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	Phil's Blogservations Friday, June 17, 2005 Posted by philgomes 10:30 PM Tech At Home And On The Road Tech At Home And On The Road EDN's Brian Dipert is sharing what technologies make his life on the road and in the home office better. Following his lead, I'll share what I have here. With regard to road gear... First off, we have the Rio Carbon, which I received as a gift some time ago. Nice little player, though there does seem to be the slight latency problem when the drive has to spin up again to fill the DRAM buffer. Definitely not for the impatient music-lover. It's filled about halfway now with music and various podcasts, most notably from IT Conversations. Great sound. Sleek design. I actually had the pleasure of meeting the Carbon's designer in a bar in San Francisco. My compliments to the chef! My Palm Tungsten C has been wonderful. I've had it maybe a little less than a year. WiFi performance is sometimes spotty because, while an access point's signal may be strong enough to get to me, the little bugger sometimes doesn't have the RF oooomph to send a signal back. For expansion memory, I have a 64MB MMC, a 128MB SD, and a few write-once memory cards from Dryden Marketing Group client, Matrix Semiconductor. These have been great for impromptu demos and for entertaining my friends' kids. I also have one card that has Matrix's current press kit in Palm-friendly PDF format, just in case. For a while there, I was using a Handspring Visor and a Targus keyboard. This actually allowed me to postpone a laptop purchase for a couple of years. In fact, as I write this, I am tempted to see if there are any folding keyboards for my current Palm. USB keys rule. I have two: a 64MB that I bought on impulse at Fry's and a 256MB that I got for speaking at a Forbes conference almost two years ago. When I'm on-site at a client's offices, these have been indispensible. After all, almost no one uses a floppy drive and a lot of the newer thin-and-light notebooks don't even have a CDROM drive! My laptop — and, functionally, my desktop back at the home office — is a trusty ChemBook 6300C. It's been quite sturdy, having suffered a number of drops. It has a 15" screen that I run at 1400x1050 resolution. This is the laptop that will be used in my Debian "Sarge" experiment. The laptop is known in some circles for its..."personality." The backside of the screen has decals showing the members of Type O Negative (one of my favorite bands), the Decepticon insignia from The Transformers, the head of a classic "grey" alien, and (my current favorite) a sticker with the visage of actor Terence Stamp and the words "Kneel Before Zod!" There might be one more decal coming. I've been joking with Tim about developing a Linux distro for rednecks called "Rednix." ("If yoooooou think a 'hard drive' is something you did with a Ford F250 in the swamp... you might be using Rednix.") We thought it'd be great to put the infamous mudflap girl on there. However, being a single man, such a move would likely conspire to keep me that way for a very long time. "Look on the bright side," one reporter told me. "If the mudflap girl doesn't work out for you, you've always got Yosemite Sam!" I have an 802.11b card from AmbiCom and an 802.11g card from pre-Cisco Linksys. The former appears Linux-friendly, since it uses the Orinoco chipset. The latter just isn't giving up da love to da Penguin, though. (Broadcom?) For those less-than-wireless moments, I have the best tradeshow tchotchky in the universe: a coiled, spring-loaded telephone cord. I got it when I was doing PR for Cohera, now a part of PeopleSoft Oracle. This proved very helpful during my last trip to LA, where I happened to get booked into the only hotel near LAX without any broadband! For the home office? Jane gave me a webcam for Christmas, which has gone a long way towards combating the work-at-home heebiejeebies. I have the webcam and Yahoo! IM on all day. It's amazing how much more work I'm able to get done that way, particularly when I'm batting ideas back and forth with my colleague, John Sun. IM is also great for presence detection — colleagues and even a fair number of journalists know when they can catch me at my desk. I bought an external drive enclosure from TigerDirect. After hammering an otherwise unused 40GB drive into it, I have a nice little 1394 backup drive. I use Karen's Replicator to do the incremental backups, which has been a lifesaver. I used to back up to CD-R every month. Now I back up nightly. Big difference. I figured out some months back that my setup here wasn't allowing my laptop to dissipate heat very well. As such, it would shut down during games periods of very high utilization. This did the trick. I have a wireless router here, but my laptop is wired into it while I'm at my desk. Ever since new next-door neighbors moved in, wireless connectivity has been spotty during working hours. Not sure if it's a '70s microwave they've got running all day or maybe a cordless phone that they're lending to SETI, but running back to CAT5 was the only way to go. In any case, I spend too much time behind a computer as it is, so it's probably a good thing that my laptop more-or-less stays at the desk while I'm here. Like with Brian, music figures a lot into the work-at-home situation here. The backup drive holds its share of MP3s — rock, classical, goth, metal, experimental, and jazz, mostly. I also frequently go to DI.FM for their Goa-Psy and Classical channels. Every so often, there are brain-numbing tasks for which much distraction is required — paperwork, administrivia, and that sort of thing. Well... The 1400x1050 resolution means that I can pop a DVD in and have the movie play in one corner while the tasks are accomplished in another. Since I'm only half-watching the movie anyway, I'll often turn the commentary track on if there is one. Last time I did this, I ended up learning a lot more about Equilibrium and got the busywork done in record time. In any case, that's how I roll both inside and outside my little PR Pod. We'll see if I get to maintain the same amount of productivity and fun when I move to Linux. Watch this space for the running log. HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes[[dot}]com SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! 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