I’ve been researching different ideas for our year long trip next year. One items we are struggling with is; do we bring the laptop or not. Now, don’t get me wrong, this laptop we bought is super light (2.7lbs without second battery) and nearly as thin as a Mac Air….but about $3000 less expensive. It’s a model R200 by Toshiba and it works extremely well, better than any Windows machine I’ve ever had. (knock on wood). With the secondary battery attached we can type for over 7.5 hours or watch the same amount of movies. It’s thin and light and I like the keyboard, but I’m getting off topic.
If it weren’t for the picture aspect of our trip, I was considering leaving the laptop at home. Most people on longer trips out there say that is a good idea, but we want to give it a go with some serious writing and photography work here and there. If we were to leave it at home I started looking for something to bring stuff with us on a small USB drive. Luckily, there is a bitchin’ suite of tools and applications out there perfect for the long term traveler.
They are called Portable Apps and it’s an opensource project (and in this case, it’s free). The idea is you get copies of popular applications you normally use and then store them on a jump drive or USB memory stick of some kind. Then you can plug them into ANY PC and start using the applications without installing anything. In other words, you can keep all your email with you in Thunderbird, all your favorites and links in Firefox, all of your applications in the OpenOffice suite of applications. You can even use Pidgin to keep in touch with IM buddies and never have to log a single thing on the PC you’re using. A lightweight media player, GIMP image editing, SCP, FTP, etc… When you’re done you just unplug the stick and nothing is saved.
It seems pretty dang cool and I’ll be giving it a whirl. Even if we bring the laptop we’ll bring this group of applications along on a jump drive as a backup and to make things more simple sometimes. Plus, it’s a good way to have vital info in case our laptop gets stolen.
Check them out at http://portableapps.com/
