Palms, Games and Auctions

[binidj]

I love my Tungsten E2, I'm not sure that I could live without it any more ... it has become an indispensible part of my life. Unfortunately all is not well in Palm-land; for a while now if I've wanted to touch an on-screen button with the stylus I've had to aim about half a centimetre below the actual button in order for it to register a "push", this of course means that I am completely unable to call up either keyboard or number-pad since they are at the bottom of the screen. I've tried recalibrating the touchscreen in "Preferences", performing a hard re-start (though not a total one yet), each several times now; but all to no avail. Do you, Gentle Reader, have any idea how I might fix this? Is it a known issue? Or do I need to send the thing back to Amazon and get another one? If the latter then is there a means of copying the entire contents of the PDA onto a memory card (my card has more memory than the PDA so space isn't an issue) so that I don't need to copy in things like birthdays and appointments again¹?

In other news, we had the first "proper" session of Magpie Empire last night and, despite some trepidation on my part I think it went fairly well (though a moment of high-tension I'd got planned was spoilt by some poor dice rolls on my part ... but that led to other roleplaying fun so I wasn't too distraught) and the characters reached pretty much the point that I'd hoped they would. One slight problem I'm running into is that the players are both better informed than I am about matters scientifical, and they also have better memories. This is being dealt with by dint of me coming clean about my utter ignorance with regard to actual-real-physics-stuff and by (I hope) cheerfully 'fessing up if someone reminds me that I made a different call on something previously. I write down as much as I can but obviosuly in the course of a game your players think of things you never did and there is a need to make stuff up on the fly ... of course there's also stuff that you wrote down when sleep deprived and high on toffee waffles² that just doesn't make sense when you say it in the course of the game, consequently some details change from the original concept and I just suck at remembering these ... thankfully I have a forgiving bunch of players. So I'm looking forward to next week's installment to see what they'll do next!

The lovely Fox managed to win an ebay auction for me whilst I was incommunicado reffing the game, so I should shortly be receiving a copy of Silent Death: the New Millenium which means that jojo-jojo (who plays the ship's Engineer/Gunner) will be able to blow stuff up³.

¹ Yes I know that Outlook should take care of this in Hotsync but, frankly, I trust Outlook about as far as I could comfortably spit my PC.
² I really want to redesign their website for them ... I mean really.
³ Her eagerness to start a shooting war with the People's Revolutionary Navy last night was really quite worrying.

Comments

[quintus.livejournal.com]

half a centimetre below the actual button in order for it to register a "push"
No help to you but my old Palm Vx does this too. Soft resets to bring up the welcome screen and frequent use of the calibration utility kept it more or less on target but I never found an effective fix.

[binidj.livejournal.com]

Sadly calibration is making no difference at all, I calibrate it and it's still wrong ... weird.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Mine too - I think it was a function of age. Given that your Tungsten is pretty new AFAIR, Bin, I'd suggest that it's a fault that needs repairing.

With regard to backing up the contents, if you are using the Palm Desktop software (or in fact synching the Palm with Outlook, for that matter) you are backing it all up. When I bought my Tungsten-E I just sync'd it and all of the content from my old Vx got copied on to it.

Similarily, if you send your Palm for repair and they return it blanked (which they almost certainly will) the next time you sync it you'll get all the content back (so long as your Hotsync is set to Synchronise, and not Handheld overwrites Desktop).

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Ahh - just actually read the footnote about Outlook.

What you could do is install the Palm Desktop software, adjust the Sync channels so that they go to the Palm Desktop, Sync the Palm (you can do a one-way sync, so you're just copying stuff from the Palm to the desktop and not the other way) and then adjust them back to Outlook so you can carry on working as normal. When the Palm comes back from repair, you can just load everything back by reversing the procedure.

TBH, its the sort of thing I could quite happily talk you through on the phone if you weren't feeling too confident about it.

[binidj.livejournal.com]

Ah that sounds like a solution, thanks very much.

[jojo-jojo.livejournal.com]

But they were getting away and going to get through the rift first!!
(I'm trying my best to play Nim as keen, but not so sensible, easily led and very green!)

'twas really good fun last night. You didn't appear at all nervous!

Don't worry about not knowing everything about everything, just remember that sometimes the answer can be "coz it is!, so ner..... and if you need Nig to shut up about realife astrophysics just ask him, he won't mind - even if it means that there are some anomalies between Gameworld physics (tm) and Realworld physics. I did the same thing when it came to the Sarcoform details. (But if you will invite people with degrees in Astrophysics and Genetics to your game..........)

Can't wait to get my hands on the blowing stuff up rules :-)

Must find that blonde wig for next week!

[binidj.livejournal.com]

Actually it's a real help having people who know what they're talking about, the feel I'm going for is a fairly hard-science one so it's good to have people who can ask the right questions ... even if, sometimes, the answer may be "because it is". With regards to the Sarcoform, as I've said, the technology is young and alien so the opportunities are there for you to tweak it ... if you dare!