Day: October 9, 2009

Most anyone who’s seen me in person in the past seven or eight years knows that I carry around with me, nearly everywhere, a slightly dated handheld PC that weighs in somewhere between the size of a modern netbook and what they used to call a “palmtop.” The NEC MobilePro, long out of production, was way, way the hell ahead of its time: it was a netbook, 5+ years before the concept of the netbook caught on with, if not the general public, then the general geek populace. It can get on the web via wi-fi with few problems. It has Word, Excel and Powerpoint on it, so I can write articles for my site while I’m away from my desktop, I can keep my inventory spreadsheets of my game collection on it, and so on. It reads PDFs, so I recently made it a bit of a personal crusade to figure out how to get it to play nice with my home LAN so it could access the huge number of ebooks I have on my home server. The MobilePros, at least the later ones, are touchscreen devices. You can use a stylus (provided with the unit), but you can also tap it with your fingers. I usually use my fingers, because how cool is that? To complete my journey to the dork side, I had a custom “DON’T PANIC” sticker made up for the “cover” (i.e. the reverse side of the flatscreen); admit it, if you had a portable device with a tiny screen that you could look stuff up on, you would do this too and you know it. The little machine has become something of a trademark of mine. … Read more