The Joy of Travel in the Digital Age

Guest post by Rob Griffiths, webmaster of Mac OS X Hints, and author of Mac OS X Power Hound.
Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking about Mac OS X (one of my favorite subjects) at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco (thanks to everyone who came to my sessions!). Since I live in Portland, Oregon, I had to pack for a plane trip to the ‘big city.’ That’s when the fun began…Traveling has become a much more complex endeavor than it used to be. A decade ago, packing for a three-day business trip would require nothing more than insuring that you had sufficient clothes in your bag, the required personal care items, and perhaps your address book and maybe even a calculator. But that was about it.
Packing today, especially if you’re giving a presentation, is a whole different ballgame…
First, you need to make sure that you’re reachable, anytime, anywhere. So that means the cell phone makes the trip. And if it’s a trip of any length, you’ll also want to take your cell phone charger. Items one and two, check; I got both things ready to go in the bag.
Next, you’re probably going to need access to your address book, schedule, open to-do’s, voice memos, and all of the other nuggets of wisdom hiding in your PDA. And again, if you’re going for any length of time and have a PDA with a rechargeable battery, you’ll want to take the PDA’s charger as well. For me, that’s a dock with attached cable. Items three and four, into the bag.
This being the age of the iPod, you know you’re going to take your music, too. iPod into the bag, iPod dock into the bag, and iPod/dock cable into the bag. Items five, six, and seven, check!
Most of us also use laptops when we travel, so that heads for the bag as well. And the accessories for the laptop – a spare battery for those long flights, the power brick, and the power cord to extend the power brick’s range. In addition, since I was presenting, I had to bring my laptop-to-projector adapters – both the DVI and the VGA versions, since you never know what type of projectors you’ll be using. There go items eight through thirteen into the bag.
More than likely, you’ll want to connect to a network when you arrive at your destination, and you can’t rely on wireless, so a short Ethernet cable becomes item number fourteen. At least, it should. If you’re like me on this trip, item fourteen is purchased at the destination, after forgetting to pack it back home! And you may want to bring your modem cable, too, just in case! We’re up to fifteen items now.
Of course, Apple does offer this great Airport Express product, which will let you roam wirelessly even when the hotel wants to keep you tethered to the desk. So there’s item number sixteen. This bag is starting to get heavy!
In this age, you’re also going to want some digital memories of your trip. So in goes the digital camera, taking the 17th spot. But with the camera comes a whole slew of additional gizmos. You’ll want the battery charger (18th item), a spare battery (19) or two (20), and an extra memory card (21) or two (22). And you’ll probably want all this stuff in a nice, compact camera case (23). Don’t forget about the USB cable (24) to download those digital images from the camera to the computer, too! Good thing you decided not to shoot any digital video this trip, so you can leave the video camera and its collection of parts behind!
Now we’ve already established that we’re taking an iPod and a cellphone, so we’re also carrying a set of iPod headphones (25), and perhaps a headset for the phone (26).
If you’ve got people back home that you need to keep in visual contact with during the trip, the bag will continue to expand. Into it we’ll add the iSight video camera (27), an iSight laptop mounting bracket (28), the iSight desk mount (29; just in case you’re asked to use the iSight with a desktop machine), the two plastic clip pieces that secure the FireWire cable (30 and 31) to the iSight, and the FireWire cable itself (32), to connect the camera to the computer.
Finally, let’s not forget that this entire collection of crud has to be carried in something — something relatively substantial, too, given the size of the collection! So your “techie toy bag” becomes the 33rd and final item.
While I may not have had all 30+ things with me this week, I clearly had the vast majority! And while you can reduce the load somewhat with a combined cellphone/PDA/camera, you’ll be trading in features in each of these devices for the convenience of a single gizmo. If you’re a full-time professional road warrior, of course, you’ve probably got the money and the incentive to minimize the collection of devices. For us occasional travelers in the tech world, though, we’re pretty much stuck with our pile of techno bits!
What’s extra grating is that these requirements are (more or less) completely independent of the length of the trip you’re taking. It matters not if the trip is for one day or ten days, you’ll be taking this whole pile with you just the same!
The days of ‘traveling light’ are long gone, it seems.
Rob Griffiths
Read more articles in this category: Tools & Techniques


Ah, yes. The question of what to bring? Kind of reminds me of traveling with the girlfriend. NOW IT’S ME.
I returned on Tuesday from a 24 day trip to the UK and Ireland. Sounds nice, Christmas in the Irish country side and New Years in England perfect. Except I had to keep in touch with my clients, one is teething with a new ecomm package, one has just had a break in and all his PowerBooks were stolen and his Linux servers were left sitting in the lobby. Etc, etc, etc. You get the picture.
Add to this I stretched something in my foot and by favoring it my back now hurts as well, I have to plan to not injure myself. I limit myself to two small backpacks, one as a carry on and one to check. I have traveled enough to know if you need it don’t check it.
What to bring? Well right off the PowerBook is out, I need my camera and accessories for sure, I always bring a flashlight for safety. My gf has an MP3 player so I burn a dozen disks for her. My clothes, extra shoes, carefully chosen winter ware and some personal stuff in my carry on to wash my face and freshen up on the plane as it is a nine hour flight, and that’s all.
So far so good, the gf says internet is free for an hour in the library and one pound for each addy. But what she did not know as a yahoo mail user was that "there are no useful internet tools on a stripped down windoze machines", as well as being behind some proxy, I was able to use workspot.net for a Linux desktop inside a java window inside IE. Slow but working.
The hospitals were she is working/living also have net access. What I found was two WinXP embedded kiosks with only IE and behind a overly aggressive proxy, which I found more restrictive then the proxy for Saudi Arabia, a new low. I can check yahoo mail but not my own ssl cert mail where my work is or get to workspot.net
There were no internet cafes that I could find in this area. Phone cards are about four to six times more expensive to call home than they are to call the UK from home.
As I was waiting for the plane home I noticed an internet kiosk in the food court. The display was totally customized to hide the slimy underbelly of windoze. A Pound for fifteen minutes it said. Yahoo mail worked but I cound not connect to ssl, and on my second try to get to my ssl mail the machine locked up totally and reset itself leaving me without my mail or my Pound! The Windoze experience I am used to.
Not being a windoze user I was caught unaware of how bad the rest of the world has it. Next time I will set up my own proxy and run the workspot.net software on my own server. By the way not bringing the laptop was sort of like a new freedom of never having to worry about it. If I have to give presentations I might just get that new Mac Mini. and a pda.
Cheers,
BB
The following was sent to me by a user on macosxhints as a tip for that site;
it really belongs here, as it’s a comment on my travel packing story, so here it
is. Everything between the divider lines are his (her?) comments, not mine…
I thought I would share my secret for losing some bag weight. If you are
bringing a powerbook you can charge many of your other toys via USB. I have
a USB charger cable for my cell and a charger/sync cable for my Palm,
eliminating 2 power bricks and voltage/plug incompatibilities during foreign
travel. Throw in a short firewire cable for your iPod and/or your iSight and
you’re pretty much covered.
If you bring your Airport Express along, you can also use the AE’s USB port as
a charger – which has the added benefit of not flinging your peripherals to
the floor when you forget they’re attached to your powerbook and you
suddenly lift it off your lap or pick it up to move it. (Happens to me a lot with
the rear facing ports on the TiBook)
The detachable plug part of the AE/powerbook charger will also plug into my
Digital Rebel’s charger, resulting in one less cable to carry. If you’re traveling
with a powerbook, lose the camera cable and use a PC adapter to download
your photos.
As far as the extra batteries go, I have yet to burn through the battery for my
digital elph or digital rebel in less than a day, and I always recharge at night if
I’m in a heavy usage situation.
I’ll have to look for some USB power chargers for my devices; I’m not sure
they exist, but it sounds like it’s worth the the search time!
-rob.
In the summer of 2003 I was flying from Manchester, NH to NYC where I learned to pack my dress shoes and wear something loose and confortable as I was left standing on a cold tile floor when the Xray machine had jammed with my hard shoes inside. The belt still moving as all the objects piled up inside causing a washing machine spin cycle sound.
Luckly I was holding my TiBook as they instructed me to remove it from the case before the jam happened. The problem here was I had it powered down and the inspector wanted to see it running, well as you know a starting powerbook does not look anything like a starting PC. The grey on grey Apple logo start screen did not satisify him and the log in screen did not satisfy him. I had to log in and show him a desktop to show him it was working?
My solution now is to sleep it if possible and install a screen grab of an XP desktop as my start up image. It’s what they want to see and if it saves me time why the hell not.