Nostalgia: Use Palm infrared keyboard with Android phone

I am probably the only person interested in this sort of thing, but in case anybody has an old PalmOne infrared keyboard and for the sake of nostalgia or convenience or whatever wants to use it with a newer device, I wrote up instructions on how to interface the keyboard via Bluetooth.

Talking of nostalgia, doesn't the phenomenon suggest that there is something not quite ideal about our current relationship to the past? The past is really real. So why feel nostalgia, when our past actions and experiences are really real? In heaven, perhaps, our memory will be so vivid that our past lives--transformed in a hindsight illumined by the beatific vision--will be fully present to us.

Free PalmOS apps: FontSmoother, myKbd, mySkin, FastLaunch, Accenter and AtomClock

For the small handful of die-hard PalmOS users, I've just released all my old shareware PalmOS apps for free.

My unkillable Treo 700P

I bought my Treo 700P phone second-hand on ebay in 2008, and it's served me faithfully.  I've written enough apps for it so it works very much like I want it to work.  I only really wish it had a better web browser, but it's good enough to check my email on.

At one point, maybe a year or two into its service to me, I had to use an app to turn on the microphone and speakers to make phone calls, but this was fixed when I blew out the headphone jack--I think it was stuck in thinking that there were headphones attached. Two or three times, I've had keys become less reliable, but that's an easy fix--I just disassemble the phone, peel back the keyboard, and clean the contacts (acetone works well).

Yesterday, I thought it had finally kicked the bucket.  We had an on-campus Fiesta event, and there was a small pool of bubble solution, and my son and I were making bubbles, and the Treo slid from my shirt pocket into the bubble solution.  I checked that it didn't work, removed the battery, disassembled and dried it at home, and it still didn't work.

I then spent several hours looking at what Android options Sprint had for me.  I wanted a large screen (4.3" is really the smallest I'd want, at least in wide-screen format) and a hardware keyboard (on-screen keyboards aren't very good for typing serious technical emails, especially if you need to use braces and the like--apparently a lot of people don't use them much).  Alas, nothing met my desiderata.  The Galaxy S II had an OK sized screen (4.5") but no keyboard, and the Galaxy S had a keyboard but the screen is little too small (4").  Granted, my Treo's screen is much smaller, and its keyboard symbol support isn't great (but I wrote an app that helps with that), but if I am going to upgrade, I'd like to upgrade to something that will satisfy me, rather than make me wish for something else.

I was planning to drive to the Sprint store and get a Galaxy S this morning, when I did the last check of my Treo and found that after drying out more fully overnight, it's now back to good working order.  I wonder how many more months or years it'll last me.

Update: It's finally dead--see comments.