Sat, 14 Jun 2008

Moving files from a Psion to a normal computer

Thanks to my brother-in-law, I got hold of a Psion Netbook, a very small, very light subnotebook which runs for some 9 hours on a single battery pack. It's a fascinating machine - yet clearly something from the past. These great thingies aren't produced anymore, the one I've got dates back to 2000, I think: it's prehistoric.

You can do a lot more with a Psion than just write texts: it comes with a spreadsheet, a contact manager, a calendar, an e-mail client, a web browser, a database and a few more applications. What I did, however, last night on our flight back from Europe, when inconsiderate people in the row behind us kept talking and laughing so I couldn't sleep, was write a diary of our wonderful trip to Sicily. This was lots more fun than reading or listening to music.

Back home, I realised that the Psion uses proprietary, rather peculiar file formats. Apparently it came with a software which converted files as they were transferred to an MS Windoze PC; you use a special cable for this, which connects to a serial port. I don't want anything to do with this: why can't I just copy my Psion files from the Psion CF card (16 MB - was no doubt hugely expensive in 2000) using my cheap "8 in 1" USB card reader? Well, I can - but then I can't do anything with the files.

Which is where Psiconv comes in, a conversion utility which runs under Linux. Its author, Frodo Looijaard, says it is "no longer in active development" and its latest version is from 2005, but what do I care! It comes as a 511 kB gzipped tarball, which you extract; then it's the usual sequence of configure, make, make install. In order to convert a Psion "Word" file to a nice-looking HTML file, you do:

psiconv -o outputfile.html inputfile

Posted on 14 Jun 2008 at 19:09 in /technology. -- Permalink