Just some random stuff, in part so I myself can find them.

The user interface of the iPaq is enough different from Windows to really confuse me. It's not like the Jornada, which was WinCE. WinCE really did follow standard Windows conventions, but this OS, whatever it's called, changes things.

One thing is that the boxed X icon in the upper right corner of the screen doesn't terminate the current app. It's equivalent to "shove into the background", but it leaves the app running. There's a frame you can get into which shows all the currently running apps, and permits you to kill them, and yesterday afternoon I drove myself nuts trying to find it, and couldn't. Just now I did again.

On the default screen, one of the lines shows the amount of free memory in various places, plus has a mini-control for the screen brightness. If you double-click that,  one of the tabs is "Running Programs". That's where you go to turn off Windows Media Player. That's also where you go to make sure that ActiveSync is running, because if it isn't, you can't connect to the PC with the USB cable.

I also leave TCPMP running. That way I can use the file explorer to look at the SD card (which is where I'm storing anime for the time being) and double-click a file and have it start playing immediately.

Watching an anime on this device is nicer than I expected it to be. In physical terms it's still a rather small screen, but not intolerably so. Using it with headphones the sound is very good. And when I was sitting on my couch, it was in some ways better than using the big computer.

There are a lot of cooling fans here on the computer desk, between Regulus and Deneb and Alcyone, and that creates a kind of background of white noise, what I'm used to calling a "noise floor". When I was sitting on the couch I was far enough away to not have that, and some of the silent parts of the sound track really were silent, like they ought to be. If I watched it in my bedroom it would be even better yet.

Kayle, I would definitely appreciate hearing how you have networking set up.

Toren writes to tell me that his experience  is that AllToAVI is the only reasonable tool for what I'm doing. It certainly works for me, albeit not all that rapidly. I discovered that when you choose the "bits per second" value you aren't limited to just the ones in the pull-down menu. The highest choice there was 1000 kbits per second, and at least for the first pass I'd like it to be bigger than that. So I manually entered 2000, but I might use even higher values in future. (2000 yields a file that's about 370M, and presumably minimizes additional codec artifacts.)

He also mentioned that it doesn't saturate his dual-CPU machine. I took a look at the task manager, and what's happening here is that AllToAVI itself is saturating one of my four CPUs, and something called "mencoder" is saturating a second one. So why not him? He hasn't answered me back yet, but I conjecture that he was manipulating files on an external USB drive, and was probably transfer-rate limited. I've been doing my conversions using one of the internal HDs on this computer, which are fast SATA. (Alcyone has two 500G drives.)

This thing is a Barbie Doll. I'm already beginning to lust after some extras. A desk stand for it, for example, would be really nice. I could permanently wire it to USB and the power brick and not have all the damned cables getting in the way constantly.

I need to come up with a name. "Steven's PDA" (which was what the setup program defaulted to) is really boring. Maybe I should name it "Uiharu". (Except that's not an astronomical name.) I suppose I could use Pollux, but that's a snore.

I am tempted to go with Uiharu. I'm not obligated to remain consistent in my naming.

UPDATE: This is what it looks like when playing video:

Except that the flash makes the screen look more washed out than it really is.

UPDATE: Interesting. There's a "product tour" app on this unit. One of the pages offers some physical specifications. The weight is 188.5 grams with battery. The OS is Windows Mobile 6.0. The Wifi (which I'm not using) is 802.11 b/g. The Bluetooth (which I'm also not using) is V2.0+EDR. The battery is rated 2200 mAh.

UPDATE: The main frustration right now is that I can't get connected reliably. When I plug the cable in, it ought to synchronize immediately. ActiveSync is running on the iPaq and the sync program is running, but they ignore each other, and I can't figure out why.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 07:42 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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