- Trick or Treat
When I say that I bought the Alphasmart Dana off the recent vido by Cathode Ray Dude on an old word processor that's able to run DOS, I'm being honest. I don't actually know where I learned about the Dana, but I've always had a soft spot for PalmOS devices in general. I may have learned about it looking it up when one of my writer friends on Facebook talked about buying a different AlphaSmart off eBay. Exploring the model and learning some things about the product line on Wikipedia, I believe I saw that they sold a thing that, hey, that runs PalmOS! I love PalmOS, and wouldn't it be nice to have such a device that I can use as a general-purpose typing device?
This would have almost certainly been around 8 years ago when I was a broke college student. Finally treated myself to it thinking about it again a couple weeks ago and per a suggestion by WildWeasel -- and wouldn't you know it, there was a recent video about the AlphaSmart product line by This Does Not Compute, who does fun little short-form documentaries about consumer products with niche or outmoded use cases, with a specialization in Apple hardware and the occaisonal Game Boy mod. I don't know if this will drive up the price of these devices, but as budget writing tools they're quite useful, and the appx. $70 I spent on it (not inclucing SD cards and new batteries) feels pretty worth it to me.
Anyway, I actually watched that video with my wife last night to show her the product line since she wasn't familiar with any of it. That's to be expected, since these were mainly, if not exclusively, being sold to a US educational market and she didn't grow up here. But we agreed (she's a bit of an Apple fanatic) that these are cool devices, and I learned that the Dana's ability to serve as a USB keyboard is possibly the one defining feature of every device they've launched. A really neat trick that I find even more justifies the price I paid for it, because it's a very comfortable keyboard, and is currently the only device I have that works as a wired USB keyboard. (I have several wireless ones and a bluetooth device or two, though.)
- backup of a backup
The AlphaSmart Dana has two SD card slots, and with a maximum SD card supported of 1GB, the cards greatly dwarf the internal 16MB of internal memory on the Dana, which I use mainly to store alternate fonts like Comic Sans (because I am a sicko with a fucked up sense of humor) and packs for Vexed, because I believe that my distraction-free writing device should be able to play as many games as possible. The Neo might have modern WiFI support, but there's no way you can play Sega Swirl on that thing.
Point is, even if I load up the SD card with games, text documents simply do not take up enough space on the Dana to be a storage concern. Saving everything I can to the SD cards will still mean that I have leagues of storage space on them. Which of course means that they're a perfect place to store backups of the internal memory!
This is not, strictly speaking, necessary. It's handy, because it means that if I were to replace the batteries I'd be able to restore any data lost from power off. Those 16 MB are volatile RAM and require battery power to maintain. As far as I'm concerned, the average Palm device is basically a Game Boy for the office worker, and that's so deeply tied to why I love them. If you back up to the SD card, then you can immediately restore that data without issue, and you don't need to find the computer you normally sync it with.
Of course, all the data on the device's memory also get synced when performing a sync; having a more hard-copy backup of data that would otherwise be transient is a key part of why the sync operation was a core part of Palm device design. Thus either one could count as a "backup of a backup", because I can restore from SD card, or restore from sync.
- Jared, 19
The guy who did the "Jared 19" vine was a fellow who at the time was going by the name Josh Kennedy, now Josh Ovalle. He is apparently from Seattle and age 25. Given that the video in question is about a kid who was never given proper language education while I'm here writing these posts on a device that was almost certainly originally used in an educational context (marked appropriately with a big ol' 14D right in the middle of it), I immediately wondered something...could Jared 19, if he were based on a real person, have ever learned to write with the help of this Dana? It turns out that I purchased the device from someone in Silverdale. If they had the device because they purchased it from Seattle's public school system when liquidating old stock, then it's entirely plausible. The inspiration for Jared, 19 could have used one of these in elementary or maybe middle school, as these devices were sold in '03-'04 and I could easily see them being used for most of a decade at least. I mean, I'm using this one right now and it's still an excellent writing device!
In conclusion, I believe that Jared, 19 might have used this device and it's honoring his can't-do attitude that I've loaded it up with stuff like Rush Hour, Sega Swirl, and SubHunt.
- roleplaying games
So one of the fun things about the Dana is that while it has the full seelection of avaiilable buttons used by any standard palm device (4 launcher buttons and page up/down), the standard keyboard layout means that they don't exist where they would on a normal Palm device. so the kinds of games that the Dana is best suited to either use the touchpad (which works fine but is a little awkward since you'd want to keep the whole device on a desk to use it) or are slower and driven either by menus or text parsers. While you can install, say, HardBall, the 3-level breakout clone that came with the PalmOS suplementary software, you wouldn't actually want to play it so much because the button layout for it has you using four buttons in the top row and one (page-up) on the botom that is the second-function of the up arrow (so you hit function + up-arrow to use it). Something like Tetris might be even more confusing and awkward, though it is installable.
However, what does exist and unquestionably works incredibly well on PalmOS is the Z-machine interpreter, the software used to run the old text adventures on servers back in the days when "graphical interfaces" were a gleam in the eye of the developers at Xerox PARC. As far as I'm concerned, Zork is at least as much of a role-playing game as, say, Dragon Quest. Zork doesn't make sense unless you look at it as an attempt to model the interactions of tabletop games in a single-player setting (with a pre-planned story to tell, of course), I think. Otherwise the goofy not-quite-Tolkien setting doesn't make a lot of sense, and a lot of the humor in it will probably not make sense either. The notion of a game being played off a server more natually aligns with the idea of a dungeon master, too, than just as a piece of software that you interact with to tell a story.
If anything the more stereotypical notion of the RPG in the modern era comes from attempts to model tabletop games and text adventures on systems that didn't have a keyboard and thus would have been ungodly to try to implement a text parser in. You can't understand RPGs without looking at Dragon Quest, and you can't understand Dragon Quest without looking at Yuji Horie's immediately preceding project, The Portopia Serial Murder Case, and you probably won't understand that unless you look at the common vocabulary of interactive fiction (text adventures) that developed into the 80s.
Zork -- a game I could play on the Dana right now if I weren't trying to write to this prompt -- is an RPG.
- What the fuck are the upstairs neighbors doing
While I currently live in a single-story single-family home, I do it mainly out of necessity, as it was per-month cheaper than paying rent on most apartments in the area for something of comparable size, and the whole point of a fixed-rate mortgate is that a locked-in low interest rate encourages spending over long periods of time, and that's good for consistent economic growth. I don't own a home to get "return on investment", but because rent is unquestionably a money bit that can, at best, maybe improve my credit score. Maybe. So it's cheaper for me to neither have upstairs neighbors, nor to be someone else's upstairs neighbor. Which is a shame, because I am absolutely a fan of dense housing structures over single-family stuff and would much rather live in a complex as long I had comparable living space.
That said, if I were that upstairs neighbor, I'd probably be inspiring that same question myself. When you sync the Dana, if it has sound on, a successful sync both starts and ends with a rather piercing set of beeps. I've been keeping the sound on while doing this, because I had previously run into some issues while trying to figure out what verison of Palm Desktop is best suited to use it, and having the beeps on makes it easier for me to diagnose connection issues, and to make sure the Dana entered the sync properly and nothing is hanging. Because the Dana can be used as a keyboard, most of the time when it's connected to a computer it's presenting itself as a USB keyboard, even if it only actually sends keystrokes when you enter AlphaWord. To get it to be recognized as a PalmOS device, it has to start a sync operation, at which point it will identify itself as one. Once you've done this, you can find the Palm device it presented itself as and use device manager to install the Aceeca PalmOS drivers over the not-working Palm device drivers it may have tried to use.
Otherwise the closest thing I can come up with for an annoying noise that wakes the neighbors is me blowing my nose due to my nostrils drying out really easily lately for some reason (probably slightly lower temperatures dropping the relative humidity). I do this and it bothers Rocket Raccon, one of the cats we have here. Any time I sniffle or blow my nose, especially when she's napping, she mutters out a little mewy sound, so I think it's disturbing her. The beeps of the Dana don't appear to be an issue for anyone in comparison. They just chill right through them.
- green thumbs
I'm not much for gardening since the pandemic. While before it started I tended to be more active in keeping up my garden, it's been harder to do since then, a lot of the activities I've done to keep me engaged in the midst of lockdown procedures haven't been the friendliest to my arms. My wrists are in less than great condition. Which is a shame, because sitting outside in the sun and removing weeds tends to feel good to me in the longer-term and I haven't been getting enough sunlight this year.
I tell you what isn't helping, though. While my wrists are probably most doomed by strain from playing dumb phone games, the work-anywhere nature of the Dana on battery power means that I can sit anywhere and use the device while it sits in my lap. It works perfectly but isn't the most comfortable in that position, and would probably be better suited to a desk or a table. I'm a sicko who doesn't like moving around much: not even to the dining table, despite it being maybe like ten feet away at most.
However, the fact that the Dana has such long battery life and doesn't really require an external power source means that I might well spend more time just sitting in the backyard typing away on the Dana, enjoying all the, uh, brown grass growing...? it's dormant, I'm pretty sure...? around me.
- The Best Places to Cry in Public
I think the best place to cry in public is probably a movie theater. It's dark, there's absolutely nobody who would pay attention to you, and if you're in the right one everyone else might be too. It would probably cost you the price of a movie ticket if you don't have someone to sneak you in, but depending on when and where that might not be terribly expensive.
The next-best places I could think of to cry in public are probably the sorts of places where you could take a legacy piece of writing hardware and not get too many stern looks about it. After all, one thing both cases have in common is that you're in a public area looking to avoid the potential shame of a disengaged public. I remember people getting really weird about Smith-Coronas in parks about a decade ago, whereas in my opinion the only awkward or confusing part of that is how heavy those things are to transport. But I'd say anywhere you'd feel safe bringing out a weird, almost novelty, typing device to take notes or jot down ideas on is a good place to cry in public. Parks, college campuses, diners, maybe even a coffee shop or library if it's not too quiet. Any of these would be as close to an ideal cry spot or writing spot as any.
So if you see me having a breakdown while writing something on my Dana while looking over a plate of bacon, eggs, and hash browns, just understand that it's because I'm profoundly committed to multitasking.