Kurt Johnson » Gadgets & Technology

Electronics and altitude problems

Kurt — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 05:14:16 +0000

I am realizing that my gadget bag carries ~4 hard drives that are not supposed to work about 10,000 feet (ipod, laptop, 2x 4GB microdrives). Hard drives require a certain density of air to let the heads "fly" over the platter and apparently 10,000 feet is the design limit; some devices work fine, some refuse to power up, and some crash forever.

This is suddenly a concern because my time in Peru is going to be largely at 10,000-12,500 feet while next summer's trip to Tibet will be 12,000 feet or higher. Given that a week of photography in someplace like Tibet could potentially generate 10-20 gigabytes of images I'm trying to see if there's any way to avoid carrying a wallet full of solid state CF cards. If nothing else I could probably just ration my photos and shoot JPG instead of Raw to fit onto a couple of large CF cards…

If anyone has any experience or thoughts I'd love to hear them.

Update: Everything worked up to 12,600 feet without any issues, although I avoided using the microdrives whenever possible in favor of my solid state card. The ipod may have balked once around 13,000 feet on Taquile; I had to reset it but I'm not sure whether this was related to the altitude.

Online photo album recommendation

Kurt — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:28:28 +0000

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Gadget update

Kurt — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 17:26:17 +0000

Newish stuff that I can recommend from experience:

Nokia 6820. A smallish phone that syncs with MS Outlook and offers a flip-out qwerty keyboard for note taking/SMS/calendar entries. Doesn’t offer the full keyboard and web browsing of a Blackberry or Treo but is much cheaper and smaller (I sync with infrared so no data plan required). Key benefit: I don’t have to carry a Palm Pilot any more.

Laptop hardcase from Tom Binh. I got the “Monolith” model because I wanted to be able to throw my T43 (14.1″) into a backback or suitcase without having it knocked around. One issue I’ve had in the past with softside cases is that if my bag gets overfilled the laptop ends up getting squeezed and I get little nicks on the plastic LCD screen where it rubs against the keyboard keys. The Monolith is a little pricey (I’ve heard there is a cheaper option now from REI/Victorinox) but nice for peace of mind.

Foldershare. Since I’m splitting my work between a desktop and laptop it’s hard to keep versions of files in sync across machines. This is a great product that runs in the background and makes all the synchronization happen seamlessly. If you upgrade to the paid version ($50/year) you can sync up to 500 folders and get access to your files remotely from any web browser as long as one of your machines is online (which could be a security concern). An important side benefit is that now if my desktop gets toasted or my laptop is stolen all of my most recent files will be backed up automatically on the other machine; this alone is probably worth $50/year to me.

4info. Send a text message to 4info to get a quick reply with sports scores (send “cal score”), restaurant locations (send “lupe torilla 77027″) etc. Very nice when you’re out and about wanting to head to a restaurant but can’t remember exactly where it is.

Hosting update

Kurt — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 00:50:08 +0000

About a month ago I switched from Readyhosting to Bluehost. I’m unequivocally glad I did; Bluehost offers vastly more powerful database/ftp/http tools as well as more useful analytics and accessibility plus 8x the disk space, all for roughly the same price. Highly recommended.

The hosting move is complete

Kurt — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 01:54:32 +0000

I think the move to the new host is 99% complete – there may be a few hiccups as the information percolates through the internet but it’s pretty well done. The only significant problem has been breaking my old blog feed when I moved servers (and concurrently switched from using blogger to WordPress).

Along with getting a new host that offers a lot more features than the old one, I’m stoked about the new blog software – it’s much, much more powerful than blogger. I’ve got some format tweaking to do but in general I’ve been very happy with how quickly setup went (including importing blogger posts). Since WordPress is free/open source software I’m sending them the $100 I would have spent on Movable Type/Typepad.

Switching web hosts

Kurt — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 18:28:17 +0000

I’m going to switch web hosts from Readyhosting to Bluehost. Hopefully this causes minimal disruption to the site but things may be a little wacky for the next week or so. I’m primarily moving to increase disk quota (from 500MB to 4000MB) and get access to Perl/PHP/Apache.

Here’s the link if anyone else wants to sign up – there’s a referral incentive involved which I’d be happy to split if/when I get paid.

http://www.bluehost.com/track/kurt5976/

Hard drive configuration

Kurt — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 06:26:00 +0000

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Simplifying personal email archives

Kurt — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 04:20:45 +0000

I’ve had some headaches keeping my personal email in line recently; I’m lugging around archives of email for the last 5+ years spread across several webmail accounts, and my primary personal email account has suffered recurring corruption problems lately (and I’ve outsourced my server admin). Finally, I’m accessing email from 3-4 different PCs in any given week and I turn over PCs frequently enough that trying to move archives around is a real hassle.

My solution, for now, is to move all of my archives to gmail and forward my personal mailbox there as well. Hopefully this simplifies my life a little as I can put the archiving out of mind and let gmail administer spam filtering instead of doing my own. I haven’t figured out how to get POP downloading to work across multiple PCs yet, but the gmail interface and options make it attractive enough to forego local email except on whatever laptop I’m using for travel.

The other thing I’m doing is setting my personal mail to be BCC’d to a second gmail account so that I’ve got a permanent archive of sent mail. I ran this for a while on my own server and like the way it works, but going to gmail is an easy switch and frees up some disk quota on my web server.

Based on what I’ve seen in the last week I’m giving two thumbs up to gmail. Thanks to Tomur for the invite; I’ve now got 50 invites if anyone else wants to try it. I started using GML to upload my local mail archives to gmail and then switched to gExodus. Neither of them is perfect but they’re easier than writing my own script.

Free at last!

Kurt — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 03:11:09 +0000

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An interesting electric vehicle (0-60 in four seconds)

Kurt — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 02:40:43 +0000

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