Utility

A while back, I posted an article about my beloved Palm T/X and how it was doing after a couple years of use. (See the article here.) One major finding was the loss of calibration that was driving me crazy- I had to literally tap the very bottom edge of the screen to access the lower row of buttons.

Being an overweight diabetic is a pain in a lot of ways, but one of the biggest is the ongoing job of trying to lose weight- which always seems to find its way home. I welcome any tool in the fight, and CalorieKing’s Handheld Diet Diary was brought to my attention as a possible ally.

One of my favorite MS-DOS applications was a program called InfoSelect. InfoSelect gave me a functionally endless stack of small note cards and a great search tool. Make a note, any kind- contacts information, scheduling details, grocery list, books to find, phone messages, etc.- and InfoSelect would store it for you, and find it in a heartbeat. To sweeten the pot, you could create reusable forms, color-code things, and much more. It was sweet.

Many of the new Palm software titles over the last couple of years have been targeted for the medical field. You would almost think that every doctor, nurse, technician, and other health-care provider is issued a free Palm upon graduation (which might be a way to boost the sagging visibility of my favorite electronic device!) OK, I was a certified EMT in my state back some 20 years ago and actively teach various first-aid and CPR courses. Why not take some of these texts for a test drive?

During the heyday of the Palm OS PDA, we used to talk about ‘laptop killers’- how to turn your Visor, Clie or Palm into a complete laptop-like device. The keystone issue- the ‘make it or break it’ crux of the problem- was live note-taking in a class or meeting.

In my house, I am the Master of the Five Remotes, Not Including the Universal Remote We Rarely Use or the TV Remote That We Don’t Need Because We Can Control It With the TiVo Remote Besides The Batteries In It Are Usually Dead. The massive responsibility lies heavily upon my kingly head. Just keeping track of all of the remotes is bad enough, but since I have kids, none of my remotes have battery covers. (If you have kids, you’ll understand. If you don’t, thank God your batteries are not always in danger of falling out.)

I’ve just been diagnosed with diabetes. I am a bit overwhelmed with the flood of information- both that I need to learn, and that I need to now learn to track. I have already learned a few things.

A. Diabetes is sometimes called the “data disease” because the more you understand it and track it, and know what it is doing, the better you can manage it.
B. It is really depressing to be a diabetic.
C. If ya gotta deal with the data involved, ya may as well make it work for you.

Some people love them, some hate them. I tend to be one of those who load one, fiddle with it forever, then eventually give up and go back to the simplicity of the Palm interface. A few years ago, I did head-to-head comparisons with most of the major versions, and at one time or another owned a valid copy of Launcher X, MegaLauncher, Silver Screen, and others. I settled on ZLauncher, but mostly because I spent enough time with it to make it work how I wanted. If you want to argue that one of the other ‘standards’ is better, I won’t disagree. It is just a matter of personal preference.

I use my Palm Tx for a lot of things- even as a fancy alarm clock and mini-MP3 player. I usually use the default player if it does what I want and the installed version of NormSoft’s Pocket Tunes v3 Basic Edition did a decent job for me. Easy to use, fun skins, sleep timer, etc. I was pretty happy with it… until they released Pocket Tunes v4 a few weeks ago.