I have to read a lot of fiction in the next few months. A lot of Science Fiction to be precice, and it’s so I can cast an informed ballot to help select the best of the genre at this year’s World Science Fiction convention (WorldCon).

As a member of WorldCon, a packet containing this year’s nominees arrived in my inbox earlier this week. Lots of PDF, RTF, DOC and TXT files, for many diverse categories including best Novel, Novella, etc. Not small files by any stretch.

So, to avoid culling a small forest by printing it all out, I decided to try and read them on my iPod Touch. In the past I’ve enjoyed reading on my previous portable device, the Palm T|X, so figured that I should give it a try on the Touch.

The dilemma, how to get just under 200mb of data on to this little sucker. Well, I solved it, two ways. Here’s how:

Over-the-air file sharing (Air Share) for PC with Files Lite:
Files Lite is, as the name suggests, the free ‘lite’ version of OliveToast’s Files program.

The way it works is pretty simple.

Files allows you to store and view files on your iPhone or iPod touch. You can connect to Files from any Mac or PC and drag and drop files straight from the Finder or Windows Explorer, as...

Google Forms are one of the lesser-known and more powerful features of Google Docs. They let you capture data from your users in a Google Spreadsheet, via simple web-based forms that can stand on their own or sit embedded in a web page. Like this:

Now, suppose you need to create that form in, say, English and French. Not hard: two forms, two spreadsheets, and you're done. But when you look at the French version, the questions may be in French but all of the interface text is still in English:

Here's how you fix that: just change the URL for the form by adding a parameter for the language you want the form to appear in... in our case, "fr" for French.

This is the original embed code that Google creates for the form:

Change that source URL to read http://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=pnY7RN2L8C5h3PQUcS0RKIg&hl=fr. Adding &hl=fr is all it takes:

You can find a list of codes for each of the languages Google supports here, from Afrikaa...