Gadgets On The Go

When we decided to head off on our adventure, Madzia and I were both heavily ensconced in our jobs in “The Matrix”, more commonly referred to as the IT industry. Although Madzia was somewhat of an anomaly as a software developer who had no interest in technology in general, I have been enamored with electronics since Wizard of Wor on the Commodore 64 in the early 80′s. So it is only natural I was assigned the task of technifying our journey.

Our Gadgets
Armed with the mantra “light and necessary, light and necessary”, I set forth into the world of international electricity standards, internet cafes and ultra light gadgets. Our primary purpose for our equipment is to be able to take a visual and written record of our trip, and it would be nice to chill out and watch a movie or listen to some tunes every now and then too :) We also have a few audio books as well as e-books to listen to and read.
After much deliberation I decided on the following gadgets to take on our adventure;

• IBM T42 Notebook
• Asus EEE 4GB
• Panasonic DMC-FZ8 Digital Camera
• 2GB ipod and 20GB Creative Zen mp3 players
• 120 GB Seagate External HDD
• 160GB Western Digital External HDD
• Corsair 4GB USB Key x 2

I felt that this mix allows us to maximise storage space to record our adventure without weighing us down too much. It also gives us the freedom to connect to any wifi hotspots that we stumble upon. If wifi is not available we can use our USB keys with Portable Applications so we can utilise our own bookmarks and even download email from our gmail account to peruse on our notebooks at our leisure, and respond in our own time rather than having to spend hours in an internet cafe.

Bangkok to Krakow Dot Com
And then of course there is our blog, which we have set up to keep as a journal of our adventure, and also to help maintain contact between our little munchkin and her grandparents :) We went with WordPress for the blogging platform and a theme by Chris Pearson, Cutline 3-Column Split. I tweaked the headers a little and added a few WordPress plugins, however Chris’s themes are fantastic ‘out of the box’. They can be personalised a bit more but we love the clear simplicity of his themes so left it pretty much as is. I purchase our domains through Go Daddy and chose to go to DreamHost for our hosting. We appreciate their effort to offset their carbon emissions, they are competitive price wise and the control panel is very user friendly.

Social Networking
We are slowly setting up our profiles on various social networking sites, and should be up and running by the time we leave. Is it just me or do these new fandangled websites make you feel, well, ancient? :)

• Facebook
• StumbleUpon
• Twitter
• Digg
• Flickr
• del.ici.ous
• Technorati
• Bebo

These sites are great for networking with fellow travellers, as well as keeping in touch with friends and family that we will be leaving behind in Australia and New Zealand.

Now we are all teched up and ready to go, I feel that we are prepared to take Morpheus’s red pill and embark on our adventure of a life time, keeping a record for posterity along the way.

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