Getting Closer to What I Want

How I love eBay! All the toys a digital dilletante could possibly want are available thereon! Despite having a close to complete lack of interest in obtaining a cell phone, I have had three digital cameras and four PDAs, all smaller and more powerful, though all were previous generations of the technology. Laptops, I've gone through seven since the first 486SX-33 (when state-of-the-art was P166).

But a Tablet PC; aren't they constantly passing them around on "Star Trek," digital books and logs and viewers? Do away with that keyboard and mouse?

So, I bid on and won a FUJITSU STYLISTIC 3400, a P3 400MHz, 192 MB RAM, 6 GB HDD. One USB port, one PCMCIA slot. It's got Win2K Pro SP4 and Office 2K, and a couple of utilities I've loaded on it. I have to say, it's getting closer to what I want.

At some point I'll need to upgrade the hard drive: 6 Gig is just NOT enough space, and I already suspect getting an OS on it will be a minor trick since the BIOS does NOT give an option to boot to a CDROM. I've just succeeded in getting a PCMCIA WiFi to work, and I'm looking for a small, inconspicuous USB hub so that I can use my digital camera, thumb-drive memory, and a keyboard together.

That last is the biggest disappointment, same as my HP Pocket PC: trying to write words with a stylus just does not make it. Slow and clumsy, especially with these aging and increasingly crampy hands. I am drafting this with a roll-up vinyl USB keyboard, though, and it works just fine.

Hey, if I could just recharge the batteries with a small "briefcase"solar panel, well wouldn't that be fun!

Closer and closer, aye!

AND OTHER WANTS:

I recently read an on-line article about someone who had hacked two iPods to allow pod-to-pod transfer of music without mediation by a computer, but the catch was, it could only be done in real time. A five-minute tune took five minues to transfer. I want to have a thumb drive, or something like it, that will allow me to select and transfer a variety of files - MP3s, docs, jpegs and the like, in the amount of time it would take to download them from your computer. Of course, this will make the Guardians of the Copyright absolutely nuts, but... well. 'Information wants to be free,' don't'cha know?