I’m in one of those annoying places where my brain is full of project and code ideas, and my hard disk is full of half-completed projects.

While I’m really NOT in a position to start hacking away on yet another item, especially when 99% of my active code-writing cycles is going into Spot Specific, there’s some good ideas that I really want to get out/alive.

So, I’m wondering – not dissimilar to the Shot of Jaq contribution scratch-your-itch wikithingy – should I just get them out there (even on said scratchpad, or my own site) and let them roll with the punches, see what happens.  I’m in the fortunate position where time is the one resource I’m lacking, but I’ve got pretty much everything else that I could need. Hosting coming out of my ears, spare hardware, etc. Could probably even muster some geeks and support workers to help with the project…

Anyway, what should one do when you’re sure the software you’re thinking of would make the open source world a better place, but you don’t have time to write it?

Suggestions welcome.

-Dx 

After being all so excited about this, it arrives and I’m quite disappointed.

It’s too small. Or my hands are too big. Lots of reviews I read said that they really liked it, the size was great, the analog stick took some getting used to, but it was great. I disagree.

• The analog stick needs to be about another 5->8mm towards the screen (making it technically too close to be able to exist, this would have been a severe hardware redesign to do)
• The buttons which are supposed to seamlessly map to Palm Pilot homekeys for backwards compatability don’t. So several (commercial) games don’t work.
• Quite a few commercial games pop up little dialogs that read, "This game is not compatible with this device" and closes. Lemmings is one
• A few games open up, draw the screen three-times over, play a bad noise and crash horribly. (GTA *sobsobsob*)
• SEGA’s Gamegear ports for PalmOS make horrible static noises when playing, if they play – buttons as above.
• The analog stick difts left. I’ve calabrated it, but even at the calibration screen you can "feel" the drift. I’m hoping this is "wearing in" or something similar.
• The speakers are ick, and your hands cover them while playing so the sound gets all distorted.
• The "cute rythmic pulsing bluetooth" button doesn’t pulse – it flashes boringly.
• The SD slots are quite an arse to get into/out of.
• The Stylus is evil and a nightmare to get pull the Stylius from.
• The desk-cradle is a CON! I bought it so I could have my charge-lead in use elsewhere, and preferably use an in-car to USB adapter to have the thing dash-mounted for TomTom use. No chance. The cradle does nothing more than provide a solid plastic "wedge" to stand the Zodiac on which you clip the provided USB to. It has no intergrated cables of its own.
• WITHOUT the Cradle, cables fall off/out – such a bad design – with the cradle isn’t much better. It’s not a case of "drop into cradle" like every other desk-cradle I’ve owned but more like "gently balance at correct angle" – when done the power light illuminates – but that only means you have it *HALF* right, you have to push it down into the cradle and listen for an almost inaudiable click – doing this often triggers bluetooth discovery mode or one of the other (highly discreet and easily forgettable) shoulder buttons which are, like most of the other buttons, slighly in the wrong place for my fists of ham.
• This isn’t a Tapwave issue, persay, but Morgan Computers delivered the wrong stuff. Rather than my 512Mb card they shipped me a 128Mb card and instead of the Luxury leather carrycase they went me this stupid canvas "bag" that I refuse to be seen with on the principle that it just looks naff. Shouting at Morgan Computers got me the answer, "just put them in an envelope and post them back to us, and we’ll ship you new ones that day." – "In an Envelope", okay, so not hidiously expensive but there’s a 128Mb memory card here, no insurance, no nothing?! Fine! I’m just going to get proof of posting when I ship it back and let them deal with the dents and coffee-stains that will probably appear. I hate Royal Mail because, amidst all sorts of problems, they are fundamentally shite. And Very-So-Sorry to Rich, if he reads this, as you’re the exception to the rule (Rich is a Postal Collection Worker, he has a big red van and everything )

I’m yet to get video playback working, MP3 playback works but I’ve got too limited a stack of SDcards to experiment with it all properly at this stage in time….

The "home" page, which is just a glorified PalmOS app (as all the software is) is nice, very intuitive, etc. And all the software that actually works is great – but make sure you get stuff that is "tested on" or "designed for" Tapwave Zodiac – the compatability layer is, um, not so good…. 

I’ve offered to host the space theme for GPE over at Xalior. If you run GPE, try it out Please

This is how I got my iPaq working with Familiar 0.8.0 – it’s left as an exercise to the reader to blow their own bootloader and jffs to 0.8.0 stock.

I had familiar0.7.1 on here before, and the usability wasn’t quite high enough for my requirements so I threw the ipaq in a box until this came out… I Started playing with it yesterday, this is what I’ve done so far.

1. Upgraded to unstable, played around, messed up moving /usr to /mnt/card and blew it all back to 0.8.0 stock, where I promptly decided to be more careful.
2. This is where things get useful….
   Setting up ssh (so you can stop using the onscreen keyboard):
   1. Edit /etc/hotplug/net.agent – best done with gpe-edit (oh yeah, I’m a GTK fan, so I used gpe, but don’t fret, I’m installing OPIE later ) from a root terminal window. the version of vi provided by busybox, in this particular rxvt, suck.
   2. Change line that reads

      add|register)

      to

      add|register|attach)

   3. Add the following before line *) near the end

      detach)
          exec /sbin/ifdown $INTERFACE
          ;;
      

3. In file /etc/network/interfaces:
   replace line  iface usbf inet dhcp  with this:

   iface usbf inet static
           address 192.168.0.202
           netmask 255.255.255.0
           network 192.168.0.0
           gateway 192.168.0.200

4. Reboot and setup UsbNet on your chosen desktop linux box installing iptables (or whatever you use) for masquerading NAT, spitting out DHCP 192.168.0.202 for the client and 192.168.0.200 for itself.

   Bring up usb0, and ssh root@192.168.254.202 and your done, no more tapping out your root password….

   (this is all left to the reader, hint: handheld.orgs WIKI, modprobe usbnet and your distribution’s documentation)

5. Next you’re going to need a DNS server:
   Now remove and replace /etc/resolv/conf with your DNS settings – not doing so (ie, only modifying it) will not keep them over a reboot – as this is a symlink into /var/SOMEWHERE-NOT-IMPORTANT, which is tempfs
6. Upgrade Flash-ROM to latest stable tree
   First edit /etc/ipkg/base-feed.conf and change the triple slash to a double slash (nice fellas )

   ipkg update
   ipkg upgrade

   Here I get some errors about configuring the new kernel, but it doesn’t seem to make any problems, so I’m not worrying….

7. Mounting up a CF/MMC card for additional storage:
   I have two cards, a 64Mb SDmmc and a 32Mb vanilla-mmc – my 3780 only has one SDslot so I wanted to use the bigger card until I could splash out on a super-big card after justifying it.
   If the card was to be part of the file system, proper, I had a couple of options, listed below – and my reasons not for picking them – but I was going to be picky – I wanted a proper unix file-system, and planned to consider the card non-removable.
   Card running:
   1. jffs2 – which would require me finding some jffs2 tools, so something to look at later – perhaps poking Gareth over at encryptec…. and Windows can’t read jffs2, I think
   2. vfat – with a loopback filesystem on top, with ext2. Yuk! And I’m not sure about block-leveling to stop write-decay with this, either
   3. ext2 – fsck would be a nightmare
   4. ext3 – needed extra modules, which were present – but disguised inside of the kernel-module-ext2 ipkg

   ipkg install kernel-module-ext2
   ipkg install ext2progs
   ipkg install extprogs.mkfs

   I am guessing the package name, sorry. Memory. Will check back and fix.

   mkfs.ext3 /dev/mmc/disc
   mount /dev/mmc/disc /mnt/card

   Add this to /etc/fstab and /etc/ipkg.conf
   /etc/fstab:

   /dev/mmc/disc /mnt/card auto defaults,noatime 0 0

   /etc/ipkg.conf

   dest card /mnt/card

   Now you can install to this new mmc-disc at any time you like by using:

   ipkg -d card PACKAGE
   ipkg-link mount /mnt/card

   At this point I should mention to watch how long it takes you to make the filesystems on your mmc device, I found the SD, while working, far to slow for a system disc – I had to go with my 32Mb card and leave the other in the digicam…. :-/

8. I am trying to get gnome-games_*.ipkg to install currently, but it seems not want to share the gconf data with gpe-conf…. I’ll get back to you… but it could be a while

I’ve done other stuff too, lots and lots, but not worth documenting as I undid or trashed something and had to repair it

Oh, and before you try and mv /something /mnt/card/something remember that jffs2 is transparently compressing so 1k on / probably won’t be 1k on /mnt/card (unless you managed to get jffs2 running on it, and forgot to tell me….)