The nights are shorter, and the days are longer. It seems like there is more time to be filled up with activities (although there is never enough time). We started earlier than usual at our June meeting to take care of all of the items on our agenda.
First, we held our annual elections. Our current officers were unanimously re-elected: I will hold the office of President for another year; Ralph Reid will be your Vice President; and Tony Barcellos will continue to be our Secretary/Treasurer. We thank all those members who turned out to vote; we hope to serve you well.
Small and Flashy
Last month I showed a Targus GoAnywhere USB flash drive, the size and shape of a marker pen. This month, our member Kurt Waters briefly showed us a different sort of mass-storage device: a "FlashMate" 5-in-1 USB Flash Card Reader.
This is a credit-card-sized gadget with up to 128 MB of built-in flash memory, a USB cable to connect it your PC, and slots for a number of different kinds of removable memory, such as Compact Flash cards, SmartMedia Cards, and even IBM Microdrives. Kurt says that the only popular flash media that it doesn't support is the Sony "Memory Stick," which is used in some digital cameras and camcorders (but he says that there is another model that does support that Sony format).
It comes with a mini-CD-ROM with driver software, and Kurt says it is also already automatically supported in some of the newer versions of Windows. So the FlashMate seems like a very handy way to manage all of the different flash media that we accumulate nowadays in our gadget-hungry society. Kurt reports that it works well, and that he was able to get it for quite a low price by shopping around on the Web.
Small Things can be Good Things
This month seemed to be a good one for small, cool gadgets: Our main presentation featured a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) that has enough horsepower to run multitasking Linux. Bill Kendrick of LUGOD (the Linux User Group of Davis) demonstrated the Zaurus PDA from Sharp.
The Zaurus PDA
It was the second time that Bill demonstrated Linux to us: the last time was perhaps a year or so ago, when he brought in a large Pentium-class desktop PC running Linux. He brought that PC to this meeting also, but only to use it as a sort of giant video display adapter, so that he could project the PDA's display onto a screen. That, in itself, was a good demo of the power of this little PDA: Bill plugged an Ethernet adapter into the PDA, and squirted all of the PDA's screen output over the Ethernet to the big PC, which showed it in a window on its own screen and on a movie screen via Ralph Reid's overhead projector. The Zaurus had no problem running over the Ethernet.
In fact, the Zaurus had no problem running any of the programs that Bill showed us, often several at a time; it is a true Linux system, and that means that it really does multitask several programs at once. Of course, with a screen only 240 pixels wide and 320 pixels high (a quarter of a VGA screen, held sideways!), and only 3½" across diagonally, it only shows one of the multitasking programs at a time. The other applications run in the background without using the screen.
Bill showed us that the Zaurus can handle Java applications, Web pages, graphics images, sound files, movie files, Word documents, and more. It has lots of RAM, a beefy processor, plenty of ports, a rechargeable battery, a color touch screen with a backlight, a keyboard (small, but usable, according to Bill), handwriting recognition, headphones, and a price tag of around $400.00.
Bill says that the Zaurus is currently the fifth most popular PDA. If that is so, I would hazard a guess and say that the Zaurus must be selling based on its potential more than its current suite of software, and that it's probably selling to technical types who just love the idea of a PDA running a "real" operating system, not a stripped-down version of Windows.
It really is an incredibly tiny, general-purpose, expandable computer, with an open-source, non-proprietary operating system that can be programmed by many programmers without needing expensive software tools.
Is it for your grandmother to use, to keep her phone numbers and shopping lists? Probably not; a cheaper, simpler PDA will do for that.
Is it for a serious computer science student to cherish and fiddle with constantly? For sure!
Is it for a corporate IT type who needs to remotely administer other systems while traveling? Maybe, if they don't want to lug a laptop around.
Is it for an engineer or scientist with a briefcase full of plug-in gadgets to turn the Zaurus into a pocket-sized oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, voltmeter, telescope controller, or something like that? Only if enough third parties decide to develop the necessary hardware and software.
Personally, I am impressed by the Zaurus, and I hope that it will succeed. Bill says that Sharp has a pretty good history of supporting their products over the long run, so there's hope that the Zaurus will keep gaining in popularity and will fend off Microsoft and its Windows CE system for small form-factor PCs. Perhaps we'll have Bill back in another year or so, to show us how well the Zaurus is doing.
Besides putting the Zaurus through its paces and showing us that "PCs" can be pretty darn small, Bill handed out a number of Zaurus-related freebies, courtesy of Sharp. Our thanks go to Bill and LUGOD!
Next Month
Our July meeting will be held at our usual time and place: at 7:00 p.m., on the fourth Wednesday of the month, in the large meeting room of the Davis branch of the Yolo County Public Library.
We will continue our popular practice of holding a raffle for door prizes for the Davis Chapter members at the meeting. Chuck Nicolaus won at this meeting; come on down, and perhaps you'll win at the next one!
—
Tim Feldman
