Work-Life issues

An interesting spin on this issue - who owns your address book? I read this article in Fortune (not part of my regular reading) a while back (while at MWC, actually) but just re-read it and thought it deserved being blogged.

Nokia Tablet - finally having fun with it!

I've finally started to have fun with my Nokia 770. It's languished in the cupboard for ages. My son was going on a ski-ing trip and wanted to take something with to watch videos on the train down to the Alps. His idea was to take our ageing steam-powered laptop, which weighs about half a ton even without the coal - and whose battery failed years ago, so that it only works when connected to a power supply.

I wondered whether we could play videos on the 770. It only had a 64MB memory card in it, so I ordered a 2MB one from Amazon. The 770 kept claiming that the card was corrupt, even though it was fresh out of the packet. A little web searching (well, it's not as if I've still got the manual, is it?) and I found that the little bugger doesn't support cards bigger than 1MB. Back to Amazon, and I bought a 1GB card - cost 1p, but postage £3.92 - why doesn't Amazon wise up to this sort of thing?

Anyway, the 770 liked the 1GB card, but it didn't like any of the .avi files that I copied on to it. More searching found the media converter that some wonderful Finn had knocked up on his kitchen table. Installed that, and found that it didn't run. I needed some new bit of Java that somehow I'd managed to live without for years. Installed the new bit of Java.

Hooray! Can now convert files, and copy them to the 770. Whole films fit comfortably on the 1GB card, and the sound and picture quality is amazing. In honour of Finnish ingenuity, I made the first film I put on to it Aki Kaurismäki's "Leningrad Cowboys Go America". I am looking forward to taking the 770 traveling with me.

Sadly, all this took too long for son to take 770 on his trip. Still, he'll be happy once he recovers from the dislocated shoulder.