Nokia D211 GPRS/WLAN PCMCIA Card

As promised, here is my review of this PCMCIA card which promises
Handheld PC users the ability to access the internet from home via
Wi-Fi, or while out and about via GPRS (SIM required of course).

If, like me, you get one from ebay without the original CD, you can
find the drivers in the software repository at the top right of this
blog. I found them at www.hpcfactor.com which seems to be one of the
few sites for the HPC that still seems to be going.

Installation is simple, just install the drivers, reset and plug in
the card.

GPRS set-up was simple enough and allowed a strong connection in my
experience. As a bonus, the drivers included SMS messaging, which was
nice and might be useful for some.

However, I had quite forgotten how terribly slow GPRS is. Now my
memory has been jogged, I seem to remember being quite dissatisfied
with the speeds back when that was the best we had.

Even worse though was the W-Fi, which despite hours of searching the
web and fiddling with the configuration I could not get a successful
connection. I had partial success with an old D-Link wireless router
that I dug out the back of the cupboard, which appeared to connect but
wouldn't transfer any data.

In the end, I just had to admit defeat. Discussion on hpcfactor's
forums seem to back up this experience. This was a real shame as I
wanted an all-in-one solution, but to have the connectivity I want I
would have to use the Nokia and my existing Wi-Fi card, which in the
end was just too much hassle when I can just use the Wi-Fi card plus
the wireless hotspot on my phone.

If anyone reads this and wants to try for themselves, I'll gladly let
them have it for just the postage.

So to sum up, if you just want GPRS on your HPC, then this is the
hardware for you. If you want both mobile access and Wi-Fi in one card
then you are probably out of luck.

Sent from my HP Jornada 720

Wireless Printing

UPDATE: Please ignore all the convoluted instructions below! I have just
tried emailing a document directly from Hotmail on my Jornada to my
wireless printer and it works. It just doesn't work with GMail.

I was originally going to do a detailed tutorial on this, but having
given it some thought, it is probably a bit too "niche", even for this
blog. It depends on you having an HP Wireless printer set up with it's
own email address.

If you do, I'll not go into huge amounts of detail, but you can use
IFTTT to print any document you upload to a public Dropbox folder.

I tried to email the files directly in the first place, but it seems the
HP ePrint  service rejects any emails that don't have the correct security
certificates. These certificates are only sent when you use the GMail web
app but not when you use POP with GMail. I have not tested with another
email provider.

This recipe on IFTTT can be configured to email any document that you
place in a special "PrintThis" folder in Dropbox to your HP Wireless
printer's email address.
In a previous post, I demonstrated how to remotely access cloud
storage via FTP on the Jornada 720. Using this to upload any file to
the "PrintThis" folder will send the file to your printer.

It's not instant: it may take a while for it to reach your printer,
but it works.

Sent from my HP Jornada 720

Mobipocket Reader

Simply because the form factor, I'm not sure if I will use the Jornada
as an ebook reader, but I love reading ebooks and wanted to try and
see how well it worked.

After some research, I figured the best bet would be Mobipocket as it
is a relatively straight foward conversion from the Kindle format.

The application itself runs well on the HPC and after converting an
ebook, displayed it nicely. There are lots of options and you can even
display the text in two columns. However, I found the lack of
sub-pixel rendering (such as ClearType) to be lacking which is a
shame. I tried uBook, which does have the smooth font rendering I was
looking for, but found the software otherwise slow and clunky. uBook
seems to be a bit of a favourite in the HPC community, but I can't
seem to get it to work nicely. Hence I'll be sticking with Mobipocket.

It's a shame that ereader.com and fictionwise.com no longer seem to
sell ebooks for Mobipocket or the eReader software. I like to read
current best sellers etc. and don't mind paying either, so my best
option was to buy and download Kindle books to my PC, strip the DRM
and convert to a .prc file with a piece of PC software called Calibre.

I have no moral qualms about stripping out the DRM as I have no
intention of distributing the ebooks.

The final step is of course to transfer the .prc file to the 720 and
open in Mobipocket and enjoy.

Mobipocket .cab installation file is now in the software respository.

Sent from my HP Jornada 720

New Focus

If you have seen this blog before, you will notice a new name which indicates a slight change of focus for the blog.

I started the blog because I was bored with the latest gadgets and smartphones as they now seem to be offering little which is new or exciting, so decided to get myself an old gadget which I had coveted many years ago but couldn't afford.

This was the HP Jornada 720, which I have had hours of pleasure tinkering around with for the last couple of months, but I am now hankering for more, so I have ordered myself an old Sony Clie PDA from ebay.

I also took delivery of the exact same make and model of TV/Radio/Alarm Clock that I had as a child and hooked this up to a Freeview box, and am now reliving memories of black and white TV from my youth.

Next, I would also love to get my hands on (a reasonably priced) Samsung SGH P310 mobile phone.

As I would also like to blog about these, it made sense to change the title of the blog. I will continue to post about the Jornada, but this will no longer be the sole focus.

I will add any Windows CE software that I have mentioned but so far not added to the software repository, but of course this will probably expand to include Palmos software and who knows what in the future as well.

Thanks for reading.

Google Calendar Syncing Is Here!

Well despite my earlier post saying that it was not possible, I have
got Google Calendar sync working on the J720.

Thanks go to Jake from the forums on hpcfactor.com who helped with
much of the testing and experimenting to get this working.

First you need an account with goosync.com, which unfortunately is not
free, but is the only way I know to get this to work. Fortunately for
me I already had an account.

Make sure you have Redgear and TTSync installed (available from the
repository on this blog). You will will want to run TTSync in PPC
portrait mode from the Redgear settings icon in the titlebar. This
renders the TTSync GUI in a more readable way, although it will still
be rough around the edges as is often the case when trying to run
Pocket PC software on the Handheld PC.

The important thing is that is usable. Now, if you already have a
device profile set up at the Goosync end, delete it and set up a new
one. Any device profile seems to work. You may want to go into
Goosync's calendar settings as well, as it seems to set a default
reminder for each appointment. I switched this off.


The TTSync program is not set up to sync with Google out of the box,
so you will need to edit the config.ini file in the TTSync program
folder. I have uploaded my config.ini file to the repository, so you
can just overwrite the file with that if you don't want to put in the
server settings yourself or just have a look to see how I've done it.

Now you can start TTSync. Go into the settings and put in your Goosync
username and password. Make sure you click in the Server setting box
and make sure Goosync is selected. Tap okay.

Now tap the large "Calendar" button down the bottom of the TTSync
screen. Make sure the "Sync mode" is set to Server. When you're ready
hit "Sync".

The screen should take some time sending and receiving, and if
everything works you should see the "completed" message in the
screencap above. Tap "Exit" to go back to the main TTSync screen.

From now on you should be able to just use the "Sync All" option at the
top of the screen every time you sync.

IMPORTANT: Do not do what I was doing wrong throughout most of my
testing and click the Redgear X button to close the apllication. If
you do this it will not save your settings and syncing will not work
after. Instead ALWAYS exit by selecting "Options" then "Exit".

That's it. It only works one way: from Google to the Jornada, so
essentially the calendar is read only. Any appointments made on the
handheld will not sync back to Google. Two-way synchronisation is
possible but it just creates duplicates of your appointments and I
don't recommend it.

Also note that I have so far not been able to get All Day events to
synchronise correctly. Thney appear as midnight to 23:59 timed events.
However I can live with that.

The other screencap above shows a test appointment I made on Google
Calendar and successfully synced to my Jornada.

It is also possible to edit the config.ini file to sync GMail contacts
as well although I have left this out as it only syncs names and
telephone numbers, not email addresses,which is of no use to me.

Quite a complicated process, but well worth it I think. I hope someone
else finds this helpful.

UPDATE: Jake from hpcfactor.com added this tip, "disabling automatic reminders in Pocket Outlook will also take away the default appt reminder in a GooSync sync".

Sent from my HP Jornada 720

Connecting To The Cloud

Yes, believe it or not, it is possible. You can connect to Google
Drive, Skydrive, Dropbox etc. from the trusty old Jornada HPC.

I looked into this for a long time: trying the webdav plugin for Total
Commander, and playing around with services such as attachments.me
(the latter allows you to send attachments to the cloud as email
attachments), but not to any great success.

Then I stumbled upon storagemadeeasy.com. I was looking for some free
method of accessing my files in the cloud, and have so far not found a
way. This service is quite cheap though, and not only provides a way
to download to and upload from the Handheld PC, but has some nifty
tools for accessing the same on your desktop PC or even from Libre
Office on a portable flash drive.

Once signed up to the free service, which allows you to connect to up
to three of your cloud storage services, you can add FTP access for a
one time fee of around $20 or £12.

Once this is done, you can add the settings to Resco Explorer's FTP
plug-in (see image), and away you go.

I expect this should work in Total Commander too but have not tried
it.

I have also used this to print to an HP wireless printer, but more on
that another time.

Sent from my HP Jornada 720