So I’m a bit of a geek. Hard to believe, I know. But when this trip started coming together, I have to admit that one of my first thoughts was “with geolocation, location based services, and pretty much ubiquitous internet… how much technology can / should I bring?” The answer: “a lot.”
It turns out that a trip like this is a perfect chance to assemble a bunch of technology and see what it can do. Some of the technology will be stuff I’ve owned for a while, some will be bought for the trip, and some of the latest and greatest will be gear that I’ll be writing about for Digital Rig.
So far, technology gear includes:
- Iridium 9555 satellite phone: about the size of a typical cordless home phone, or a state of the art 1999 cell phone, the 9555 seems like it’s going to be pretty sweet.
- Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 netbook: a full size laptop would have been too big and too power-hungry. The S10-2 is promising because it a low-power Atom CPU, has a relatively big 6 cell battery, has an SD card slot to transfer pictures from cameras, and has a 160GB hard drive so it can double as a media player on the 18,000+ miles of airplane time.
- Spot-1 satellite GPS transmitter, which will be used to update that map on the front page of Tangentry.com with our location… theoretically, every 10 minutes for the duration of the trip, or at least while we’re outdoors.
- GiSTEQ PhotoTracker CD111: a very small GPS logger which we’ll use to geotag photos for later upload. Unlike the Spot-1, which will post a live location via satellite every 10 minutes, the CD111 will record location once a minute, and then we’ll combine those log files with the cameras’ EXIF data to pinpoint the exact spot each picture was taken.
- iPhone 3GS: yep, we’ll see what Apple’s latest thinks of a desert trek in the Sinai. If these things really do have temperature issues, it’ll be pretty apparent.
- Amazon Kindle: Anna opted for the Kindle versus carrying a bunch of books around or trusting strange airports’ English language selections.
- Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ28S: Anna went for this model because of its digital viewfinder (LCD displays won’t be readable in the desert) and its 18x zoom.
- Brunton Solaris 26 solar panel: 26 watts of power should be enough to keep the Lenovo charged, and also provide charge for the Iridium phone and various iPods and whatnot we’ll have with us.
- iGo Everywhere85: Because the Brunton panel outputs 15v using a standard car adapter, we’ll need the iGo to provide appropriate voltage and plugs for the Lenovo, iPods, and so on. The Iridium phone will charge directly from the Bunton, since it comes with a nice DC-to-DC converter that’s good from 10v – 24v and plugs into the Brunton’s car adapter.
- Tripshell universal electrical adapter: any-to-any plug, in theory.
- Go-Sim global sim card: for times we’re near cell coverage
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }