So, I've been doing some shopping lately. As with much gadget shopping, there have been some interesting learning curves and problems.

Item 1. PalmOne Tungsten T3 handheld.This is my third Palm, and they just keep getting better. The device is a joy to use, and the applications are all what you'd expect - pretty damned good. The extendible screen is a nice feature, and the ability to switch between landscape and portrait is great for working on spreadsheets or word documents.

One slight niggle, however - I can't get it to sync to anything. At home, I use a mac - you have to use the Hotsync Manager to get it working with iSync over bluetooth, and the installation program (for the Palm Desktop and Hotsync Manager) errors ("Permission Denied") when installing. So, no syncing there. I'm hoping that PalmOne support will find one of my support messages soon, and have an answer for me on how I can resolve this.

Of course, I also tried to get it syncing at work - home would be nice, but work is where this would be most useful. However, at work, our operating environment is tightly restricted - so I can't install the Palm desktop software that came with the T3. I'm currently going through the process of getting the installer scripted so I'm allowed to install it, but these things take time.

Of course, through all of this, I've been making use of the Palm. It's too good not to. Of course, this means it wasn't backed up... so it duly reset itself last night and lost everything I'd laboriously entered.

*sigh*

This post has taken me quite a long time to type... this is because of my other purchase - a Kinesis Advantage USB keyboard. For a few years now, I've been intending to try one of these out. No I'm finally doing so, and it's brought home one real fact to me: I've never really learned to type. I think this keyboard might actually force me to properly learn, which can only be a good thing. It should also help with further reducing reducing my doom/quake induced wrist pain which has never fully departed, and is aggravated by long periods of typing on normal keyboards.

There's some other shopping I've been doing as well, but I'll report on them later, once the projects are complete.