July 28th, 2026, 06:19 pm

Salem, Virginia

Today felt like: a properly rainy day here today.

The day moved like this:
Spent a chunk of downtime yesterday and today fiddling with my new Palma 2 Pro.

I noticed:
Always neat to catch a glimpse of the local wildlife doing its thing, even if it is just a quick blur of motion through the window while the weather stays dreary.

animals / visitors:
a deer completely zigzag out back really fast, just sprinting and weaving through the trees like it had somewhere very important to be.

I kept thinking about:
I am really unsure why anyone would want a SIM card for it. I assume it makes syncing easier, but if you have Wi-Fi at home or, even better, always carry a phone with hotspot functionality, you can do it in real time without needing another data charge or subscription to monitor. I guess you could use it as a phone if you liked, but that seems to defeat the whole simplicity vibe I mentioned earlier.

small good things:
• now that everything is in place, reading is smooth
• comics look good on the color e-paper
• I can have my Kindle, Libby, and other assorted ebooks and audiobooks in the same place

Tonight:
For our evening screen time, we have been watching Beyond Paradise. It is pleasant enough background television, lightweight mystery filler that keeps us entertained without asking for too much heavy lifting. The in-laws are visiting right now, so tonight we are opting for Chinese takeaway with bhk instead of cooking in the kitchen. I am going with the homestyle lo mein with tofu, which always hits the spot on a soggy summer evening like this one.

free write:
I like the Palma now, but there was a learning curve yesterday setting it up and making it play nice. The security was glitchy out of the gate, asking for a PIN before I had assigned one, the text size scale was not great off the bat, and everything seemed like it needed a lot of tweaking. Nothing smooth out of the box, to the point where for a moment I was considering returning the thing. I eventually sanded off all the ugly bumps in the interface and got it to play nice, and now I like it quite a bit. I certainly would not recommend it to anyone who does not like to tinker. It has a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles, which seems counter to the simplicity vibe that they are trying to project.

— Scottobear (@scottobear.bsky.social) 2026-07-28T23:50:03.069Z