But then a few days prior I had followed fellow Debian marathoner Christian and used my birthday at the end of this month (as well as the upcoming Boston Marathon) as an excuse for conspicuous comsumption. After some price comparison, I ordered a factory reconditioned Garmin Forerunner 405 from this web discounter at a nice rebate to the regular price. It arrived this afternoon, seemingly shining new and I have been fiddling with it for the last little while.
This device features wireless data transfer to a usbstick. This meant booting the laptop in windoze for the first time in years to load the 'client software' after which data transfer proceeded. The Garmin Connect site has very slick presentation and aggregation of the data. The trouble is of course how to get the data there when running Linux... Christian had mentioned the garmin-forerunner-tools package. Unfortunately, this seems to really be written for the Forerunner 305 models as it doesn't see the device at all. Some more googling lead to this page and the gant tarball. All still fairly raw, but with some prodding in the settings of the 405 ('pairing' set to 'on', 'force send' set to 'yes'; which may have to be reset each time ?) I got my two xml files off the gps watch. Yay. We'll see what mode I will settle one. With the 201 and its ancient serial port, I basically just dropped the run and training histories which their fairly limited data collections.
Last but not least, fellow Oak Park runner Peter Sagal had a humorous Runner's World column on the whole GPS geekyness. If he'd only known how to pair it with programming geekyness...
So Google: if someone asks you why AvantGo syncing from Linux all of a sudden fails, tell them to get the new files from here. The app is now called M-Business and requires a fresh setup of server, id and password; but you're off to the races afterwards.
More recently, I noticed a 16 mb SD card for a whopping $2.99, shipping included, on the always help TechBargains site. So I ordered one, and got it today.
And lo and behold, it now works. I first tried to transfer the files via Card Directories, a little Palm app to place files anywhere on MMC or SD cards. Didn't seem to work, though.
After upgrading to the newest version of Power48, I sort-of learned from the README that a) the HP roms needed to be converted -- for which one needs to employ a Windows binary, and having the work laptop home proved useful for that, and b) that these thusly generated files needed to be installed under Windows too -- pilot-xfer did indeed fail.
And lo and behold, having done that, Power48 now works and I have three new (emulated) calculators.
By the way, I'm really quite pleased with the Tungsten C. It feels less sluggish (400 MHz Strongarm cpu), it has ample memory (64mb), the screen is terrific (but harder to read outside) and the 802.11b wifi is neat. Drawbacks are the above-average weight, the fact that there are way too few open hotspots (but it's nice enough not have to go upstairs to check email) and that documents to go and the adobe pdf converter require windoze. So I only get to use that at work ...
It turns out that this mightily confuses the AvantGo reader I am so used to. Despite several upgrade attempts from (gasp!) windoze and directly (nice hints are here and here (though you may need to be logged in) via pilot-xfer, it would sync nicely but never get the reader software going. At first I was confronted with 'AvGoPimPod1 not a shared library'. Deleting libmal and installing libsmal from the 'palm executables' bundle fixed that. But still no reader. It continued to babble about channels -- I guess that's their commercial product for intra-company news transmission.
Well, another attempt his morning fixed that. Deleting AGConnect, AvantGo and libmal before reinstalling them along with a new definition of the server in AGConnect did the trick. While the info is exactly the same as before, this seems to sail around whatever bug was blocking me before. I'm happy.
Now if only the other channels would use a smaller font just like the venerable Globe & Mail does so that one gets more mileage out of the neato 320x320 display...
Almost as easy under Linux once the right modules are loaded. I had already built them months ago. The following script mount_flash does the trick for me:
#!/bin/sh # # edd 13 Feb 2003 # using info from http://vic.dyndns.org/linux-UsbMassStorage/ # and http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/personal/cf-linux # a matching entry is in /etc/fstab # also use 'sg_scan -i' and 'sg_map' so that all is well before mounting # load modules modprobe sd_mod modprobe sg modprobe usb-storage mount /mnt/flash echo "Compact Flash storage mounted at /mnt/flash" exit 0