1 This might be academic, since your USB connection seems to be dead, but..

Settings -> Connections tab -> Connections icon -> Advanced tab -> Select Networks button
Select My Work Network from the first list (title starts "Programs that automatically connect to the Internet...")
Edit... button -> Proxy Settings tab
Check This network connects to the Internet checkbox, leave the next checkbox unchecked
Hit the ok buttons until back to the Connections tab of Settings
(This next part may not be necessary)
Network Cards icon
Select Work from the first list, titled "My network card connects to:"
Select Remote-NDIS Host from the lower list and select Use server-assigned IP address from the radio list
Hit the ok buttons until back to the Connections tab of Settings
Plug your iPAQ in.

One debugging check: on your PC, when you plug your iPAQ in a new network adapter should show up, if you bring up a shell window and do an ipconfig it should have an address of 169.254.2.2. On your iPAQ, if you go back to that Remote-NDIS Host page, you should see an address of 169.254.2.1.

If that doesn't work, try this also:
Settings -> System tab -> USB to PC icon
Uncheck Enable advanced network functionality, hit ok

I should try setting up to connect via Bluetooth...

CompactFlash readers are pretty widely available, though performance varies a lot. Alcyone is a laptop, right? If so, it probably has either a PC Card (nee PCMCIA) slot or a ExpressCard slot. A CompactFlash to PC Card or ExpressCard adapter is likely the fastest CF reader you'll find, and they're pretty cheap too. There are USB and Firewire CF readers, some of which are quite good. Rob Galbraith has a CF/SD performance database, you can see several CF readers tested against many cards.

I did some testing of read/write performance to some of my CF and SD cards on my Axim PDA, and performance was pitiful compared to my laptop:

         CF rd    CF wr     SD rd   SD wr 
laptop   45 MB/s  19 MB/s   17 MB/s 15 MB/s
axim     11 MB/s  300 KB/s  10 MB/s 150 KB/s

I would definitely take the numbers as illustrative, the benchmark programs were different, etc. Looks like writing to either card is the slow part, and 378 KB/s is actually pretty good!

2 Kayle, thank you. I'll give it a try later. Who knows? Maybe it'll make the connection work!

3

Too, there is one more hope. Alcyone supports bluetooth and so does the iPaq, and maybe I can get them to talk that way.

Bluetooth worries me. Does it open up a door that anyone nearby can waltz through and plunder my computer? I'm going to have to do some reading up on it to convince myself it isn't unsafe.

4 "Even if the only thing it's good for is watching anime in the bedroom, it's still kind of cool."

I'm curious what makes it equal or superior to similarly-priced alternatives?

You've almost paid what a nice netbook costs.  Does the iPaq have a better screen, or battery life, or is it more convenient to hold in your lap?

(I have never used either iPaq or netbook.)

5

It looks like the battery life is superb. Compared to a netbook the advantage is that it will fit in my pocket.

But the biggest advantage is that I have it, and I don't have any of those other things.

6 Truly pocket-sized means also useful in the bath or spa.

With my toddler, I do not get much reading time.  What I have often happens in the spa.  I'd need a waterproof e-book reader, or one small enough to fit a specialty camera pouch (for example, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FE5PBU).

So I usually use my mp3 player in a zip-lock bag, and listen to audio books.

I hadn't thought about it when I asked earlier, but it makes sense that the iPaq would be good for that too (and a netbook wouldn't).

7

Here's some good news: Bluetooth connection works. It doesn't seem to activate the Mobile Connect program.

But I can access the iPaq's storage from Alcyone through it -- except that it doesn't show the CF or SD, only the internal storage. Yeesh.

Even so, it's progress. Now to try Kayle's settings for networking and see if I can get internet connection through bluetooth.

8

Nope, no network love for me. And it still doesn't seem as if the sync program believes the unit is there.

It doesn't look as if the installation process is all that complicated. I can install apps on the portable storage (TCPMP is on the CF) and it looks like "installation" simply consists of creating a folder and copying files into it. I wonder if I can do that manually instead of relying on the sync program to do it?

9 DavidVS: Think of the iPAQ 210 as something like a keyboardless touchscreen smartphone without the cell radios. A bit larger and heavier (6.6 oz) than any I can think of, but not by a lot. A CPU more powerful than just about any smartphone, except for the 1 GHz Snapdragons (e.g. Nexus One) and probably what's in the iPhone 3GS (just looked it up, it would be comparable except Apple underclocks the CPU). CompactFlash and SecureDigital slots, instead of teensy microSD. Display is 4" diagonal, 640x480, 16-bit color, transflective LCD. Transflective means it supports both reflective and transmissive modes (most LCDs are transmissive), the reflective mode means it is daylight viewable without a backlight, kind of like the PixelQi screen, except it's in color. My understanding is the PixelQi has a higher contrast ratio in reflective mode.

A netbook is far larger, far heavier, with substantially more CPU power, memory, storage, and usually runs a desktop OS.

Really, the nearest comparisons are to things like smartphones, portable media players, internet tablets, and some GPS devices. PDAs were designed as general purpose, so they typically emphasized processing power, memory, display, and storage in a handheld device, while those other devices are relatively specialized so the computing platform is generally reduced to "good enough" to support their other goals.

If Steven merely wants to watch anime away from his computers, he might want to consider switching it out for a portable media player, or maybe something like the Archos 5 Internet Tablet.

Steven: Bluetooth security isn't very good. I did a quick skim of the literature, and my impression is that in theory, the foundations of Bluetooth security is worse than WiFi, but in practice, it's better due to hardware difficulties and severe protocol weaknesses in WiFi. The main problem for attackers is that off-the-shelf hardware that let you sniff encrypted connections is expensive, and it appears that knowledge to modify consumer Bluetooth hardware to go into the equivalent of "promiscuous" mode is not readily available.

Bluetooth's data encryption has known vulnerabilities which might be practically exploitable, but the worse problem is that the initial pairing uses a variable length password which could be arbitrary bits but in practice is always a PIN, digits represented in UTF8, drastically reducing the keyspace. An attacker listening in when the pairing takes place can brute force short PINs very quickly. If the attacker wasn't there at the initial pairing, she can force a repairing, but this will be obvious: your systems will ask you to input a new PIN.

Ok, saw you've actually tried Bluetooth since I started writing this... I'm not having a problem seeing my SD Card though. Here's the steps I used to get Bluetooth going.

Settings -> Connections -> Bluetooth -> Mode -> Checked both Turn on Bluetooth and Make the device visible to other devices -> ok
Clicked on the Bluetooth icon on my laptop's system tray ->
 Select Add a Device ->
 Selected by PDA from the list of discovered devices ->
On PDA, hit yes -> typed in PIN -> Next ->
Started up ActiveSync on PDA -> Menu -> Connect via Bluetooth

Hmm... on my laptop, the program is "Windows Mobile Device Center", which I guess is Windows 7 new name for ActiveSync.

Some applications will supply .cab files, you can copy those to your iPAQ and then click on them from the File Explorer to do an install. Otherwise, it's like Windows, if you get the files in the right place, update the registry with whatever settings the application needs, that's basically what's happening behind the scenes.

Ok, noticed you reinstalled Windows Mobile Device Center in previous post, I'm guessing things are all messed up from installing earlier versions of ActiveSync. Don't know how you're going to fix that other than by rolling your laptop OS back to before you installed. At least on my laptop. WMDC didn't need to be explicitly installed, it was already there.