I re­cent­ly re­cov­ered a Palm m100, be­cause my cal­en­dar was get­ting out of hand.

So, be­sides us­ing it as a glo­ri­fied alarm clock, what could I do with it?

Oh, sure, some lame games ex­ist (re­mem­ber this is an old mod­el, black and white, al­most no sound, low res­o­lu­tion, very lit­tle mem­o­ry), but...

Well, I have had for a long time the habit of read­ing project Gutem­berg's book­s. I even wrote a pro­gram to read them on my PC (Uqbar, link at the left­).

But the main prob­lem is, of course, that the places where I do most of my read­ing (bars, clients' of­fices while wait­ing for stuff to in­stal­l, train­s, wait­ing room­s) usu­al­ly lack com­put­ers I can use.

So, I de­cid­ed to try us­ing the Palm for that.

Of course, I am not be­ing orig­i­nal, since a bazil­lion peo­ple had the same idea.

There­fore, I went and got my­self some of the soft­ware peo­ple rec­om­mend­ed for read­ing Palm­doc doc­u­ments, and some stuff to cre­ate them.

I tried: Iambic Read­er, CSpotRun, and a cou­ple of oth­er­s, and had a nasty sur­prise, be­cause all of them, when I jumped to a dis­tant place in the book, did one of the fol­low­ing:

• Crash

• Cor­rupt the text

So, I gave up hope on Palm­doc (although it's nice that KWord can ex­port to it!), and looked hard­er.

Then I found Weasel Read­er. Not on­ly does it work great (it on­ly lacks an op­tion to add a margin, some­times light­ing makes the edge of the screen hard to read­), but the for­mat it us­es com­press­es texts more than palm­doc!

So, how's this go­ing:

• The screen is smal­l, but that's not too bad, it is about the same as read­­ing a news­­pa­per col­um­n.

• Smooth scrolling does­n't work. Maybe my palm is too old/s­low/bad, but it doesn work well.

• Page-rolling au­­to­scroll does work. The top of the screen is au­­to­­mat­i­­cal­­ly re­­placed with the next page line-at-a-­­time.

• Man­u­al page-scrolling works best. Since you on­­ly have to tap the screen or press a but­­ton it's not an­noy­ing at al­l.

• It does­n't hurt my eye­­s. Since it's not even back­­l­it, it re­quires good am­bi­ent light, but it's not bad at al­l.

• It has de­­cent ca­­pac­i­­ty. I can stick up to 3MB of tex­t, along with all the pro­­grams I use, in a 2MB de­vice. 3MB of text is a lot of tex­t.

So, I am pret­ty hap­py with the re­sult.