Connecting to the Internet

The great thing about the Jornada is it's built-in 56K modem. It gave
me such a kick to connect it to the phone line and try dial-up again
after all these years and hear all those noises emanating from the
machine. I must have been really handy at the time to just plug in a
cable and connect for your email or web.

Fast forward to 2013 and to be honest, it's not so handy any more.
It's more of a bind than anything else. I did toy with the idea of
carrying a modem cable around with me, but I knew there had to be a
better way.

So back to ebay and I found a cheap PCMCIA wi-fi card called the
"Cabletron Systems Roamabout Wi-Fi". Setting it up wasn't so easy
though. There seem to be quite a few of these listed on ebay at the
moment in the UK and appear on searches for "Jornada", so there may be
a few people stuggling like I did.

Firstly, I couldn't find the correct drivers, and spent a lot of time
installing and uninstalling drivers to no avail. The drivers supplied
with the card were of no use. The correct drivers, which I eventually
tracked down are in the repository on the right if anyone needs them.

Windows CE 3.0 cannot support the WPA encryption that my wireless
router uses, and I didn't want to drop the security to WEP, so once
again I had to be a bit more creative.

On the router I set up a guest network called "Jornada". In the router
settings I made sure that it was set to not broadcast the SSID,
meaning other computers would not be able to see this guest network.
You would only be able to connect if you knew the name of the network.
On the back of the Roamabout card is something called a MAC address.
This is a unique identifier for the modem card, so if you set up a MAC
adddress filter on the guest network for this address, it will only
let this particular card connect. I left the guest network unsecured.

That done, I added a profile in the Roamabout settings. When it asked
for SSID I had to type this in because it is a hidden network. I made
sure the security settings were left open and finished the setup.

Lo and behold, it worked!

To be sure it's not going to be the fastest connection to the
internet, but you don't need it on a device of this age.

Out and about, I suspect there would be problems connecting to public
wi-fi hotspots because of the security, but at home this works fine
and dandy.

In any case, I have just ordered a Nokia D211 Wi-Fi/GPRS card from
Amazon second hand, which should solve the mobility issue once set up
with a pay-as-you-go SIM card, so I'll let you know how that goes.

Sent from my HP Jornada 720

GSPlayer

What a great little media player this is. It is freeware, nice and
compact and plays shoutcast streams.

If you want to play shoutcast on your HPC simply do the following:

- Install GSPlayer from the repository on this blog. There is no CAB
file: simply unzip to a folder on the device and run the .exe, create
a desktop shortcut or assign to a hotkey.

- On your laptopor desktop, browse to shoutcast.com, find a station
you like and right-click on the link. Choose "save link as" and save
the "tunein-station.pls" file somewhere.

- Rename the "tunein-station.pls" to the name of the station, e.g.
"Smooth Jazz.pls" and then transfer to a folder on your handheld.

-From there, you can either open the file you just saved from GSPlayer
or double click the file from explorer.

- Listen to the radio! (best to keep the Jornada on charge or you'll
have a flat battery very quickly.)

This is of course assuming you have your Jornada connected to the
internet. This might work over dial-up, but unlikely. I'll explain how
I got my J720 online in the next post.

Also, coming soon: How I managed to set up wireless printing through a
very convoluted solution, and how I now have cloud access to Skydrive,
Google Drive, and Dropbox!

Sent from my HP Jornada 720

New Software Repository

Trawling the web for old legacy software has certainly kept me
occupied for the last few weeks. It seems that some software titles
are just dead and buried and will probably never see the light of day
again.

To make things easier for any new HPC owners that land on this blog, I
thought I would put together a little repository of some of the best
and most useful (and often hard to find) applications for the
platform.

They are either freeware or trial versions, so I should not be
stepping on any toes by putting them up here. Needless to say, if you
need to get some of the software registered, then you should try the
official sources first, but if the software has been abandoned by it's
writers then you might need to be a little more (ahem) creative!

I have included nPOPuk, which is still supported by it's developers
and seems to be the only email client worth installing. Many of the
other clients do not support SSL, which means you cannot use it with
modern email servers like GMail etc. Best of all, it's free!

There is also Opera Mobile 8.65 (trial) but make sure you install
Redgear first. Redgear allows you to run software designed for later
Windows CE devices on the Jornada.

Opera is probably your best option for web browsing, but to be honest;
that ain't saying much. Web browsing on the J720 is painful at best:
there doesn't seem to be enough memory, modern website security seems
to always fail, and the machine has locked up completely on me on
numerous occasions while trying to browse. However, a computer needs
web capability doesn't it? Well this is as good as it gets.

Resco did some pretty decent software back in the day, and here we
have two fine examples. The first is Resco File Explorer which is much
easier to use than the built-in explorer, has loads of functions, and
has an FTP plug-in. The FTP plug-in has proven to be very useful, but
more on that in a future post. There is the also excellent Total
Commander for the same sort of thing, but I just prefer Resco's app.

The second Resco app is Photo Viewer, which allows basic conversion
and editing of photos as well as viewing. Not only that, but it has a
screen capture function which is useful for me when posting screencaps
here.

Resco Explorer has a registry editor plug-in, but I prefer this one:
PHM Registry Editor. This is useful for tweaking the system, but more
on that later as well.

CE Agenda, is a very nice PIM application, but so far, I have had
little success syncing my google calendar items, so it's not very
useful to me at the moment.

Finally, FrotzCE is for playing Infocom style text adventures and I've
had lots of fun with this already. Great on a device with a keyboard
like this. Takes me back to yesteryear.

Well that's all for now. Hope this has been useful.

Sent from my HP Jornada 720

Don't pin any hopes on getting google calendar sync to work...

I have been trying to get this to work for some time now.

You see, I don't have Outlook installed on my PC: I use Google
services for just about everything. Anyhow, I resent having to dock
the Jornada and sync with my PC. I have a wireless card in the
handheld, so shouldn't I be able to do this over-the-air?

Well, as is often the case, the HPC predates google's sync services
and any software I could find requires a higher version of the OS and
.net CF 2.0. I could get around the versioning problem using tools
such as "executability check" but not the .net CF requirement. There
is absolutely no way to install it on this machine. You can install
.net CF 1.0, but this is not compatible with any of those apps.












The closest I have come to getting google sync to work is by
installing an old Pocket PC shareware application called "TTSync". It
will run if you have the Redgear utility installed. However, as you
can see from the picture, it doesn't run very well.

Nevertheless, I tried ediing the .ini file in the TTSync folder with
the the server details for Goosync.com (where I have registered an
account) and eventually I had success. The sync process seemed to work
and I had my google calendar appointments and contacts appearing in
Pocket Outlook.

Sadly, this only seems to work once, and then I have to delete my
device profile on goosync and re-add it for the sync to work again,
and when it does work for subsequent tries, it duplicates all the
data.

Therefore I have given up for the time being, but at least the above
shows that it is at least technically possible.

Sent from my HP Jornada 720

My New (But Old) Gadget

So, I have had this lovely HP Jornada 720 Handheld PC for a couple of
weeks now.

Being a gadget nut who always likes to have the latest toys, I had
longed for this for many years after it's release circa 2000.The
problem being, the extremely high price at the time.

Fast forward to 2013: remembering how I'd coveted the Jornada, I took
a little look on ebay, and a few days later had the device in my
hands.

Having played around with it, I have come to realise that installing
software and getting it to work with with services is far more
difficult than I imagined on a thirteen year old device.

There a couple useful websites out there, but even those are not very
current.

Hence this little blog: I aim to provide information on how I have
managed (or tried) to make the Jornada into a useful device. Judging
by the number of these being sold on ebay, there ought to be a few
people out there who may find this useful.

I'll also be updating the blog entirely from the J720.

Sent from my HP Jornada 720