Palm Pilot hacking

When I first got my Palm m125 I was estatic, no more lugging around a notebook (a relatively light ThinkPad 701C butterfly), and no more dead battery after 45 minutes. For an entire semester I used it on a daily basis to download news using the included Avantgo software for a course I was taking on writing for the media, it served well in this capacity. During this time I was syncing on a daily basis and everything seemed fine until near the end of the course when the batteries seemed to die on a daily basis, which meant mandatory synchronization. Luckily, my Sony Ericsson T310 phone also had infrared, and I discovered by accident that it's possible to synchronize contacts between the two devices over Infrared (it works quite well). I made the plunge for AAA rechargable NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydrate) batteries, but discovered the m125 doesn't like NiMH. Scouring around the net I found some cached posts which seem to imply that NiCAD (Nickel Cadmium) rechargables also don't work with the m125. If you've experienced differently, please let me know.

So for the last six months my m125 has sat unused in one of my drawers. I take it out now and then to look at and with the intention of using it again, but inevitably it ends up back in the drawer after a few days. Lately I've been considering using it as a LCD reporting tool for one of my desktop machines. Some cool open source developers have posted complete details about using Palm Pilots as cheap LCD displays. Since I have a couple of headless boxes (computers with no monitors, keyboards, or mice attached), it would be a handy way of reading certain data without having to secure shell or remote desktop/vnc in. What interested me about the hack is there's a section about hacking your palm with a power adapter (goodbye batteries). Of course the m125 would have to stay in the machine, and it would require another outlet for the adapter, but it might just be worth trying to put the m125 back in circulation.