Ronda, Spain, Spanish, Themes, and Everything Else

Did some hunting around the web for forums or help pages about the Palm z22, found a few, and then started to get a little annoyed with the overall tone of a lot of those people. Those of us who don't require the very latest gadget, and who don't feel an urge to push our z22 to the very limits could be forgiven for thinking our favourite gadget has some serious flaws. Pity the poor soul wanting to buy one who reads these forum posts and then blows their budget buying a pda that won't do any more for them.

One of the comments I read, which I won't link to because of its language content, seems to imply the Palm z22 has terrible battery life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Read this review for some benchmarks on the battery use. Note the author's comment that under normal use our little gadget could reliably run for many weeks without a charge.

More significantly though, the little Palm z22 doesn't lose any of its memory or settings if the battery does go flat. That is a real selling feature for me. I would not want to lose all my contacts or calendar entries because I forget to charge the battery.

Lastly, if like me you hotsync your z22 with your pc, did you know your battery is automatically trickle charged in the process? See the little lightning indicator at the top of the screenshot, the one sitting over the battery, that shows my battery is being charged.

Blogging with my palm z22 has made such an incredible difference to my life. To be able to type a blog entry whenever I get a spare few moments makes life more enjoyable.

If you would also like to use your z22 in the same way, here's how;

Open a new memo, and type/write your entry. Once your entry is complete, hotsync with your desktop, then simply click the memo icon in the 'Palm Desktop'. Now click or double click your new entry and copy [Ctrl-C] the contents to your clipboard.

I use serendipity blog so I just need to login to my administration suite, cleck a new entry, and paste the article I wrote on the z22. This very article was written following these steps.

I'm pleased to release the Softened Cell theme for Serendipity (s9y) blog. This design, and the related Sunset design were requested by another user on the s9y forums. The actual design was sourced from OSWD, and created by Pat Heard of FullAhead.org

These themes are designed to work at 640x480 resolution and on larger screensizes they may seem quite small in comparison to other s9y themes. This is easily fixed by increasing the width of the different elements within the stylesheet, but the banner image at the top will also need to be replaced if you do this.

Download the zipfile for Softened Cell and Sunset.

Tapping the addit icon on the main screen opens a program that downloads extra software for the palm z22, which is a handy utility, but what impresses me more is the offline news browsing.

I don't really see the value in buying a daily newspaper anymore considering I can get the latest headlines online. Often times though I don't have enough time to check my mail far less read the news.

When l discovered that my z22 could comunicate directly with the palm website, and also download the latest headlines directly from reuters my attention was piqued.

Apart from top news, the reuters subscription also includes world news, business headlines, politics, entertainment, sports and science. An unusual addition is entitled 'oddly enough', and brings with it some of the more amusing headlines.

This service really makes having a palm z22 worthwhile, and I don't have to read the news every morning anymore, I can leave it till later in the day.

This is cool, I often want to know the times in other locations around the world. We have family and friends scattered everywhere. Tapping the world clock icon opens the program to a map of the world, but more than that, it looked like one of those NASA maps that shows daylight and nightime zones. And that is really groovy. My own time zone was listed above the map, and below the map are two other cities which can be changed by simply tapping the downwards pointing arrow next to the city name.

The list of cities is quite impressive, and I was able to customise the my other cities quite easily from the dropdown. Then I decided, hang on a moment, a tiny little country (Malta) where we have some family wasn't listed, so I tapped 'Edit List' at the bottom of the dropdown, and every timezone is listed. Oddly enough, Valetta, the capital of Malta is listed under GMT +1.00 so I was able to select this and now my z22 shows three personalised timezones, one for my location, and two others for our closest family and friends.

The other truly great thing about world clock is that simply tapping on the map will tell you the name and time of the city closest to where you tapped. Try tapping on the tip of Africa and you get the time in Cape Town, or if you have a steady hand, tap at different locations around Europe, all the major cities are there.

Quite a few people have asked me how to change the order of the columns in their s9y theme. If the theme you're using was based on the default layout then you should look for the following lines within index.tpl, which should be in your template folder.

<table id="mainpane">
<tr>
{if $leftSidebarElements > 0}
<td id="serendipityLeftSideBar" valign="top">{serendipity_printSidebar side="left"}</td>
{/if}
<td id="content" valign="top">{$CONTENT}</td>
{if $rightSidebarElements > 0}
<td id="serendipityRightSideBar" valign="top">{serendipity_printSidebar side="right"}</td>
{/if}
</tr>
</table>

If this is missing, that's ok, simply copy the index.tpl file from your default folder into the folder for the theme you're customising. Read More

Got my first pda for Christmas this year. It's a little Palm z22, ideal for typing entries for my blog.

First impressions seem impressive. The first thing I noticed when turning it on was a welcome screen asking me to configure the stylus by pointing into the centre of a target as it moved around the screen. Next came a wizard asking me to set my location and time.

Shortly after I was looking at a screen full of icons. Whilst the organizer capabilities are no doubt going to be very well used, the main reason I got so excited about having a pda was the memo function. In my profession I do a lot of writing and the ability to type something on a device as small as the Palm z22, then upload it to my pc the next time I login will be invaluable, wow.

The bonus for me is that I also get to store my contacts, track all my expenses, keep a diary, and manage tasks.

Writing with the z22 is actually rather easy, you have two options. The first is to use the 'graffiti 2' option, which really surprised me with how sophisticated the character recognition is. I had been expecting that I would have to learn some obscure style of hand-writing so that the z22 would beable to read my memo, but this proved unnecessary. In fact for the most part the graffiti option is just like regular hand-wrting.

The second option for writing is to use the on-screen keyboard. Selecting this option reduces the size of screen by half but allows typing with a 'qwerty' keyboard. This post was written with a combination of the two options, and whilst the qwerty option seems easier on my first day I can already imagine graffiti writing becoming my preferred option once I've memorised how to punctuate my entries.

Is your theme switcher too wide, has it only recently become too wide, is your sidebar wider than usual and you don't know what's wrong? Have you recently installed the SFII theme? You may not realise but the theme switcher is the plugin that is making your sidebar wider than usual. You see most of the traditional themes had short names, but this probably won't be the norm in the future. More and more themes are being designed and s9y theme designers are likely to want to add a little more detail to their theme names, perhaps even a short description.

The problem now and in the future is going to be ensuring that theme designers specifiy the width for select boxes within the sidebar so that the theme switcher doesn't ruin the whole design by expanding the width of the sidebar, or worse, flicking it down to the bottom of the page.

If your blog is facing this problem, it is easily fixed if you're willing to dabble with your stylesheet.

The theme switcher uses a dropdown box to select the theme to be switched to, and the HTML tag is actually the <select> tag. Nothing wrong with that, it is as you'd expect, however most of the themes don't include any reference to styling the select tag, which means when you have a theme name that is longer than the width of the sidebar you get problems.

What we need to do is this;

.serendipitySideBarContent select {
width:150px;
}

An alternative, which has since become my favourite method, is to specify a percentage instead. I found that every theme uses a different sidebar width and I am/was going through the process of updating the themes on my themes site and needed something I could paste into every theme and know that it would work without having to determine the sidebar width beforehand.

.serendipitySideBarContent select {
width:90%;
}

Simply including that small piece of code at the end of your stylesheet will fix the problem you are experiencing. If 150 pixels or 90% is too narrow or still too wide, go ahead and adjust this figure.