Palm Pilots



Kpilot under KDE 2.2-11(Redhat version 7.2) appears flaky. The Hotsync daemon, if enabled, stalls the program.
That said, the importance of Kpilot is the ability to transfer mail and address book into the underlying K Komponents (Kmail Kaddressbook etc) will relatively little pain.

By all accounts, the following program is 'better' (tm).


 



from Susan Machia


There are a bunch of tools written for the palm. Do a man of "pilot-link ".  I use pilot-xfer to simply sync/backup my pilot w/ no GUI (again, man pilot-xfer).

Go to www.jpilot.org to see a really sweet GUI.  They have a great user list.  The GUI also uses the pilot-link tools.

This is much in line with many linux tools, like cdrtools for cdwriters, and so on.

I love my palm - couldn't live w/o it and have been using it with the aformentioned tools since September, with no probs.

---

"Alan Jackson" <ajackson@oplnk.net>

Here's some stuff to keep you busy.

Use jpilot as opposed to kpilot. I don't remember why, but I think kpilot had problems or limitations.

Most utilities (such as jpilot) are autoconfigured to look for /dev/pilot

Assuming your connection is on com2, as su:

ln -s /dev/ttyS1 /dev/pilot
chmod 777 /dev/ttyS1

A few general Pilot tips from a friend who is an organization consultant (she helps people get organized)

- build memos for birthdays (put in everyone's birthday and add gift ideas as they occur to you)
- build a memo for books/CD's you have loaned out
- In my address book, I use one of the custom fields to store keywords about a person. For example, Xmas in that field designates Xmas card list, Bad Address indicates that I know the person has moved, but I don't have a good address, whatever. I use these later in perl code to do simple db querys.
- I use another custom field for building a family address. For eaxmple, I have a normal entry for John Doe. In custom1 I put "John and Jane, Jim,
Joyce, and Julia", so that when I address Xmas cards they will go to
"John and Jane Doe", but I have also stored the names of their kids as well. This really wants a fairly complex database, but you gotta use what you got.
- You can use your Palm for a travel-alarm and leave the clock at home. 8-)
- If you change the batteries within about 60 seconds, you won't lose anything.
- Build a memo for your car(s), store license plate #, windshield wiper replacement blade #, insurance tele and policy number, etc.

I have collected my perl scripts together with a small amount of documentation and placed them on the web :

http://www.oplnk.net/~ajackson/software/

http://www.oplnk.net/~ajackson/software/palm_address_tools.tar.gz

dump_addrs

This script does just what it says, it dumps the contents of the address book to STDOUT. It makes a good basic script to modify for your own devices.

print_labels

This script also makes use of the module PostScript::MailLabels to generate a postscript file suitable for printing onto mailing label stock. I use this to address my Christmas cards.

The key things I have done for this script and the next one are the use of the custom fields. The Palm has 4 custom fields in the address book. I define the first one to be family names, so I enter husband and wife, children so that for addressing Christmas cards, I can pull out the "husband and wife" part of the field and use that in the address.

In custom2, I put my database keys for selecting subsets of the data. I simply put in a comma-delimited list of keys. For example, everyone on my Christmas
card list gets an "Xmas" flag in custom2.

create_teampage

Another very simple example, here I select out a subset of addresses, and output html for a 2-column table, in alphabetical order, of the selected addresses.

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