Very little to report today. The weather has cleared up since yesterday's drenching and we did in fact see some sunlight here on the West cost of Scotland, which is a treat!
Earlier on I discovered much to my delight that I had a floppy disk backup of various applications for the Acorn PocketBook II, a PDA I own. A bit of history: the Acorn PocketBook II was basically a Psion 3a that was badged by Acorn Computers and sold mainly to the education and industrial markets. It superseded the original Acorn PocketBook which was a re-badged Psion 3. Both models were fully compatible with their Psion counterparts and could use the same peripherals. No other PocketBooks were produced, but the PocketBook II came with a variety of memory sizes: 256K, 512K, 1MB and 2MB. Mine is the 1MB model. There are a number of applications stored on ROM but additional applications as well as any data files are stored in RAM which is maintained by the two AA batteries. However if the batteries fail and the backup coin cell fails, you lose all your data (apart from the ROM-based applications of course).
So imagine how annoying it was when I opened by rucksack a couple of month ago to find that the batteries had fallen out of my PocketBook II, wiping all of the contents. None of the data, (documents, contacts etc), was backed up and alot of the applications I had downloaded for it are no longer freely available on the internet. To get over the problem of losing batteries, the battery compartment is now held firmly shut with electrical tape as otherwise it is quite easy for it to pop open in transit. Fortunately, as mentioned, I found a backup of the applications I had lost on disk today so I was able to re-install them.
I did this by establishing a serial link with my Performa 475 and using a Mac application called "Psion Link" to transfer the files. Then the quick install procedure on the PocketBook II brought everything back to how it was. The most useful of these applications is "Tone Pad" - an acoustic phone dialler - excellent for 'experiments'! There is also a good game called "RockFall" which is an adaption of Repton. So yes, I'm very happy with my PocketBook II!