So I recently (September 2004) bought a Palm Zire 31 in another attempt to get organized. I tried (in chronological order, starting in early 2000) a Handspring Visor, an Agenda VR3, a normal notebook, a stack of notes in my wallet and remembering everything in my head, all of which failed. The last one was the worst, actually. So now I’m back to square one and I’m trying with electronics again. So far it’s going well, mostly due to the fact that I mostly work on Windows machines again. Desktop software support is a large part of the user experience and I hate to say it, but Linux software support for pda’s has never been great.

To keep track of what software I use I compose a list here; it may be of some use for (other) new Palm users.
For reading texts and ebooks:

* CSpotRun: free DOC reader.
* MakeDocW: Windows application to convert HTML or ASCII files to the DOC format, that can be read by CSpotRun. Tip: Project Gutenberg offers a lot of free e-texts (in ASCII format) for download.
* Plucker: a Free (GPL) document reader with desktop software that can convert HTML pages and RSS feeds into Palm-readable text, in addition to normal e-texts.
* PdaConverter: a free tool to convert PDF to Plucker format (that’s only one of the things it can do, it can also import and export html and word and lots more!)

Other

* Secure It (Sit): a free tool to remember username/password combinations or any other things that you want to store encrypted on your Palm.