Ewan's Musings
The day to day ramblings and thoughts of a Scotsman who will soon be leaving England.
The day to day ramblings and thoughts of a Scotsman who will soon be leaving England.
More fun and games with the Psion Netbook and the home Wi-Fi connection. This time, a way to completely bypass the horror that is Psi-Win. For those of you who aren't aware, the Windows PC Connectivity suite for the Psion PDA's is a bit... shoddy. Development work on it stopped after the release of Windows 98 release 2, and while there were some 0.0x patches to MacGyver Windows 2000 and XP connectivity, it's never really stood the test of time,. And if you're on a Mac or (god forbid) a Linux box, you're stuffed in terms of official software.
So here's the modern day solution that is cross platform, works smoothly, and gives you access to almost every feature you could want. There are some gotcha's (aren't they always) but given the majority of netBook users will need a desktop machine for backup or for Word/Sheet conversions, then this will do.
FTP.
Yes it's as simple as that. The netBook ROM with the Wi-Fi drivers also comes with a full copy of Neuon's nFTP program. Couple this with one the many freeware FTP servers for our Desktop, and you're almost there.
Step one is to set up an FTPserver on your desktop PC (Windows users could look at BabyFTP, which is a 41K exe file). Run your server, and make sure you allow full read and write access from your root directory on your computer. On the NetBook, you can set up a new FTP client with the IPaddress of your desktop on your home network. In my case, it points to 192.168.1.100.
Connect the FTP client on the netBook to the client on your desktop, and yu get full read and write access to your desktop's hard drive. Single files, directories, or the entire memory of your netBook dumped onto your desktop. Or move large files back and forth at 802.11b speeds. Certain wizardly eBooks are over 1mb of compressed text per volume. No more limited to 115,200 baud serial cables It's gorgeously fast.
Now you just need a good set of conversion filters, and you can't go far wrong with Neuon's nConvert, which provides Word/RTF and Sheet/CSV conversion along with a bundle of other useful things (like Agenda dumping to a text file). Well worth the small registration fee.
Untethered connectivity to your PC as well as the internet? Wi-Fi is proving more and more useful as the days go by. What delights will there be next week?
Posted by Ewan at July 15, 2024 09:00 PM | TrackBack