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Handheld
7 April 2004
In the realms of the greater stupidities of men, it probably doesn’t count for so much, but in my own personal universe there is probably not much I could have done that would be more foolish than installing a whole new operating system when I’m in mid-book with an urgent deadline looming. Not that it’s thrown up many problems so far - but the one distinct difficulty that I can’t resolve lies absolutely at the core of my practice. What do I depend on? My word processor. What’s not working properly? My word processor. What seems to be happening is that everything I type is fed into a buffer, and doesn’t make it to the screen till I stop typing. I gaze at the screen and see nothing while my fingers thunder away, and every half a line or so I have consciously to stop and let the screen catch up. It’s amazingly disconcerting. Admittedly I do use an obscure little German WP program (Textmaker for Linux), and I do have a fallback if I have to use it, but I like this one and I don’t want to give it up. So I asked them if they could help, and they needed some technical details about my system; so I asked my system to divulge them, and found the other little problem that I have post-upgrade. It won’t tell me. Or can’t tell me, rather, it freezes every time it tries. So I asked Suse (that’s Suse Linux, the distribution that I use), and they declined to help. It seems that although I bought Suse 8.0, and now Suse 9.0, both of which come with free installation support, that doesn’t actually cover an upgrade from 8.0 to 9.0, I suppose because they know it causes problems. Their only suggestion was to wipe everything and start again from scratch with a whole new installation. Grrrr...
So I wasted my morning hammering at futility, and then went storming off into town. But - because I am a good boy, and I’ve had a couple of really good working days, and I really didn’t want to lose that - I took my old handheld with me. I love this machine; it’s five or six years old now, a Packard Bell Easymate 770. It’s what, nine inches by five when it’s folded up, and it opens just like a laptop, so that is also the size of the screen and the keyboard - which means it’s big enough to type on properly. And it weighs nothing, the batteries last ten hours between recharges, and it cost four hundred quid. It runs a cut-down version of Windows, alas, but that’s okay, Linux can read Windows docs. What I don’t understand is why these machines disappeared. They’re a halfway house between PDAs and laptops, but in no sense a compromise; the virtues of both as far as I’m concerned, and the drawbacks of neither. But nobody makes them any more. People are always asking me where they can get one. Sorry, guys - have you tried Ebay?
Anyway, took the handheld to the Lit & Phil, and it’s that thing that happens when I’m working away from home, I find an extra degree of focus, I suppose. An hour and a half solid, fifteen hundred words, rat-a-tat. Maybe I really should think about getting an office, but I’d probably only fill it with distractions. Better to work in libraries and cafes. And pubs. Of course I did go to the pub on the way home, swathed in virtue as I was; and it seems I can’t go into the pub these days without a friend finding me, and buying me more beer than I meant to drink. Ah, me...
© Chaz Brenchley 2004
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.