS1 under linux.

Web content

You can get local web content sync'd onto your palm via avantgo. There is a windows client to hotsync this, but if you are using unix, you will probably want malsync. Look on the ports page to download binaries.