To get Office documents onto my Nokia N770 and make them decently readable I’ve been using a combination of CutePDF which a printer driver that acts as a printer driver but produces PDF files along with FBReader. Admittedly CutePDF has a couple of weaknesses, such as hyperlinks can’t be followed from the PDF document it does produce a good reliable results, and its free as well. As for FBReader, it produces nicely rendered pages and is very easy to work with on the N770.

del.icio.us tags: N770, FBReader, CutePDF, Nokia, Internet Tablet

The Delays are releasing a new EP on the 12th November called Love Made Visible as prelude to a new album.  The EP is a limited release of only 2000 copies, so you might want to preorder on the web from the likes of Amazon or HMV.

To go with the EP there is a video for ‘Love Made Visible’. Click below to see the video.

In my work roll I’m having to manage more and more machines, particularly with the increasing adoption of Virtualisation.  A friend of mine introduced me to a rather helpful little tool which used to be provided freely by SysInternals and now Microsoft (they acquired sysInternals) called BgInfo. BigInfo create a simple wallpaper that provides clear visibility of a machine’s configuration.  Below is an example in Vista:

The only shame is that it doesn’t capture the information for Linux based machines as well.

It appears that Amazon – have opened a new shop for Baby clothes, toys etc – visit Baby Amazon using this link.

My house wide music solution at home has been achieved with a couple of Slim Devices’ Squeezeboxes (in different versions). As the server can stream audio and has a web interface it is a perfect tool for using with my Nokia N770 as the latest update(s)/installation comes with a skin suited the the Nokia’s screen as you can see. The Slim Devices community wiki (here) gives you the simple steps on how to set your N770 up to access the page leaving your normal browser views unaffected.

You can go one step further as the Internet Tablet is capable of playing audio streams it is possible to connect the N770 to the Slim Server – so you control and listen from the same device. The information on picking up the audio stream is a little more complicated but only marginally so.

del.icio.us tags: N770, N800, Internet Tablet, Slimserver, Squeezebox, Slimp3, Nokia, interface, streaming, audio

Having joined many other geeks by becoming the happy owner of a N770 (or N800 if you got lots of free dosh) one of the questions that people have wanted to know is how to access their PC using the tablet. The solutions I’ve found cover using Samba/CIFS and hacking into the tablet’s OS and creating mount points. The problem with this in my mind is that creating mount points is a fair bit of fiddling around and specific to a single host.

There is definitely one simpler solution, albeit with a couple of limitations. As the basic browser can handle FTP, I’ve simply installed FileZilla (Server) and shared my PC’s root directory. As long as your network is safe you can share the without any passwords etc. It can be setup to quietly sit in the background as a service. If your root directory is too much you could just select which folders to make available. Then just point your opera browser to FTP://<yourIP> and Bob’s your Uncle as they say.

The only down side I’ve found is the handling of spaces in filenames. Filezilla escapes them with %20 – but when you try to access the file it can’t find it. There are several applications out there that can solve this problem (an example here). Filezilla looks good to me as it doesn’t seem to consume much in the way of resources. For other platforms you would need to get a different Server as FileZilla Server is windows only.

The other option that is open to Windows XP Pro and Windows Server users have that I’m looking at trying is setting up IIS which is free with these versions of Windows. However this approach does mean that you’ll also need to get Minimo (the Mozilla port for Maemo) as IIS tries to authenticate in a way that Opera is unable to support. Once you’ve got Minimo then you just need to configure IIS to share certain folders, and then Bob is still your Uncle.

del.icio.us tags: FileZilla, Maemo, N770, N800, FTP, Opera, Minimo, Mozilla

Yes, I’ve joined the N770 Internet tablet brigade. I have to admit I like the inherent connectivity aspect of it, not to mention the large screen and the ease to dual purpose it as a sat nav.

One of the first things I’ve done is to install Pidgin (formerly GAIM) onto the device, a piece of pie if you follow the instructions at – http://pidgin.garage.maemo.org/.

Although when using the on screen keyboard the amount of screen real estate available to seeing the messages isn’t huge. But the ability to use MSN (or any other IM protocol as Pidgin is a cross protocol solution) anywhere around the house (or with wireless access for that matter) is a great advantage.

del.icio.us tags: GAIM, Pidgin, N770, Nokia, IM, MSN

Friends – Richard & Veth, have attended this year’s Tapper’s show and again blogged about it.  See what they have to say here:  

Link to Beyond the Sea with the Basingstoke Tappers at Exigency In Specie

 It doesn’t take doesn’t need bullying, blunt spoken or multi-platinum selling artists to enable music to be used to help those less fortunate parts of the world such as Uganda.  Joseph Arthur has contributed to the A River Blue project to help displaced children by recording a song with the children being helped.

The background to how Joseph got involved and be read about by going to A River Blue website. The site allows you to download and listen to the song, and if you like it, they ask that you make a donation.