I'd Like You To Meet Little Black Olive

This little piece of metal and circuitry is what has kept me in large supply of nutty behavior all weekend.

It looks so harmless doesn't it?

I have to confess, in addition to buying this for work-related tasks and general organization, I also purchased it with all sorts of knitting-related usefulness in mind. But, before I was able to actually DO anything with it, I had to spend a few hours -- who am I kidding, TWO DAYS -- tinkering with it, setting it up to Hot Synch, loading all sorts of nifty software and trying to get the tricky, buggy Acrobat Reader to work properly. I also tried to get a wireless connection, but I'm afraid it won't happen until I update my cell phone.

So, after all of this, the next step is actually inputting content and figuring out how to organize things, and what role this little thing will play in my knitting, design and blogging endeavors.

For the geeks among you, it is a PlamOne Tungsten T5. The screen does both portrait and landscape, the stylus has a nifty ball point pen inside and the screen is tap-sensitive on all areas (not just the input area). It has thousands of colors, a very large drive, removable storage chips and it came with a FREE wireless keyboard.

Here is the breakdown for the image above:

1. 320x480 Color Display

2. Expansion Slot

3. Stereo Headphone Jack

4. Infrared Port

5. Stylus

6. 5-way Navigator

7. Home/Favorites

8. Calendar

9. Contacts

10. Files

11. Multi-Connector

Hidden Features

12. Rechargeable Battery

13. Bluetooth® Wireless

14. Speaker (on back)

15. 160MB Flash Drive

I LOVE the wireless keyboard!

Because I am able to view PDFs, edit MS Office files (including my fabulous Excel spreadsheets which record my yarn stash totals) and input data using the keyboard, it feels like a mini-laptop. The organizational part is but a fraction of what it can do.

At this point, I am using it for so many things that it's saving me large amounts of space and sanity.

I'm sure many of you have already discovered the wonders of the PDA for knitting purposes, but I don't care! I plan to dissect my use of the PDA for various tasks in the next coming weeks. I figure I can share my info and get feedback from you guys on better ways of doing the same thing.

Also, I have a need to obsessively document everything. :-)

In actual knitting progress news, I cast on with the Ultramerino4 last night and all I can say is I think I might love this more than Koigu. It isn't just soft people, it's SMOOTH. SO SMOOTH...

Needless to say, I'll be heading back to that store this weekend to clean out her stash. 

More pics to come once I get my design sorted out.