iSilo says it reads its own format as well as .txt and some .pdb files. I downloaded a .cab file for Pocket PC that said it required an ARM processor, which apparently my e800 has because it installed fine. It started and told me I was on day 1 of a 30-day trial period. However, even when I had it look in my ebooks directory, it did not see any of the text files, only the .plucker file which it couldn’t actually read. So I didn’t need 30 days to decide it wasn’t going to work for me and removed it.

Mobipocket Reader looked very customizable and I know Gutenberg offers many of its titles in their format. I downloaded the “Old Windows Mobile” .cab file for ARM processors and installed it without problems. But it doesn’t customize the items I would like to set. I don’t really care about the colors, which I can set, but I’d like to be able to permanently set which directory to look in and to list all the files in that directory, and I can’t. I have to manually change those choices every time I click on “Library.” It also takes a LONG time to load. The standard version is free, the Pro version is for purchase (I couldn’t find for how much) and includes the capability to scroll or switch to landscape mode. It automatically found the .plucker.pdb files (the “type of file” defaults to .prc) but couldn’t open them (error message was that they were corrupted, all three of them – right). Interestingly, Mobipocket couldn’t open any of the three .mobi files I downloaded from Gutenberg. Mobipocket was able to open the big Bleak House .txt file, but it took several minutes to load and there was another delay when I tried to do anything but simple page-down. But I like being able to read using the scroll button or the down-arrow button (which it treats as a page-down button) so this one stays, at least for the time being.

Tiny eBook Reader ($34.23 but with a free trial version) says it can read books of any size in txt (and zipped), html, and lit formats. I clicked on the .exe file and the information said I could add ebooks to the library by moving them into the My Documents folder or onto the CF card. It installed on my PC but the “finish” screen gave me the option of installing it to my “connected Windows Mobile with touchscreen” which I selected. It showed up on the PDA under “Programs” and started just fine, giving me a choice of folders to look in for ebooks. I clicked on my ebooks folder and it found the .txt files but none of the others. It opened Bleak House with no delay and I was able to move around in it with no problems. It did leave several .tbr files in the ebook folder, though. This one stays to be tested further.

I couldn’t resist a program named Tome Raider although it costs 15 British pounds (I got the free trial version) and appeared from the documentation to only read its own proprietary file format. It installed painlessly from a zip file and opened on the PDA, but I was right about it only reading its own format; it saw no ebooks until I downloaded a “trial” book from the TR website, then it opened the one I had just downloaded but every other page was “please register” so I uninstalled it. Too bad, I still love the name!

uBook ($15 with a free demo) claims to read .txt, .html, .rtf, .pdb, and .prc files as well as zipped files of any of these. Knowing now that I have an ARM processor, I downloaded the .cab file for Pocket PC ARM with Toshiba listed in parentheses. It installed, but gave me an error message that it might not have installed correctly because it was for an earlier version of Windows Mobile. But it opened okay and went directly to a 43-page User Guide. There is a nice clear (if tiny) page number at the top of the screen with forward and back arrows to either side. But there are also arrows pointing in different directions in the corners that are not obvious what they do, the type size is miniscule, and the program defaults to covering up the Start menu button – not a good thing as there is no quick way to exit the program. I finally found an Options section by clicking on the unlabelled buttons at the bottom left, but most of them were disabled, including the type size adjustment, presumably because this was the demo version. I paged down and the program locked up, I had to do a soft reset to get out of it – NOTHING worked. I still wanted to see what files it could read, so after the soft reset I clicked on the program again and found myself directly in the options section again and unable to get out AGAIN – had to do another soft reset and removed the program. It may be a great program, but if I can’t navigate around in it I’ll never know.

Vade Mecum is an open-source free program, although I couldn’t originally tell whether it supports Windows Mobile 2003 – since it hasn’t been updated since 2006, I thought it was worth trying. This is the Windows Mobile program to read Plucker files. The .cab installed but gave me the same “designed for a previous version of Windows Mobile” error message I encountered with uBook. But it not only opened, it found the Plucker files without further prompting and had a nice clear “settings” button at the bottom of the screen to let me adjust items like the directory where the ebooks are stored and what size typeface to use. It also defaulted to full-screen mode but it was easy to find the pull-down screen to turn full-screen off. It opened Bleak House in sections but remained pretty fast when I navigated both within the section and to the next section. It also let me use the scroll button on my Toshiba. I like this program! Even though it apparently *only* reads plucker files and I’ll have to go see which of the books I’ve already downloaded in .txt format are available in plucker format. It did create some small files of its own but they are safely tucked in a VadeMecum folder, not cluttering up my ebooks folder. Definitely on the short list.

Free Zulu Reader can read .epub and .rtf files. The .cab installed fine but didn’t actually run, which wasn’t a big surprise as the wiki listing claimed it would run under Windows Mobile 2003 but the download page didn’t list it. Removed from PDA but this was another one that I couldn’d get the icon out of the Programs folder.

There is still a brisk market on ebay in these older devices, and plenty of people like me who want the convenience of a PDA but can’t justify (or afford) spending hundreds of dollars on the newest one. That is why I’m going into such detail here, because everything I found on Google was several years old – I’m supplying info on what is available *now*.

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Thanks to Google, I found and downloaded three: Microsoft Reader (which did NOT come already installed), eReader (which is affiliated with Barnes & Noble and of course markets their ebooks, but also has some freebies, and comes in a wide variety of OS flavors), and Freda. (I also picked up a free PocketPC PDF reader from Adobe – don’t know if it will work as an ebook reader, but it will be nice to be able to read pdf files like the user manual on my mobile.) I tried all of them with my PDA on and connected to my computer, and Windows Mobile Device Center running, which (besides keeping calendar/contacts/tasks synced) syncs the PDA with whatever I put in my My Documents\Documents on Sylvia’s PDA folder – very convenient both as a backup of my critical document files and as a way to painlessly get files onto the PDA.

Freda was the easiest to install. It came as a .cab file so I just moved the file to the CF card on my PDA, then clicked on the file from the PDA and it magically did its thing. The only problem was that the program didn’t work. I clicked on Freda on the program list and NOTHING HAPPENED. I found the exe file using File Explorer and clicked on that. Nothing happened. Okay, I thought, maybe it only activates when you click on an ebook file, so I clicked on one in my ebook directory. It opened fine – with Pocket Word. Still no Freda. I went back online to read the manual, and apparently Freda is supposed to go to a “main menu” when it is started. So apparently it doesn’t work with Windows 2003SE after all and I deleted it from my PDA (which was a minor pain and I had to find and use Remove Program). So much for Freda.

The next on the list was Microsoft’s Reader. It was an .exe file so I just clicked on it, on my main computer, in Windows Explorer. It ran an install program and although it wanted me to let it install in the default directory, when I clicked “no” it let me choose between regular memory, the flash ROM, or the CF card. I decided to put it on the CF card with my ebooks. When it finished, it told me to check my PDA to see if additional steps were necessary, which I thought was smart. But the message on the PDA was to “reset your device according to the device manufacturer’s documentation.” Huh? The user guide PDF says nothing about resetting after installing a program, and I don’t know if the instructions mean a soft or hard reset. So I did neither and went into Programs to start it up (and was annoyed to find the Freda icon still there). It started fine but told me the program was “not yet activated.” Huh? What do I need to do to activate it? I was able to open the help file that came with it, but it took me a minute to figure out that the page number was the number between the “3″ and “4″ at the bottom of the screen. Maybe this was one of the fonts that the PDA needed to be reset to use properly? So I tried a soft reset. Sure enough, after restarting the program, the page number at the bottom is now bracketed by left and right arrows instead of 3 and 4. The program has adjustable type size, which was nice, and the capability to add bookmarks, which is necessary. But I still couldn’t get it to see any other ebooks, so I started wandering through the help file and discovered it was looking in the My Documents folders. So I moved my eBooks folder into the My Documents folder. I also accidentally found out how to “activate” Reader, and it requires logging on with a Passport ID (using Internet Explorer, it told me Firefox doesn’t support activation), but the help file says any Hotmail, MSN, or Passport account will do. Of course, I don’t have ANY of those. This is turning into a major pain. (Gee, what a surprise with a Microsoft product.) However, the login page also said I could use a Windows Live ID, and I had to get one of those a few days ago to download Windows Mobile Device Center, and fortunately I long ago set up a “login” folder and filed the confirmation email for my Windows Live account in that folder so I can actually find it now! So I login and now I get ANOTHER error message. “You must install the Activation ActiveX control before you can activate.” And I can’t go any further without allowing Microsoft to install ANOTHER program on my computer. Reader is looking less and less attractive now. Before giving up completely, I checked to see if Reader would recognize and read any of my free Gutenberg .txt files. No matter where I put them in the My Documents folder, they failed to appear in the Library. I also tried a book in epub, Plucker, QiOO mobile, and Mobipocket formats, moving them all to the Personal folder to make sure it was somewhere Reader could find it. It didn’t recognize any of them. Does anyone actually jump through all of Microsoft’s hoops in order to use their “free” reader?

eReader was the last one I tried because it came in a zip file and I hate dealing with zip files. But Microsoft has made it too hard to use Reader so I guess I’ll try eReader now. I right-clicked on the zip file, told it to “extract all,” had to wade down through two levels of folders to get to the extracted files, and clicked on BookInstaller.exe – at least they made the title obvious. Install was not so obvious. There are three choices on the screen and none of them are to install a reader. I selected “install books” and it prompted me to tell it where to look for the books to install. It didn’t find any of my .txt books so I moved all the odd-format files (that I tried with Reader) into the ebooks folder and it recognized one of them. Wish I knew which one, but I guess it doesn’t matter because I got the dreaded “this program may not have installed correctly” message and there is no new reader in Programs. (Turned out to have been the Plucker file, I found it on my CF card later.)

So my choices are: (a) buy an ebook reader (which may just saddle me with another program that doesn’t work); (b) let Microsoft install another program on my computer and see what other ridiculous hoops it makes me jump through to get Reader to work; (c) keep using Pocket Word as my ebook reader, which doesn’t let me insert bookmarks on txt files; or (d) give up on reading ebooks on my PDA (which is a major reason I bought it in the first place). But I’ve had enough trauma for one day. Tomorrow is another day.

Oh, and the Freda icon is STILL in the Programs folder. Guess it’s time for a hard reset after all.

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There are several links to sites on old messages (around 2005) but unsurprisingly, most of them were no longer valid. The link to the manual on PocketPCAddict did work, thank heavens. I also found a UK Toshiba link still active (select Archived Files as product type and PocketPC as family) and it steered me to the Microsoft site that told me I needed to use Mobile Device Center rather than ActiveSync. However, when I went back to see if it had any other useful files, when I tried to search all I could get was an error message that “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.” I tried with several different OSs and they all got the same error message, so I don’t know how I got useful info from the site earlier. I went looking for ActiveSync and found a message that for Win7 64-bit I had to download Mobile Device Center 6.1 drvupdate-amd64.exe and before I could get the file I had to download and install a couple of programs to establish I had a legal copy of Windows 7 (like I would have it installed if it hadn’t come with the laptop!), but the site walked me through installing them with no problem. I installed Mobile Device Center and that worked well for communicating between laptop and PDA, but it said Outlook was not installed. Outlook2000 *is* installed, but I had to update to Office2007 before Mobile Device Center recognized it and synced with the e800. But I now have my appointments and tasks on my PDA! Hooray! I also copied a game .cab file onto the PDA and got it running – very straightforward, I just clicked on the .cab file and Windows Mobile 2003 SE installed it.

The hard-reset button is neat (kills everything except what is in FlashROM). It’s unlabelled and hidden on the bottom by the WiFi on/off switch, but it completely shuts off all power to the device and let me do a hard reset quick and easy when I first locked it up by not knowing what I was doing.

I found all kinds of info by working my way through the manual. The device on/off switch is terribly anti-intuitive. It’s at the top of the PDA and labelled with the usual icon, but you can either press-and-hold or press-quickly to turn the PDA on, but you can only press-quickly to turn it off! Sheesh! The transcriber works surprisingly well, I used it to add a task and it correctly read my handwriting first try.

I also like that if the e800 is on and connected to the laptop, when I make a change in Outlook on either, it immediately syncs with the other. That will be a huge help to me, as often I have to leave the house with a minute’s warning, and I won’t have to worry about not having a shopping list or phone # with me. It will even keep a directory on my laptop synced with a directory on the PDA, although it wouldn’t let me decide which directories to sync, I had to move all my current & active files into the directory it would sync with, and the directory on the PDA is volatile, not the flashROM or the CF disk. Still, it’s pretty unlikely that both my laptop and PDA would crash at the same time, and I can still do manual backups onto a more stable storage device.

I’m posting my trials here so anyone else looking for e800 info will find something more recent than 2005 and hopefully have information and other links to share!

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Meanwhile, the upside-down tomato saga continues. Of the two heirloom plants I put in last month, one died and one is thriving, still trying to grow UP. No flowers yet, though. Yesterday, I transplanted another tomato plant into the empty hole where the other plant died, so I’ll see how that one does.

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I asked some garden people. They agreed it looked interesting but they hadn’t tried it. They did, however, urge me to tell them how it went if I tried it.

Then I went to a “localfoods” seminar earlier this week, in Laramie WY. Great, I thought, here is my chance to ask some experts. So I did. None of them had tried it, but they too wanted me to let them know how it went if I tried it! One audience member said she had a friend who had tried it, but the tomato plant grew upright anyway. Well, if you think about it, that makes sense. Plants *do* try to grow upwards. But as the plant set fruit, the weight should have gradually pulled it down. Naturally, this didn’t occur to me until later, so I don’t know if the friend gave up the experiment or if something else happened.

Being a perpetual optimist when it comes to gardening (in spite of the historical record of my black thumb – I have actually killed a mint plant), I decided I would be the one to try it. With no place to hang a planter, but with both kitchen and living room windows having a great southeast exposure, I bought the upside-down patio garden at good ol’ Wal-Mart. This gives me a little over a square foot of conventional growing area on the top of the patio garden, as well as two holes on  the bottom to set tomato plants through.

So I set to work. First challenge was to get a couple of tomato plants ready to transplant upside down. I have a tomato plant growing from seed, but it really isn’t ready to transplant. Someone at the localfoods seminar was giving away unlabelled heirloom tomato plants, and I took two. But I managed to knock them over travelling home, and although I carefully replanted them ASAP, only one looks like it’s going to recover. What the heck, I decided to plant both of them and see what happened.

Next challenge was to keep the plant and dirt from falling out of the holes! This is in my living room, and I can guarantee my DH will not be happy if I leave dirt around there. So, while the plant was still upright, I took a half-sheet of damp paper towel, folded it in half, tore a little hole and pushed the tomato plant through, then carefully pushed the leafy part of the plant through the garden hole. The damp paper towel should keep dirt and roots up in the garden for a while, and hopefully by the time it decomposes, the dirt will be packed enough to not fall out and the roots will have spread to keep the plant from falling out. I thought about using pieces of cardboard, but I couldn’t find anything suitable around the house and I didn’t want to wait any longer. I wouldn’t use anything non-compostable, though, otherwise as the tomato stem grows thicker it might get choked.

So they are both planted. The healthy plant started trying to grow upright almost immediately (less than 10 minutes after planting). The other poor plant is just lying there. I have lettuce and spinach starts that I bought and really need to get planted, so they will go in the top part. (Does anyone besides me buy too much in the gardening department?) Watch this space for future developments!

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So I was surprised, last night, when my waiter was obviously using an Aussie accent. I finally asked him if he was really from Oz or was he trying to win a bet by sounding like it. He assured me he was really from Australia, and I asked him some questions about his country. I can’t remember when I didn’t want to visit Australia, and he seemed happy to talk about his homeland. And he agreed that an Aussie working at an Aussie-themed restaurant in the U.S. was a nice irony. (Like he was going to disagree with a customer …)

But can’t you just picture the manager’s face when this guy with an Aussie accent and passport came in to apply for a job?

When I came under attack by the Freecycle.org organization, I went hunting on the Internet for other dissatisfied or unaffiliated groups. I was astonished at what I learned. The three board members required to establish a nonprofit foundation are founder Deron Beal, his wife, and a close family friend (although on http://www.freecycle.org/about/board, they committed no later than 2007 to expand the number of board members “in the coming year”). The only outside financial reporting is that their annual Form 990 is available on their website at http://www.freecycle.org/about/funds. There is no way for ordinary members to have input into official policies. While I will always admire Deron for the brilliant idea that is Freecycle, I certainly don’t respect someone who runs what is supposed to be a nonprofit organization as a private fief.

The idea remains brilliant. Keep usable stuff out of the landfills and help your neighbors save money. I’ve given away a ton of stuff and picked up many items I needed, even including an electric scooter chair that literally makes the difference to me between being housebound and being able to go places like the library. (The giver said the batteries were bad and she didn’t want to sell it enough to get it into sellable condition.) It is an outstanding way to pick up and pass on items that don’t get worn out before they get outgrown, such as children’s clothes and toys.

Just remember, not all the freecycle groups are listed on the official website. The best way to find your local freecycle group is to search Yahoogroups for freecycle (yourtown) (yourstate) and see what comes up.

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Or picture this: you are a woman who is balancing both children and a career. Your husband drops the little ones off at a good daycare in the morning, and you pick them up on the way home.  Late one afternoon, your office phone rings. You’ve been bawled out by your boss and found out your favorite co-worker is leaving, so when Caller ID shows your husband, you wonder what is up. As soon as you say hello, he asks what is wrong; you tell him. He admits he was calling to say he had a late meeting, but you are more important. He’ll cancel the meeting, pick up the kids and the babysitter (who will be available on no notice – this IS a fantasy, after all) and then take you out to a nice relaxing dinner. You know you will be the envy of every woman at the restaurant, with such a gorgeous, attentive husband.

Ever had something like this happen to you? Me neither. Yet this is the “hero” of hundreds of books every year in the most popular genre in bookselling: romance novels.

Frankly, I blame them (partially) for the spiraling divorce rate. When a woman has spent a few hours with an incredibly handsome man watching for her every whim (and, in imagination, she is utterly beautiful as well), and comes back to an average-looking man who wants his dinner and is eager to complain about HIS day, it’s a shock. If he has the bad taste to complain about the kids as well as fail to notice her stress, you have a recipe for disaster.

But few husbands are mind-readers. I happen to have chosen a pretty good one. He likes to come home to his family, proudly introduces me as his wife (and I’m no raving beauty either), brags on our children but takes on his share of the work. He believes in fidelity, trusts as well as remains trustworthy. I had a shopping list of characteristics I HAD to have in a husband, and he had all of them. But he can be totally oblivious of my feelings. Once he did something on a trip that left me fuming, but he didn’t hear my anger in a long 10-minute phone call. My father happened to call a few minutes later, and as soon as I said hello he asked what was wrong.

The answer, of course, is communication. Both partners need to discuss their feelings and desires, and not just in bed. But women who have absorbed the idea of the man who mysteriously detects their feelings are offended by a real man who is focused on his own.

My daughter is almost 20 and has never dated, and I’m glad. We agree that dating is to find your potential husband, and she is not even interested in marriage at this point in her life. Meanwhile, I’ve tried to point out her father as an example of a good husband, and discussed the unreality of romance novels. (She seems to prefer fantasy, anyway.) She’s sensible, and I hope when she starts to think about marriage, she’ll remember not the handsome, hunky hero of a romantic fairy tale, but a real man who took care of me when I was sick and remembered to buy my third-favorite chocolate truffles for Valentine’s Day. (My favorite chocolates are Teuscher, $60/box. My second favorite are Godiva, still too expensive for our budget. My third favorite are Lindt, about $3.50 at Wal-Mart so I can enjoy them with a clear conscience.) And I hope she’ll find as devoted a husband as I have been blessed with. And I hope she’ll appreciate him, while less sensible women wistfully remember dashing, mind-reading men who never existed.

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Now that I’ve figured it out, I’m a fanatic too. It’s WONDERFUL, and I’m so glad I bought the model with the most storage. I can listen to the type of music I like. Or I can listen to a book or two, great during long waits. If something occurs to me, I can dictate a quick note to myself. And I still have plenty of room on it to backup the working directories of my laptop so if worst came to worst, I wouldn’t be without my data.

All this in a package about the size of two of my fingers held together, that easily fits into a little zippered camera case (player, USB cable, ear buds, manual, and spare AAA batteries – and it holds my place when I need to change batteries). This is technology at its best: enjoyable, flexible, and enabling me to make the most of my time. I *am* glad I waited until there were models with larger storage, however.

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So for Christmas, I got him a silicone pizza baking sheet. It’s really pretty weird, there is some kind of rigid wire running around the edge to keep it flat but the silicone itself is quite soft and flexible. He insisted that you can’t put plastic in the oven, and I had difficulty persuading him that this plastic was MEANT to go in the oven.

He finally tried it, confident that we would have melted plastic stuck all over the oven and he could say “I told you so.” Of course, any of you who have baked with silicone know what happened. The pizza cooked perfectly and slid off the (intact) pizza sheet,  not leaving any burned bits behind.

DH is now a silicone fan and uses his pizza sheets to bake anything that will fit, including biscuits. But he still gives them a leery look whenever he realizes (again) that he is baking with plastic.

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