Tag: Psion

In through the out door

The excitement of receiving my new Psion Series 7 on Thursday has been superceded a little by the grief of losing my Psion Series 5mx this evening to a broken screen cable. My screen now looks a little like this:

Broken Psion screen

Which, while being pretty and a bit 1970s retro, wasn’t a whole lot of good when I opened it at the team meeting this evening wanting to add something to my to do list.

Thankfully my dear friends at POS Ltd. will come to the rescue, and I’ll get it back in no time at all, looking good as new. This will be my first 5mx that I send to them, having sent a couple of 3mx machines in the past.

At the moment I’m backing it up — 12 mins 5 seconds to go now.

Filing sermons

I used my new Psion Series 7 today to write my sermon for tomorrow. I wrote this one in the sunshine, sitting at a round patio table in our conservatory in Cellardyke. When the midday sunshine grew too bright for me to view my screen (even with the brightness at full) I moved downstairs and finished wrestling with Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus there.

I’m subscribed to an online email discussion group called Midrash which frequently offers me inspiration aplenty during the weekly discussions of the following Sunday’s Revised Common Lectionary readings. It’s a wonderful resource.

Anyway, this sermon e-group got me thinking today about how I now keep my old sermons only in electronic format (with various regular backups) having discovered that the printed versions take up an awful lot of space over time. But how to store them, what format of naming and ordering on your computer would / do you use? Here’s what I do:

I have a folder entitled Sermons, within which I have four subfolders:

  • Other
  • Year A
  • Year B
  • Year C

‘Other’ covers anything that doesn’t fall into the Revised Common Lectionary three-year cycle of bible readings, eg Meditations, Funeral and Wedding sermons, sermon series and sermons that I’ve received from other people.

Within Years A, B and C I have the same eight subfolders:

  1. Advent
  2. Christmas
  3. Epiphany
  4. Lent
  5. Easter
  6. Ascension
  7. Pentecost Trinity
  8. Festivals

Hey! It’s the church year!

And within each folder I file my sermons with the following scheme — one that took me ages to develop, but which I offer to you for free:

<RCL Year> <Sunday Proper No.> <Year in ISO date format > <additional information>

eg

A Pentecost 03 Trinity 02 Proper 05 2005-06-05.lwp
B Easter 7 2000-06-04 A4.lwp
C Christmas Eve 2003-12-24 John 1.lwp

That way I’m always aware of the RCL year that each sermon pertains to, and within a folder I can immediately see if I have a sermon for a particular Sunday, and are sorted in chronological order, eg

A Pentecost 23 Trinity 22 Proper 25 1999-10-24.lwp
A Pentecost 23 Trinity 22 Proper 25 2002-10-27.lwp

Clever, huh! I share that with you for free.

Psion Series 7

On Sunday I won a Psion Series 7 computer on eBay, for a cool £187, including postage and packing. This also included a leather case, and a Psion Gold Card (a multi-function card, including a 56k modem). Here it is, as illustrated on eBay.

Psion Series 7

I’ve spent the last couple of hours installing software on it, including a wonderful application called EPOCSync which allows me to synchronize my Series 5mx with my new Series 7 via IRDA (InfraRed)! Very many thanks to Bernard for that tip.

Also installed this evening were

  • PocketChess for EPOC (Freeware)
  • MahJongg v.1.21 (Registered) by Adrian Collister
  • Opera 5.14 for EPOC (Shareware)
  • psiMind (Freeware) — a mindmapper application
  • PDF+ (Registered) — for viewing PDF files, including the Series 7 manual
  • Street ’99 (Commercial) with the entire map of Edinburgh.
  • EPOC Text Editor, v.1.41 (049)

Still much to install (hoorah for Compact Flash cards!). I have a 256MB and a 64MB card.

I’ll write more about it later. Must get to bed now.

PsiXpda … is that a 5mx I see before me?

I received a kind email from POS Ltd today informing me that they’ve moved premises, and would I please update the details on my website.

Series 5mx

Once I had, I looked up their website: www.posltd.com and discovered that it’s had a complete redesign. Not only that, but they’re advertising a new PDA called the PsiXpda. Which, to all intents and purposes, looks exactly like my belovéd Psion 5mx. I’m looking forward to more details being made available. Seemingly they are “comming (sic) soon”!

Mystery of the freezing Psion 5mx

It appears that I am not the only Psion user to experience my Psion 5mx locking me out during a connection to the internet, via a Nokia 6100 mobile phone in my case. The forum on PDAStreet has a very active thread dedicated to this very problem.

A cursory read through the nine (9) pages of chat suggest that one of three options may fix it: First, update the TCP/IP Stack – files are posted; Second, use an application called Sink to establish the connection; Third, use an ISP which is shown not to cause these freeze-ups.

Once I have investigated this further I’ll update my Psion Modem page and post the appropriate files.