[ More fun with PalmOS

I think they're going to announce the end of the rainy season tomorrow. It was
announced for western Japan already and judging by the change in weather we've
had, Kanto (Tokyo, Kanagawa, etc.) is next. Gone are nights with a cool breeze,
replaced by days like today where it was muggy and still and gross. Also, the
cicadas are back and will be for the next few months. I am already looking
forward to the autumn.

So I spent this weekend inside to escape the heat. For several weeks now I have
been exploring PalmOS and software for it, and just the other day I got to
thinking about AvantGo. It was a service in the late 1990s, and the Wikipedia
article says it:
  "allowed users to set up a free account and subscribe to web pages and
  "content channels", which they could then view offline.

So you could subscribe to Golf Digest, The Weather Channel or Fodors.com [1]
and then view the content offline on your Palm device. I find this absolutely
fascinating and I'm sorry it doesn't exist anymore. What /is/ available though,
is Plucker[2] for the Palm, and PyPlucker[3] written in Python. With some more
help from an LLM, I was able to get script up and running that:
 1. Uses OpenWeather to pull the weather for a few cities
 2. Writes the output to a simple HTML file on a small web server on my LAN
I then use PyPlucker to format that HTML file into a .pdb file, and jpilot to
sync that .pdb to a Palm. Open Plucker and voila! I have the weather report in
the palm of my hand.

That I could do all that in a few taps on my smartphone bores me. Having a
basic little webpage on a 160x160 pixel display with only text and some simple
graphics is much more fun. I am reminded of i-mode from Docomo (or EZWeb from
KDDI) which I used in 1999. There is excitement again in simplicity and what
was.

Good night from a Palm addict in Japan'







[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20021003080729/http://ami.avantgo.com/channels/

[2] https://palmdb.net/app/plucker

[3] https://github.com/lxmx/PyPlucker