The Portable Consultant

The Portable Consultant spent Christmas in Nova Scotia this year. While connectivity to the Internet is not an issue (except during winter storm power outages) I did end up having to handle MS Word documents.

Could I create or edit MS Word documents, I asked myself, while traveling with only my Nokia N800?

It turns out that a Linux version of OpenOffice is not an option, according to forum discussions, due to the lack of power of the N800.

My solution is to use Google Docs, whose online interface works reasonably well with the N800’s Mozilla browser and my Think Outside Stowaway Universal Bluetooth portable keyboard.

Documents created on Google Docs can be downloaded in MS Word format (or OpenOffice or PDF).

While many MS Word formatting features are not supported, a basic word processing document can be created, downloaded in the MS Word file format, and sent out by email; e.g., As a Google Mail attachment.

Happy Holidays!
-pmh

This December, the Portable Consultant enjoyed another opportunity to use his Nokia N800 overseas. One Wi-Fi connection was supplied by a small hotel in Oxford, England occupying a 400 year old building and the other by a totally modern hotel near Rochester, England.

In Oxford the hotel offered free wi-fi in the room. In Rochester the hotel offered free wi-fi in the central lobby, bar, resturant areas… but not in the rooms which had a pay-for-use wired service.

With the time difference, the Rochester free service was sufficient to handle email in the morning (at breakfast) and in the evening, over a pint of bitter. I did use the better Oxford service to use Skype for local and long distance calls at 2 cents per minute.

Ok, not very exciting perhaps - but I did remember my bluetooth keyboard this time. That made handling my business email easier.

-pmh

ps: This was posted via MaemoWordPy on the N800.

Google Notifier and Google Talk tools not yet available for Linux

The Portable Consultant is increasingly amazed at how excited folks get about Cloud Computing and Google Apps while simple, basic tools like Gmail Notifier and the Google Talk client are only available for Windows (and perhaps Mac) systems.

Surely these should be OS agnostic utilities in this day and age!

Ok… the Google Talk tool is available as a ‘gadget’, but if a download-and-install version is desirable, why only for Windows? (Which, by the way, the Google Talk download page does not make clear although the Gmail Notifier page does).

A silly grumble, perhaps, but in this day and age one expects better from Google.

Cheers,
-pmh