Plucker Productivity!

The Palm Treo is an extremely useful tool because of the veritable mountain of software available to run on it. That software, combined with large-capacity storage devices such as the 4 GB miniSD that I have plugged into my Treo 755P, make it the perfect mobile device for the many tasks that us so-called "Information Workers" need to do. As a computer programmer, my career is a never-ending sequence of technological studies, and therefore I am reading technical documentation all the time.

It should come as no surprise therefore that one of my very favorite Palm programs is "Plucker", an eBook reader with one significant difference from most other programs of this genre - it has a PC component that can download reams of technical documents and comfortably format them for later reading on the Treo.

Suppose, for example, that you are a Linux SysAdmin and need to configure a Beowolf cluster. On your Windows machine, fire up your favorite browser (mine is Firefox), and go to the site known as "The Linux Documentation Project". There is a page there called the "Single List of HOWTOs". Page down a bit to the "Beowulf HOWTO" and click the link there.

Now, having done that, minimize your browser and run the "Plucker Desktop" program. Do "File / Add a new channel using wizard" and enter "Beowulf HOWTO" as the new channel's name. After you click the "Next>" button, bring back your browser window and copy the address line into Plucker Desktop's "Start on a website URL" form input. Click "Next>" again twice and either choose to save the Plucker in a directory or to set up the Hotsync of the plucker file automatically. I just save it to a directory of my Plucker documents and sync them myself later. Click "Next>" again, and then click "Finish".

Your channel is now set and you're ready to create the document! All you need do now is click on the "Beowulf HOWTO" channel to "select it", then click "Update / Update Selected Channels". After the Plucker Desktop has done the job and you've sync'ed the file to your Palm, you can go out and make lunch a productive one while you study the document on the Treo. Nothings beats mobile technology like this!

These documents take up so little space on the machine that you can easily put the entire library of Linux HOWTOs on it with plenty of room to spare.