Just under forty-three degrees in Melbourne most of this afternoon, and they don't expect it to fall below thirty tonight; and yet I am unconcerned — I'm headed for a triple-length summer and I can write this off to "acclimatising" ...
Spent the last couple of days working on my PocketPC. Have decided to leave the laptop at home again, which means I need to make sure everything I may need is loaded onto my mini-me.
Although the PocketPC weighs 350 grams with its charger and accessories (200 grams for the PC, 150 for the rest) it saves me having to carry notebooks, printouts, maps, and the like. This year it's saving me even more, because Lonely Planet has decided to issue some of its guidebooks in PDF format and I have been busily buying and downloading the ones I need. A complete set of PDFs for each book costs about the same as buying the book in a shop (even with all the "discounts" LP claims to be offering) but as a PDF weighs nothing and bulks nothing, for the first time I can leave home carrying a complete set of up-to-date guidebooks for every country I plan to visit. No need to hope I can find them along the way. I can read the PDFs on the PocketPC — no need to print them out.
My PocketPC is an HP 212 with 256Mb memory and 480x640 screen. I have fitted it with a 16 Gb SD card and an 8 Gb CompactFlash card, giving me over 24 Gb storage (and I have spare SD/CF cards too). My camera uses SD cards so the PocketPC serves as my photo storage too. I have applications such as CityTime to handle time zones, an encrypted vault to store passwords and other confidential information, a diary program, and my budget is kept in an Excel workbook generated from a master workbook on the laptop before I leave home. I have a program to handle lists, currency and measurement converters, and all the maps and snippets of information I can find.
For each trip I cut some HTML menus with links that give me instant access to all this useful information.
It worries me a little because this little basket carries a lot of eggs — but in ten years of travel I have not lost my organiser, knock wood.
One thing it's not, alas, is a phone. For that I have a small Nokia device whose network-locked contract expires in February, at which time I can unlock it so that I can change SIM cards for overseas networks. Maybe my next PocketPC will double as a phone but so far the devices I've seen don't do enough of the PC things I need them to do, so I've chosen the device that does what I want and accepted the need for separate devices. This trip the absence of heavy guidebooks will offset the weight of the phone as well.
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