I've written a detailed description of how I blog on holiday at my travel blog. I deals with limitations of various Zaurus models and how, sometimes, a full PC is what you want.

The Zaurus is back! I received my Ambicom compact flash WiFi card today and it works a treat. Hopefully it lasts longer than the Netgear MA701 cards which had a nasty habit of cracking. I've gone through 3 so far. It's fortunate that they have a 3 year warranty, but I don't think that the Netgear make CF WiFi cards anymore.

The reason I really need the Zaurus online again is that my Sharp Muramasa ultraportable notebook is suffering random lockups right now. I've run virus and spyware scans without findding any major issues. Maybe it's a drive or dodgy ram. The problem is that the recovery screens and manuals are all in Japanese! I might also need an external CD drive as well.

I'll wait until I'm feeliqng well before I try anything. For now it's back to my quirky Zaurus.

As with my other recent trips overseas I intend to keep a blog of my experiences. Previously I added my entries right here in Webworld. However, the trip entries tend to get diluted amongst everything else, making them difficult to refer to later, so I'm thinking of starting a new blog solely devoted to this holiday in Hong Kong, China and Japan. Which blog software should I use?

On previous trips I have brought various Sharp Zaurus Linux PDA's with me and either used them or internet kiosks to blog. This time I will be travelling with both a Windows mini-notebook PC and my Sharp Zaurus C3100. Blogging with the notebook presents no problems, except that the battery life is poor and B might be using it for her own blog. So I need a blog that I can update using the Zaurus.

One area I have had a lot off difficulty with in the past is adding images to my blog. Drupal, which this site runs on, seems to have problems with my host's use of PHP Safe Mode. I got around this by using a shared installation of Gallery version 1, uploading photos to this and linking them in my Drupal blog entries. It's a messy solution. Firstly I would resize the photos one at a time in Gimp (I run X/Qt), then upload them into Gallery using Firefox.

Unfortunately, Firefox under X/Qt seems to have a problem where it displays some fonts in form fields as unreadably huge, meaning I would need to continuously shrink and enlarge the font sizes. The same issue caused problems using online banking and numerous other sites, including a trial of a shared Wordpress installation on my site. I have two other web browsers installed on the Zaurus.

Netfront 3.1 is the default browser and I quite like its clean interface and tabs. However, Netfront's renderer has problems with modern CSS and really stuffs up some of my favourite sites, including this one.

When I bricked my Zaurus C700  my only consolations were that I owned an older SL-5500 model and that I would be visiting Japan later in the year. The SL-5500 is okay for typing up basic documents, but for coding I really miss the larger screen real estate and keyboard. Both models lacked speed and memory and copy folders from my work to the PDA was only really possible when dealing with a Unix machine that could handle ssh. Unfortunately, I had to work with Windows PC's as well.

I have so much work to do at the moment that I would like to make use of my train travelling time and even doing some coding in bed. I want something that can hook up to a Windows machine, yet also runs a Unix/Linux OS for development purposes. It should also be highly portable.