Davids Jewish Traveler and Hacker
blow out and blow up
In Jerusalem yesterday I ran over a screw and blew out my rear tire. I had not brought my fix kit so I had to pack the bike back to yeshiva. The glueless sticky patches included in the kit were useless (they were a gift) I only buy the orange edged glue patches which have always worked well. Carrying a whole extra tube really paid off when the sticky patches failed.
While packing up the bike the police shut down Yaffa road because of a suspicious bag. A sapper went and covered and blew it up. Odds are it was someones baby bag and the cops blew up diapers and formula.
A dahon bicycle has few places to mount a pump but I found a place on the top tube after the fold, patches and tube go in the rolled carry bag on the tail rack, and tool kit pouch is zip tied onto the bottom of the tail rack but protected by the fenders. Having a seperate bag is too easy to leave behind stranding you with an unusable bike.
Camera
On their last visit my in-laws gave us a Canon A520 digital camera. Fortunately this camera surpassed all of my requirements and I am quite happy.
The A520 uses SD or MMC cards, I can view and even send pictures from my Zaurus SD slot over GPRS or WiFi Internet, the photo viewer and FTP program are installed to root on the Z.
This camera has video with sound ability for 3 min video shots.
With adapter standard lenses may be attached to this camera.
Using a PTP standard connection and the USB cable I can manage from windows or linux machines with Digikam, camera includes a TV out cable.
Optical zoom and flash zoom gets me the tight in shots from far away.
A good phone
I have over time become more attracted to Nokia brand phones. While a quiet non flashy brand they have really pushed J2ME aka mobile java on their handsets. I am running the Nokia 6100 which plays well with both the Modem over IRDA and sending/receiving contacts between phone book and the PIM contacts on the Z.
This phone replaces my venerable Motorola P280 and is also a GSM 3 band world phone. A simple feature about Nokia is their standard non-proprietary power port which has not changed for at least 5 years making borrowing a charger easy. Besides Internet and Phone calls I use the alarm clock function most, I doubt I would take another phone without a decent loud snooze alarm.
in the mail are modem cable for my laptop, headset, and crank charger. THis crank charger has both tips for my phone and Zaurus, really taking me off of the grid if needed.
Servers while you are on the road
While I live in Israel the availability of good network bandwith on the away/upstream side is very expensive above dialup speeds even with a decent download speed DSL line. Fortunately in the USA you can connect onto a friends DSL, cable, or fiber optic line and provide yourself with an always connected system to do work for you while you are offline. I was lucky enough to get offered a connection to a fiber line of 2m upload and 15M download making this virtualy unlimited against what is available in Israel.
Dynamic DNS services such as dyndns.org allow you to keep even a changing IP address fixed to a domain name so it is always findable on the net.
A server can be a generic computer loaded with Linux or other server operating system and is designed to be administered from network only, my server is connected only to network and power. Think longevity as you will want this machine running for years without shutdown. Quality disks and power supply are essential to prevent failure, two large disks running hardware or software RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) you might even consider a flash based (use a CF to IDE converter) / directory in linux and make it read only.
Screen is a program that lets you login and leave a console running even if you disconnect so it can complete its task. You could connect, and run screen, start a torrent download, then disconnect letting you do this task even if you only have a GPRS or cellular connection. Once you have your file find a wifi hotspot and order a coffee while you grab your file. Often The file is too large for your Z mencoder if run on your server will let you squeeze your downloads to a size and bitrate usable on your Z.
You are the server
If you are fortunate enough to stay in a place where you know the owner of a wireless access point in the area you can set yourself up as a server!! That Z is an amazing mini server if you set a root password and then make a seperate public account (don't let root be their login!!) running thttp and proftp. Now log onto their router which should be properly password protected, if they are non techies try default passwords http://www.phenoelit.de/dpl/dpl.html and set your IP address to DMZ. DMZ means that your machine is now exposed naked to the Internet and it can be contacted by any other machine on the net. Again a dynamic DNS service can be set to help your friends find your server.
