Son of Floppy

The sun shines brilliantly over pristine snow-covered fields and Christmas card woods outside as me and my wife ride the fast train to Malmö. We just passed Boxholm and will soon be entering Småland, the highlands of the Little Lands.

I've spent the trip so far listening to podcasts: Skepticality and my favourite, Escape Pod. Steve Eley is a hero! How can he manage to do E.P. so well and in his free time, while also working to support himself and being the father of a little baby? I'd like to hear more readings by Mrs Eley too, her drawl is really cool.

To be able to bring this kind of large audio files on the road, I bought a gigabyte of storage for my handheld on a mini-SD cartridge. It's incredibly tiny and cost me less than what I saved by ordering the handheld on the net instead of buying it in a shop. And it pretty much made my iPod obsolete.

Holding that little flake of black plastic, I mused about the 5.25" floppy disks we used back in the 80s. I used to think they were pretty high tech compared to the tape cassettes used for my friend's C64. A floppy back then was fragile -- floppy! -- and prone to data loss, its capacity 0.00036 gigabytes. And it measured, well, 5.25 inches across.

Ever on, ever on, railway of progress, you know.

[More blog entries about pda, computer, handheld, mobile, Sweden; pda, handdator, mobil.]