Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

You see that? *points*

[fa:p:a=72157594329015352,id=479018545,j=r,s=s,l=p]That is offi­cially Katie’s replace­ment. Katie is well and truly “brown bread” and has been left out for the dust­men. She’s had her work­ing Li ion bat­ter­ies removed and sold for pea­nuts and the hard drive ejec­ted and cut into quar­ters with an angle grinder. After all, if I can’t get to the con­tents of my HDD, I’ll be buggered if I’m going to let any­one else have the chance at get­ting their sticky paws on it.

I con­tem­plated selling the car­cass and remain­ing innards for parts but as laptops go, she was a bit of a lardy old mare and the post­age costs alone would render the exer­cise entirely pointless.

I’ll miss her and her funky blue LEDs, knackered fan and food-encrusted key­board, she was my baby. The very first com­puter that was mine. All mine. She would travel almost weekly to and from the “in-laws”, where the Womble would absent-mindedly boot her across the liv­ing room floor with his gammy leg and evict sugar-laden tea (from its more than adequate ves­sel) and lav­ishly deposit it over the key­board and AC adapter whilst it was still plugged in at the mains. And to think we wondered as to why she stopped working…

As I have pre­vi­ously men­tioned, I thought a PDA would be an adequate sub­sti­tute once I’d worked up the cour­age to finally bid farewell to Katie. As a res­ult, I received my a Dell Axim X51 shortly after my birth­day in February.

Since then, I’ve actu­ally had it sur­gic­ally installed into the palm of my right hand, or rather it just seems that way. I can’t func­tion without it, it organ­ises my life into a series of short, man­age­able, tick­able items and pre­vents my mind from going into melt­down when I think just that little bit too far ahead.

I can check my email any­where, I never need to hunt for a pen and I can watch a cer­tain musi­cian (with a purple suit and typhoon hair-do) gyr­ate indul­gently to sampled strains of “Gett Off” in the tra­gic­ally under­rated gem that is the “Violet The Organ Grinder” video. I know that most of you will not truly under­stand the sig­ni­fic­ance of that video clip, so I’ll just say that the title speaks volumes.

The pocket-sized exper­i­ence of the Axim was exten­ded this week after I pur­chased a Belkin Infa Red Key­board at a fab­ulously bar­gain­ous price on Amazon (about half of what Dell charges for it). I had been search­ing for a viable altern­at­ive to tedi­ously prod­ding at the on-screen let­ters with the stylus for some time and happened upon this rather good review over on Axim­s­ite that influ­enced my choice.

[fa:p:a=72157594329015352,id=479001382,j=r,s=s,l=p]Installation was idiot-proof, the key­board and stand click together and fold-down to little more than the size of the Axim itself and most import­antly: it simply works. I used to use an infa-red key­board and mouse with Lola and it caused untold grief. Float­ing and erratic mouse con­trol, dead keys, you name it. With this setup, there’s no “absent” let­ters, no fuss, just sit the Axim on the stand with the key­board in front of it and type, it’s like magic. Coupled with a fake cursor and arrow skin that can be con­trolled via the Axim’s D-Pad or the key­board arrow keys, it’s almost like an iddy-biddy-bubby ver­sion of a proper com­puter, all I have to do now is name her.

The icing on the cake? This morning’s arrival of a 2GB SD card (inten­ded for use with my PDA) for only £9.99 from MyMemory.

Talk­ing of icing cakes, watch this space…

“Violet The Organ Grinder” photo: © Pais­ley Park Enterprises/NPG.