Technology List Technology in the Cabin
Keeping in Touch in the 2000s

Our “on board” technology can be split into four basic categories: internet connectivity, mass storage, media to share with others, and printing. This in turn requires various pieces of technology – some shared between us, others duplicated for convenience.

  • Scott's aging IBM Thinkpad computer, CDrom drive recently upgraded to a writable DVD drive and with new Bluetooth connectivity.
  • Kathy's new, media-rich HP laptop -- souped-up version of this base model. It's a boat anchor, but it has a great screen for viewing movies, has slots for just about every type of camera memory card, a DVD writer, fabulous speakers, Bluetooth connectivity, etc. Upgraded to include a wireless mouse.
  • A Canon IP-90 portable printer. It weighs just a couple pounds, but prints photo-quality pictures, and connects via Bluetooth or USB
  • A voltage converter: give it 240V and it produces 120V, or the reverse, automatically. Plus converters for power plugs around the world.
  • A “pocket” travel router Dlink DWL-G730AP (so we can set up our own wireless network or make a hotel internet connection into a wireless hub we can share)
  • Scott's 40gb iPod, loaded with just about every song we own, plus several “books on tape” we got from the library or the internet
  • A new Altec Lansing portable iPod stereo system – providing the amplifier and speakers to play from the iPod in our cabin
  • Kathy's new Canon A95 camera – the previous A80 conveniently broke just a few months earlier. Plus a couple new 500mb flash cards to hold the higher-resolution pictures.
  • Scott's new Nikon Coolpix 8800 camera – his prior Nikon was four years old, so it was time. This new one has a 10x optical zoom and generates fabulous 8mp images – heavy but great for the types of shots you want to take while traveling. And a 1gb memory cards (compactflash format) for photo storage.
  • A USB compactflash reader (his) and PCMCIA adapter (her's) for using the camera memory cards with our computers
  • Our latest travel innovation – a 500mb USB disk, with software that allows us to quickly sync our email on a public computer (e.g. at an Internet café), then sync it to our laptop (including our outgoing mail). We'll do a similar thing with our website. This “dongle” as they're called, is just about 1” long, ½” wide, and ¼” deep.
  • Canary “Hotspotter” – a little device that allows one to find wireless internet connections to hook into, a convenient way to get on the web directly instead of going to an internet café.
  • His-and-her external disk drives, for backup and extra storage – about 600GB total
  • His-and-her battery chargers (3 in total)
  • A surfeit of blank CDs and DVDs for backup and sharing photos
  • Collection of photo papers, regular papers, label stock, etc for using with the printer.