Since I’ll be travelling for the next 6 months I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at how I can reduce my key content to be able to bring it with me on the road. I’ve had quite a bit of success and here’s how you can do it too.
The solution has turned out to be a combination of the 13″ Macbook Pro with a 1 terabyte drive, along with the ipad. The 1 terabyte drive finally gives me enough storage to keep everything on one small laptop, and the ipad works as a display device.
I’m finding so far that I’m extremely comfortable whereever I go — I always have my information with me (books) and TV to watch if I want to. It is starting to feel like “home” can almost be anywhere.
Anyways, here’s how it works: There’s 4 key types of content I want to be able to travel with..
1. TV
Since quite a while now I’ve made all my content digital; downloaded from the web from a variety of sources. I’ll assume you know how to do this part already. Today’s breakthrough was when I realised I could run an Ipad application: Air Video, and display TV on my ipad. This means if I’m in a hotel room the computer sits on my desk and the TV is displayed on my ipad from bed, streamed wirelessly. It works very smoothly.
2. Books
Readers of my blog will know I have about 800 books which cost approx $25,000 over 10 years to buy. I’m getting closer and closer to the point where I no longer accept physical books in my life and only do reading on my ipad. This would mean I only buy books on the kindle, or read PDFs via goodreader. For books which I simply have to have but are not available, I am looking into a PDF scanning service where I send the book to them and they send me a PDF. Its simply too awesome to have all my books with me electronically wherever I go. I have no problems reading on my ipad unless I’m in bright sunlight.
3. Music
For now I’m just using Itunes for music with MP3s played on my laptop when I don’t have internet, and pandora when I do have internet. It works pretty well.
4. Photos
Storage has been a big issue for photography since I shoot very high resolution. Now with the bigger drive this isn’t a problem. These are displayed on the web via my smugmug site: http://photos.adrianbye.com. I also display them on my screensaver on my computer, pulled down via an RSS feed.
I’ll continue to update on this topic, but so far this is looking very promising. Here are the components:
13″ macbook pro:
http://www.amazon.com/Apple-MacBook-MC374LL-13-3-Inch-Laptop/dp/B003GSLU3E
1 terabyte drive for 13″ macbook pro:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0034ZD5P0/ref=oss_product
good reader:
http://www.goodiware.com/
kindle app:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_ipad_mkt_lnd?docId=1000490441
smugmug:
http://smugmug.com