I know this is silly, but i'm posting this from my pocketPC. In my bedroom. Completely unplugged from anything. 30 feet from my computer. On a device that weighs just a few ounces. It's one of those moments like when I realized that connecting to a friends computer in a state 500 miles away over the net and grabbing a file off his floppy drive was actually making little motors move. Not terribly life changing, but cool.

I know how you feel. I wrote scripts to keep family and friends updated while I was in Seattle, and a simple connection to the site from my web-enabled phone made me quite happy. It's just really cool

I also liked that someone wrote a VNC client for my phone, and while I'm away I can log into my computer and send a friend a file from my computer a home. I love technology.

What text entry method are you using? I have a similar setup, but it's just too laborious to use any of the currently available methods of getting text to the screen.

Stu

I remember years ago, shortly after catching glimpses of the internet through a 2400 modem, I managed to sign on with a low tech device. I built a serial cable to interface my HP48 calculator to an external modem, and found a real basic terminal program. I managed to sign on, and post to a newsgroup my success. All while sitting on the cable to prevent it from moving, due to a lack of soder.

I continued to sign on to a few BBSes and do the same thing. I still find it amusing to this day that I even bothered, but it did show a proof of concept to me that small devices might actually be useful down the road for connecting to other people.

When I was in engineering school I had a great professor for my controls classes. He was the best. For example, he would take a class poll: "Do we want the test on Friday to get it over with, or Monday so we could study over the weekend?" When the class chose Monday, he offered to come to the school Sunday night after dinner to answer questions and work problems. He was *always* available to help when somebody had a question. About 8 of us would show up on Sunday nights and he'd stay there until we didn't have any more questions. Before the final exam, about 3 or 4 of us were there until about 2:30am and he just kept on going and helping us study and prepare. Great guy.

Anyhow, he was a believer that if you were going to do a certain job you should have the very best tools available for that job. He told a story in class once about buying his first calculator, an old HP dinosaur that cost him over $700 (in 1970 dollars). He would rant and rave about how silly it was to be an engineer with a 4 function solar powered calculator -- something he'd often seen in his classes.

I used his story to rationalize buying a brand new HP48. I *really* wanted this calculator and I couldn't afford it. I bought it anyway. He was right. It was *the* tool for the job.

I was working and taking a pretty full class load and was running out of time to study for a module in his class. It was Nyquist plotting of systems. Rather than cram on the material, I downloaded a Nyquist plotting program for the HP48 and brought it into the exam, thinking that most of the exam would be building the systems model, etc, etc. and that the Nyquist plot would be only part of the test.

When I got there, the whole exam was to create 3 or 4 Nyquist plots from given system equations. I punched them into the HP48, hit "plot" and copied the graphs to the answer book. I had shown absolutely no work. I couldn't have.

5 minutes into the exam I was copying the last graph to the answer book and I noticed the professor was standing behind me and watching what I was doing. I was horrified. I felt "caught" and I was really worried I was going to have to do the plots by hand.

He smiled at me and said, "now *that's* a good calculator," -- and walked away.

$700 (in 1970 dollars)

Eesh. That's something like ~ $3500 now.

Great story, TigerJimmy. Thanks!

I had an HP48G in high school. I loved that calculator. My friend and I hacked the iR port so it was a bit more beefy, then I would use it to mess with the tv's in the classrooms.

oh, and I did some cool constructive things with it too.

My friend and I hacked the iR port so it was a bit more beefy, then I would use it to mess with the tv's in the classrooms.

oh, and I did some cool constructive things with it too.

I did quite a bit of this too. The cool thing is that HP only limited the receiver, so transmit range was quite high for IR remote control and such. I also programmed a basic Tic Tac Toe game that used IR, and discovered you could aim 3 HP48s just right to get an odd 3 player game. After that, I made a full battleship game that worked really well.

I think I did more programming on that device then I did work in Calculus. But I still managed to pass with a college credit under my belt, so I guess I did enough

TigerJimmy, that's a good story.

I couldn't afford a 48, but I did buy a 42s. 8x8 complex matrix operations, wahoo! 12 years later and I still keep the 42 in my bag and use it almost every week for adding numbers. I'm not sure which would take me longer to relearn: matrix math or how to key it into the HP.

--Nathan

I prefer the keyboard (onscreen) without the spacebar, enter key, etc.

I can't read my own handwriting. There's no way the computer could.

Hehe, the 48 was great at controlling TV's. And since it has a built in system timer, I wrote a program to turn on the TV and amp, tune to channel 3, and sloooowly ramp the volume up until it woke me. After a while I learned to wake up whe it was pretty quiet.

The only "cheating" I ever heard of with a 48 was with the IR printer. A guy in the back would point his calculator at his buddies printer 2 seats in front of his and 1 over and hit print. Busted, though when the prof had his calc set to recieve.