Tuesday, June 27, 2006
The Technology of Being Away from Home
When we first started planning this RV trip, I didn't think through all the details that we'd have to plan for. One issue is how we stay connected and stay entertained while we're away.
My job is one where I can't be totally out of touch for a month. I can certainly slow down, and I plan to during this trip. But, I need to monitor my email at least every couple of days, and I need to be reachable by cell phone in the unlikely event of an emergency. The cell phone part is easy. They work pretty well, and just about everywhere. Just need to remember to pack the charger.
As for email, I have two solutions. Of course, I am bringing my laptop with me. In fact, for reasons described below, we are bringing two laptops. In many of our stops, I expect to be able to get Wifi access to the Internet. That will work fine to download my email and deal with it later. Web-based email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) won't work as well here because, unless you can stay connected while you read it, you can't catch up on your email while your spouse is driving.
To solve this problem, I'll probably download my Yahoo mail into Outlook Express, delete the ones I don't want, and queue up my replies for later. Since I like to file the emails I want to keep, I'll have to file them away the next time I connect to a network.
For the more urban parts of the country, I decided to get Verizon Wireless BroadbandAccess. This will give me a decent speed Internet connection while on the road. When Denise is driving, I can read my email live, including my Web-based Yahoo mail.
In addition to work and personal email, I read quite a few blogs for work, news, and entertainment. Right now, I download these into Outlook via NewsGator. NewsGator also has a nice Web reader that synchronizes with their Outlook reader, so you can keep up with your RSS feeds either way.
I also have a Blackberry to read my work email and for on-the-go web access (got to stay on top of those Yankee games!). Due to the limited interface and slower speed, that's kind of a back-up plan.
OK, that's work. How about fun!
Our RV has a TV and DVD player, so we'll definitely bring a selection of movies to watch, including a bunch of new ones that each of us will pick out. Our son, Anonymous, will bring his PS2 so that he and our daughter, PieLover, can play some games. But, that's just the start.
We all got new iPods for this trip. I've been a digital music laggard, mostly due to my laziness in getting my hundreds of CDs onto an iPod. But, my new iPod video is great. I've got about 1500 songs on it so far, and a few video podcasts that I am interested in. Everyone else in the family got iPod Nanos as they don't have the extensive music collection I had. Denise really wants to catch up on some NPR podcasts.
But, our aging PCs at home were running out of disk space. You need lots of disk space if you are going to load up a 60 GB iPod and several 4 GB iPod Nanos. So, Denise and I each got a second internal hard drive for our computers. The kids hard drive recently died, so I replaced it with an 80 GB drive, which is plenty for them, for now. We were running out of disk space on some of the computers anyway, so this was overdue.
With all this additional storage space, music we download from iTunes, music I rip from my CDs, and the need to get all this stuff mobile with my laptop, I decided to buy an external 250GB Iomega 33215 Hard Drive. This can backup everything of importance on our home PCs and bring our music collection with us.
In order to juggle multiple iPod libraries on one PC, I recommend Libra. It lets you have one copy of iTunes with multiple separate user libraries of music and also to import music libraries from an external hard disk. This will let us use one of our laptops with the external drive to synch up any of our iPods, each with our own music collection.
To listen to our iPods through the radio in the RV, I bought a Monster Cable iCarPlay Plus. This lets you play your iPod through a nearby FM radio and charge it at the same time. To be honest, I haven't tried this yet, but the reviews on Amazon were quite good.
In addition to DVDs, the PS2, and iPods, I plan to use the Verizon Wireless BroadbandAccess to stream video from one of our two Slingboxes. These let you watch and control your TV at home. Ours are hooked up to two of our Tivos, so we can watch shows we record at home while traveling. You need a decent speed broadband connection, at least 200 Kbps. But, we'll have that with Verizon BroadbandAccess and when connected to Wifi. We can't fall too far behind on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report! And, of course, the occasional Yankee game when Denise lets me.
At the beginning of this post, I mentioned two laptops. The main reason is for no fighting! I expect that I may be dealing with email quite a bit in batch mode when Denise is driving. And, if the kids want to play a computer game, watch video via the Slingbox, practice their foreign languages on the Rosetta Stone software we bought, or write up a post for this blog, they'll need a laptop, too. So, two seems to be a minium.
That was quite a bit more than I expected. We might even take a nap or read a book once in a while!
On a future sequel to this post, I'll talk about what I did to help make it easier to keep up with our snail mail and bills while we are on the road.
My job is one where I can't be totally out of touch for a month. I can certainly slow down, and I plan to during this trip. But, I need to monitor my email at least every couple of days, and I need to be reachable by cell phone in the unlikely event of an emergency. The cell phone part is easy. They work pretty well, and just about everywhere. Just need to remember to pack the charger.
As for email, I have two solutions. Of course, I am bringing my laptop with me. In fact, for reasons described below, we are bringing two laptops. In many of our stops, I expect to be able to get Wifi access to the Internet. That will work fine to download my email and deal with it later. Web-based email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) won't work as well here because, unless you can stay connected while you read it, you can't catch up on your email while your spouse is driving.
To solve this problem, I'll probably download my Yahoo mail into Outlook Express, delete the ones I don't want, and queue up my replies for later. Since I like to file the emails I want to keep, I'll have to file them away the next time I connect to a network.
For the more urban parts of the country, I decided to get Verizon Wireless BroadbandAccess. This will give me a decent speed Internet connection while on the road. When Denise is driving, I can read my email live, including my Web-based Yahoo mail.
In addition to work and personal email, I read quite a few blogs for work, news, and entertainment. Right now, I download these into Outlook via NewsGator. NewsGator also has a nice Web reader that synchronizes with their Outlook reader, so you can keep up with your RSS feeds either way.
I also have a Blackberry to read my work email and for on-the-go web access (got to stay on top of those Yankee games!). Due to the limited interface and slower speed, that's kind of a back-up plan.
OK, that's work. How about fun!
Our RV has a TV and DVD player, so we'll definitely bring a selection of movies to watch, including a bunch of new ones that each of us will pick out. Our son, Anonymous, will bring his PS2 so that he and our daughter, PieLover, can play some games. But, that's just the start.
We all got new iPods for this trip. I've been a digital music laggard, mostly due to my laziness in getting my hundreds of CDs onto an iPod. But, my new iPod video is great. I've got about 1500 songs on it so far, and a few video podcasts that I am interested in. Everyone else in the family got iPod Nanos as they don't have the extensive music collection I had. Denise really wants to catch up on some NPR podcasts.
But, our aging PCs at home were running out of disk space. You need lots of disk space if you are going to load up a 60 GB iPod and several 4 GB iPod Nanos. So, Denise and I each got a second internal hard drive for our computers. The kids hard drive recently died, so I replaced it with an 80 GB drive, which is plenty for them, for now. We were running out of disk space on some of the computers anyway, so this was overdue.
With all this additional storage space, music we download from iTunes, music I rip from my CDs, and the need to get all this stuff mobile with my laptop, I decided to buy an external 250GB Iomega 33215 Hard Drive. This can backup everything of importance on our home PCs and bring our music collection with us.
In order to juggle multiple iPod libraries on one PC, I recommend Libra. It lets you have one copy of iTunes with multiple separate user libraries of music and also to import music libraries from an external hard disk. This will let us use one of our laptops with the external drive to synch up any of our iPods, each with our own music collection.
To listen to our iPods through the radio in the RV, I bought a Monster Cable iCarPlay Plus. This lets you play your iPod through a nearby FM radio and charge it at the same time. To be honest, I haven't tried this yet, but the reviews on Amazon were quite good.
In addition to DVDs, the PS2, and iPods, I plan to use the Verizon Wireless BroadbandAccess to stream video from one of our two Slingboxes. These let you watch and control your TV at home. Ours are hooked up to two of our Tivos, so we can watch shows we record at home while traveling. You need a decent speed broadband connection, at least 200 Kbps. But, we'll have that with Verizon BroadbandAccess and when connected to Wifi. We can't fall too far behind on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report! And, of course, the occasional Yankee game when Denise lets me.
At the beginning of this post, I mentioned two laptops. The main reason is for no fighting! I expect that I may be dealing with email quite a bit in batch mode when Denise is driving. And, if the kids want to play a computer game, watch video via the Slingbox, practice their foreign languages on the Rosetta Stone software we bought, or write up a post for this blog, they'll need a laptop, too. So, two seems to be a minium.
That was quite a bit more than I expected. We might even take a nap or read a book once in a while!
On a future sequel to this post, I'll talk about what I did to help make it easier to keep up with our snail mail and bills while we are on the road.
