Agenda VR3 Personal Digital Assistant

Monday 19. February 2001, I got myself an Agenda VR3, a PDA running Linux, developer edition. 5 days, six AAA batteries and most of my spare time later, I finally have it upgraded and started to make code that seg faults and spews bus errors on it... Lovely.

Some links:

• Essential:
  • Linux VR Tools HOWTO
  • The Unofficial Agenda FAQ
  • Andrej Cedilnik: Agenda Help Page - Agenda Help Page
• Others:
  • Agenda VR3 Projects
  • Agenda VR3
  • TestHWR
  • Moo
  • vsergeev's VR3 Website
    Vsergeev mailed me a vr3 binary of his porting efforts of Ruby for testing. Floating point isn't working yet, but it sure is fun running some Ruby snippets on the Agenda.
  • The Agenda VR3 InfoIndex

After giving up on getting my Red Hat 7.0 installation up and ready to compile code for the VR, I started using my ol' 6.2 installation. Alot of reckless rpm-forcing and lib installations later, I finally am able to compile programs for it.
{ Prescribble , MasterMind , XPhoto }

• Prescribble Oh no! Yet Another SketchPad wannabe?
  Not quite. I've been missing a way to enter notes quickly, without struggling with those pesky HWR strokes. I'm probably the only one going to read my notes, so it shouldn't matter that I am the only one capable, right?

  Download the current development snapshot from the Prescribble page at Agtoys on SourceForge. of Prescribble the note jotting app for people with handwriting as bad as doctors signatures. (Yes, thats where the names from - a mix between prescription and scribble :-) Features: multiple note pages - start with 4, and can increase at the end. horizontal and/or vertical guidelines for easier writing (optional) Simple undo and redo (doesn't work properly for erase yet) Crude erase modes, as well as zoom, box and delete mode. Hack to use .gz files as input/output (run with -ziphack) very configurable using commandline switches save/load works. Experimental Save As... and Load From... (using the modified FLTK file browser, as is in the modified FLTK Editor done by R. Douglas Everhart) a Ruby script for the workstation, so that you can convert your prescribble.dat file to a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file. I personally plan to use some viewing/converting program (such as Batik) for printing the SVG, when I have notes I want out on paper. (Here is an example of notes, which was 91Kb in Prescribble text format, 126Kb as SVG after running prescrib2svg.rb and 247Kb as JPEG after running export in Batik) To do: Insert pages nilly willy, move pages, swap? support tools to make it readable by some other program for printing/viewing/editing on the host computer??? clever stroke reduction grid snapping for strokes? (someone wanted clever HWR program connectivity, but that I will probably _never_ get around to even attempt!) Well, atleast its yet another dandy FLTK example program :-) ( Previous verions: May 6 | May 7 | May 8 | May 10 | May 15 | June 9 )

• My first stab at using FLTK. A half-baked MasterMind clone. I've cleaned it up abit, and am working on various difficulty settings.

  See the MasterMind page at Agtoys on SourceForge for the latest version. Or download source and binary from here. Features: 3 modes of play user definable mode of play using commandline arguments: [-tries #] [-digits #] [-values #] [-duplicate]

• Some small hacks/contributions to the port of XPhotoEditor.

  Highlights: All menus on screen.
  Single filename given as commandline argument overrides the File-Load and File-Save commands, avoiding the need to use the buggy dialog inputs. (I never managed to save, till now)

  Download source and binary or just the binary.

  I only made small modifications from Troy Stum's port of the XPhotoEditor program created (and copyrighted 1998) by Andreas Soupianas.

So far, I've upgraded the kernel and romdisk a zillion times, something that drains batteries like a bathtub with a bombhole. Best excuse ever to buy rechargables.

As a "Developer Edition", things don't always work properly. But I'm beginning to use it "seriously" for shopping lists.