A few years ago, I had a Palm IIxe and I loved it — I loved having my datebook and addresses with me, and, yes, even having games with me wherever I went. But it died suddenly. I was able to bring it back to life for a little while this fall, but it quickly died again. A little research showed that there was a problem with the entire Palm III series with battery drain. Oh well . . .

But I still wanted a Palm and, when I listened to this PodCacher podcast, in which Dan-O talks about paperless caching and the fact he bought a nice Palm on eBay for cheap, I knew I needed to do it. A little looking showed me that I wasn’t going to get it as cheap as Dan-O did, but still reasonably enough. Of course, I wasn’t going to get a Palm III again. I decided on an m130 for the following reasons:

• Color screen.
• SD expansion card
• USB connect (down with serial!)
• Rechargeable Battery

The expansion card was the most important, because I wanted to be able to put in plenty of caches and not have to worry about memory issues. The rechargeable battery was a close second, but most third-generation Palms have them anyway.

So, after bidding half-heartily on a couple, I got agressive on one and got it for a very reasonable price. I had checked out the prices of SD Cards and one was going to cost me almost as much as the Palm! When it arrived, though, the owner thoughtfully (or thoughtlessly) left a 128 MB card in the slot. Yes!

But before that, during shipping, I played around with Plucker and Geocaching.com’s website. Yes, it is possible to use Plucker to grab the printer-friendly pages from Geocaching.com. Yes, it’s quite easy. And, no, I’m not going to tell you how — Geocaching.com is known to be draconian about their content. You can figure it out on your own. It’s not hard.

So, I have caches on my new (for me) m130 but haven’t used it for caching yet. “Yet” being the appropriate word.