GPS

  I haven't mentioned till now the fact that my beloved Palm PDA (Tungsten E) has snuffed it. Well to the point of being unusuable. So I now had to look for a replacement PDA to help with the long dull shifts I sometimes get at work. After some difficult decisions and circumstances where I was offered a second Palm that was "much better than Tungsten E" but turned out to be a prehistoric brick some gay guy wanted to off load onto me as a way to meet me after work, I finally struck pay dirt with what I believe is the best option I could have hoped for. I was showing the smashed screen off to a work mate who suddenly got excited and exclaimed "you can buy mine!" Now after my ordeal with the gay guy the last thing I wanted was yet another old outdated peice of crap loosely dubbed a PDA. But he was adamant that it was not a crap one and that the only reason he wanted to sell it was to get money up to buy a new Walkman mobile phone. Then he said something which really grabbed my attention. "Oh... and it's got GPS too!" he claimed! Really I thought. "So what is wrong with it?" I snapped back. Then he went on to reassure me that he simply wanted to money. Also he told me that he has never even used the damn thing.

 

  Cut a long story short he was right! Daddy bought the iPaq for him to use GPS but he got overwhelmed with the amount of messing around you go through to set it up.

 

  It's an h3630 iPaq Compaq Pocket PC. It originally came with Pocket PC 2000 which sucked ass. Looking around on the internet was almost a waste of time till I hit www.ebay.com.au where I got lucky and found an "unlocker" seller who sells mostlly codes and passes to obtain hard to get software. So through him I was able to get the 40M download to install Pocket PC 2002. That's when new problems arose around the issue of memory. The PDA only has a measly 32M RAM. Hardly enough to go messing with GPS. But the GPS attachment has a  Compact Flash slot. So first day I grabbed a 256M card and whacked her in. But my main drama was in getting software to install onto the card and not the squeezy RAM of the ipaq.

 

  Well after learning more than I cared to learn about iPaq's and their set up I ended up solving my dramas.

 

GPS

 

  I've always known that GPS was a great way to get about as I hire them out as part of my job. What I didn't know before was the way it changed your driving patterns when you owned one. I'm seeing streets in Sydney I've never even seen before. You'll be coasting down the road along what you thought was the quickest way home when you'll get a surprising TURN LEFT announcement for 300M ahead. As you hold your breath you turn placing total faith in a emotionless persona in your PDA. Next thing you know you've just avoided 4 traffic lights and learnt a new short cut! Oh and did I mention how deadly accurate the pick up is of your current location? Scary to say the least. You get into your driveway and the dreary destination announcment rings out. I'm sure I'll be making more entries in relation to my new Navman GPS unit in the not too distant future!