Traveling with a Digital Swiss Army Knife

The Sharp Zaurus


The Mission


Travel for two weeks in Europe, without the ubiquitous laptop, but still maintain laptop-like functionality. This trip would be light traveling indeed, just a digital camera, and a Zaurus (with accessories*).


What needs to be done


Although I used a SL-6000, most if not all these applications can be used on other Zauruii.

I needed the following while on the road:


Organizing the Photos


With a digital camera in hand, naturally many photos would be taken. I like to keep my photos a bit more organized than the standard img-xxxx.jpg numbering that my camera provides. Since my camera saves photos on a CF card, it was no trouble at all to eject the card from the camera, and insert it into the Zaurus, then use Tree!Explorer to copy the photos shot that day to my SD card. Using tkcGallery, I could view my day's shootings and toss the bad ones, while applying useful names to the ones worth keeping.


Staying in Touch


I have owned tkcMail for a long time, waiting for the promise of IMAP support. IMAP is now supported but it isn't as robust as I would like, sometimes stalling while pulling down headers. In order to have a more reliable connection, I opted to use POP. However POP authenticates with passwords in the clear, this may not be a concern to most but in this day of identity theft, I am not interested in making it any easier by broadcasting my passwords. I opted to create my own VPN secure tunnel with SSH and its port forwarding capability (see -L in the man page). After using Qkonsole to setup the SSH secure tunnel to my ISP at home, tkcMail would to connect to the localhost, while SSH did its magic behind the scenes forwarding my mail traffic to my ISP securely.


This arrangement of POP via a SSH tunnel also provided another benefit, as in sending email. I also needed a secure way to send SMTP traffic, and have my distant SMTP server accept my traffic. Again via the magic of SSH port forwarding, my home ISP's SMTP server thought the incoming traffic was local, and had no problem forwarding it.


There are other ways of doing secure email while traveling. Google Mail is one. It uses SSL protected POP and SMTP. Unfortunately for this trip, tckMail was not quite working with Google's SSL enhanced SMTP (I understand this has been fixed in the current version). Another difficulty is that Google POP access is a little odd, in that messages are marked as read by any method (including the Web interface). This means that if you view the message on the web interface, it will not be available via SSL/POP. I would prefer to have all my messages local (to my Zaurus) for off-line replies. All of this meant that although had tkcMail configured to pull mail from Gmail, I didn't rely on it for my primary communication while on my trip.


Editing the Best Photos & Uploading


I had purchased Hancom Mobile Paint a while ago for a previous trip. I don't believe it has been updated past version 1.01. It is a moderately powerful editor, however much of that power comes at the expense of agonizing slow performance, even on my 400Mhz SL-6000. Mobile Paint can't handle photos larger than 800x600, but it will offer to resize larger photos to that size during the loading process. Operations such as cropping, adding text, and adjusting the brightness/contrast occur with enough speed to be useful. Using some of the more powerful functions such as adjusting color balance, are useless, seemingly locking up the Zaurus for minutes.


After cropping and editing the photos, it is only a matter of finding where did Mobile Paint save the file, since it doesn't really use a standard file system, but rather saves in "pre-defined" directories (Documents/images/jpegs). Then I used Qkonsole to SCP the files up to my webserver. By setting up public/private keys with ssh-keygen before hand, scp does not even required a password to securely transfer the files.


Entertainment for the Ears


tkcPlayer is nicer than I need for listening to my ripped oggs, which are like mp3s but patent-free. It has many features that I don't use, along the lines of iTunes, with a library and playlists and all. All I really want it is to have it play ogg format and play a directory of music at a time, corresponding to a ripped CD (from my library). And it does this nicely. TheKompany came out with a CL-xxx version a while ago, and I bought it for the 640x480 screen support (for my SL-6000). Armed with a GigaByte CF card full of music, I had plenty to listen to.


The Gig CF card served a secondary and equally important purpose as well. After listening to "albums" I would delete them making room to copy and store the almost 1000 photos we took on the trip.


Is anyone out there?


I was curious to see what the wireless penetration would be in this far off land, and see how the security message was being received by the 802.11 masses. Using Kismet, I could "sniff" out wireless networks, quickly seeing which had WEP enabled and which were totally open. Interestingly enough, only one hotel we had stayed in, had wireless service for their clients. Perhaps we were staying in the wrong hotels. There weren't as many wireless APs as I have would have expected (based on my surveying wireless networks in North America) given the density of the large cities. But the security message hasn't really made it, as most of the APs discovered were unprotected.


Hello, is that you?


We stayed in a Deluxe Hostel which not only had free internet access (wired) but a windows 98 machine available for all to use (for those who hadn't brought their Zaurus). Using an AmbiCom CF Ethernet card, I was online in seconds. Just to see that it could be done, I decided to use Kphone (aka kppi on the Zaurus) to call my neighbors back in North America. I had previously registered with FreeWorldDialup (FWD), as the name implies, it is a free VoIP registration service (a SIP Proxy). FWD permits free calling to North American 800 numbers. Using my handy calling card from my wired telephone provider, I was able to call the 800 number, enter my calling card number, and dial anywhere just as if I was sitting in my living room at home, and pay the same long distance fees. So my hop across the Atlantic cost nothing. Calling my neighbor's wired phone was just a matter of dialing a few extra digits.


The designers of the SL-6000 must have had VoIP in mind, as the speaker and mic are both located on the back of the unit, and work quite well by just holding the PDA up to one's ear like a telephone.


The connection was great! Every ten minutes or so, the audio would break up and go silent for a few seconds then it would come back and be great again. Network congestion? Who knows. But it was so much fun, and had to dial my friend in Hawaii, a mere 12 timezones away, fortunately he is a morning person. Another great connection.


All this and touch typing too?


Using my PockeTop IR keyboard and Zeditor, I was able to touch-type notes about the different locations we had visited to help me when I write a travel log after the trip. Although the Zaurus includes Hancom Word, a fairly simple word processor, Zeditor is more light weight for text documents, and much faster if the document is anything more than just a quick note.


And the Total is?


With Hancom Sheet, which is an included application on the Zaurus, I was able to create a spreadsheet to tally our expenses, giving us the scary news, day by day of our financial position. Since Hancom Sheet saves in Excel format, it was trivial to import the saved spreadsheet into OpenOffice on my laptop when I got home.


What doesn't the Zaurus do?


With all this functionality, you might be asking, just where do I run out and get one? Unfortunately, it is a bit harder now that Sharp has withdrawn from the North American Market. The Zaurii are only sold by Sharp in Japan, and one has to utilize proxy companies such as Dynamism in the U.S.


But once you get your hands on one, you will find it is truly the Swiss Army Knife in the Digital World.


By Craig Miller

April 2005


*Zaurus Accessories included: PockeTop IR Keyboard, Ethernet Cable, AmbiCom Ethernet Adaptor, Sony Headphones, several CF Flash Cards, Sharp Zaurus Recharger