Anil Dash has religion, and he wants you to have it, too. Preaching the “power of personal publishing” through his popular weblogs, he also moves us through his works as the Six Apart’s (Movable Type/Typepad) Vice President of Business Development and as a member of the Web Standard’s Project Steering Committee. Anil took a breather from his circuit-riding to let us know what’s in his gadget bag:
Well, these days, there’s a lot in my gadget bag. I’ve been on the road three weeks of every month for the past three months and that means that I’m carrying almost every piece of gadgetry I own with me everywhere I go. I guess I should start at the top…
Headphones: Two of my favorite pieces of gear are also two of the best gifts I’ve ever gotten. They’re both headphones, and the most spectacular is the Grado SR80s that I wear as frequently as possible. Astonishingly good sound, the kind that makes you find new parts in songs you’ve known your whole life. And they’re made in Brooklyn. The foam earpads are a little chintzy, but it’s not like you’re listening to the foam.
The other great pair of headphones I own is a pair of Aiwa noise-cancelling folding headphones. (They’re like the HP-CN5s but older.) I fly a lot, so these are a godsend for getting across the country without a headache.
I actually also tend to have two other pairs of headphones with me when I travel (yes, that’s a total of four pairs of headphones in one bag…) because I have simple earbuds for listening to music on the go and my GameBoy has its own pair of earbuds that connect to its proprietary connector. I should really just get the adapter to plug regular ‘phones into that thing
Phone: I have the de-rigeur “blogger’s friend” Nokia 3650. Decent camera that I use the shit out of when posting to my moblogon Typepad. I was always skeptical of moblogging until I got this phone and got completely hooked on how easy and fun it is.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=gizmodo08c-20
The 3650’s got Bluetooth, the birth control dialing pad, an insanely loud speaker, and pretty blue LEDs. I have a standard silver faceplate, but I do covet the panda love faceplates that seem to enhance my friends’ 3650s.
I have some crappy generic headset for this, too, for when I want to feel like an asshole salesman. I’m a lousy texter, though I send SMS messages more often than most Americans, so I don’t really mind the weird keypad. The phone also has a 16MB MMC card, which I just use to store photos until I Bluetooth them off onto the PC.
PDA: I have an old HP Jornada 568. Yep, I’m the guy who actually likes PocketPCs. I have this model because I had been at the launch of the original PocketPCs and ended up with an older 5xx-series Jornada and had all the accessories. So when it came time to upgrade, I stayed in the family. I dropped 7 big ones on this goddamn lump of lead and the next month the price went down about $400 and HP discontinued the Jornada in favor of the iPaq.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=gizmodo08c-20
That being said, I actually really like this PDA, even though it’s huge and old and ugly, since it’s built like a tank and does everything I need. I have a 256MB memory card in it, so I can carry around enough music for me. (They’ll never make an iPod big enough to hold my entire collection, and if I’m just carrying some songs around, I don’t need 40 gigs.) It has great handwriting recognition but I mostly just use it to keep track of appointments, phone numbers, and my tunes. Sometimes I pull the CF card out of my camera and put it in the PocketPC to show people the pix on a larger screen. It’s hard to standardize on CF as one’s memory format as the devices get smaller.
I have a CF wifi card for my PDA, too, and I was always embarrassed it was so clunky and non-integrated until I met a guy who works at Microsoft and had the exact same getup that I do. Someday I’ll replace this and my 3650 with a PocketPC phone, probably.
USB Bluetooth Key: I dunno, it’s some generic USB Bluetooth key that’s not too ugly. I only mention it because it’s cool to sync with my phone and if you’re using Bluetooth on Windows, you MUST MUST MUST upgrade to the new Windows XP Service Pack 2 beta, because it’s a million times better than all the shitty third-party Bluetooth stacks that are out there. We finally don’t have to settle for envying Mac users their Bluetooth experience.
If you (understandably) refuse to run a beta of an XP service pack on your machine, try Jon Scaife’s directions for working with Bluetooth.
Mouse: I guess it’s weird to list my mouse before my laptop or other accessories, but I am a strong believer in a good mouse. Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical. No other model, not even the other Microsoft optical mice like the leather-covered one. I just wore out one of my old MIMOs and got a replacement in silver and black and so now it’s not just the perfect web-junkie no-ball 5-button scroll mouse, it’s actually attractive! Five buttons to get around the web browser is a must.
Cables and Crap: I have a Zip-LINQ AC-to-USB power adapter that I had to scrounge around a Fry’s for two hours to find, but the rest of my cables are generic third-party ghetto USB cables I found on eBay or in shifty Chinatown retail stores. I have a great USB charging cable for my GameBoy and a shoddy USB charging cable that’s supposed to work with my phone, but doesn’t. I also still inexplicably carry around a retractable phone cable, though I haven’t even touched a phone jack in a few years, let alone used dial-up. For network connectivity on the road, I either use wifi or I have a 50 foot CAT 5 that I carry around just because it makes the ladies swoon.
I keep a stock of 3 or 4 Compact Flash cards around with me, since I use them in my laptop, PocketPC, and camera. I also have a really great lens cloth for my glasses, camera lenses, phone and PDA LCDs and laptop screen. When I’m going overseas, I take a pretty straightforward voltage adapter, and next time I’ll take a USB hub and Zip-LINQ cables instead of an army of power supplies.
Camera: Though I take pictures with my phone all the time, I also have the other blogger’s best friend, a Canon Elph. A Powershot S230, to be exact, and it fits my needs just about perfectly, since I’m a lousy photographer, never remember to download my pictures, and love Compact Flash cards. I also have the disassembled remains of a Nikon Coolpix 950 in my bag, as I’m trying to fix a jammed motor in this hand-me-down camera so I can give it away to a deserving person.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=gizmodo08c-20
Laptop: I got an IBM Thinkpad T41 from Six Apart as my work laptop. Holy hell I couldn’t love this thing more. Fast, powerful, full-featured, lightweight, miserly with battery power and attractive. Plus fantastic support and it bears the distinction of being the only Windows laptop I’ve ever own where I didn’t have to blow away 5 gigs of preinstalled crap when I set it up. The included utilities were actually useful.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=gizmodo08c-20
My only complaint is no built-in Bluetooth, but that’s a minor one. I’ve probably done 20,000 miles in the air with this machine just in the past few weeks since I got it, and I have no complaints.
GameBoy: Sigh. Where to begin with Gameboy Advance SP? I don’t even actually play the thing that much (despite my passionate love for WarioWare) but I just love this device. The form factor, the appearance, the accessories. Kenichi Sugino got screwed by not winning Wired’s Rave Award for his design on this device. And the advertising for it on NYC bus stops was way hotter than those goddamn iPod silhouettes.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=gizmodo08c-20
I love my GameBoy so much I explored its innards in great detail, in preparation for my eventual casemodding of the device. I’m not a gamer or much of a casemodder so this will be my first sojourn into that realm. Naturally, I carry one or two GameBoy cartridges with me everywhere in addition to my GameBoy headphones mentioned above.
Everyone else in my social circle carries a GameBoy and a link cable for some head-to-head gaming. I am definitely smelling a burgeoning social trend for this platform that, at its heart, is 15 years old. Very cool.
Purse: All this gear (minus the laptop) goes into my purse, a Banana Republic over-the-shoulder bag that I got a couple years ago. It’s simple black microfiber with no logos or decorations and has one big pocket with a velcro flap over a smaller pocket. I almost never leave the house without that bag, stuffed with a bunch of pens, a (paper) notebook, and my camera, phone, GameBoy, and PocketPC. If I am just stepping out to walk the dog and am not taking the whole bag, I’ll always grab at least one of those gadgets to keep in my pocket so I don’t get jittery from not having a device.
In addition to the pens and paper, I have a mini multitool-like collapsible thingy that I fold up and keep in my bag. It just looks like a metal square on airport x-rays, so it doesn’t get confiscated like the reversible mini screwdrivers I always used to keep with me until I started losing one per flight. Of late, I also have a special tri-wing screwdriver for taking apart my GameBoy. And I have an LED squeezable flashlight, just for kicks.
Summary: In total? 9 earpieces, counting my four pairs of headphones and my telephone headset. Five microphones, from the headset, the phone itself, my PocketPC’s voice recording feature, my laptop’s mic, and the audio capture on my camera. Two cameras, one standalone and one in the phone. Three devices capable of playing MP3s: The PocketPC, the laptop, and the phone. (The GameBoy could play MP3s if I bought that accessory, but that seems redundant.) 512 MB of storage total on the various Compact Flash cards. Five independent LCD screens. Two wifi-enabled devices and two bluetooth enabled devices. Six USB devices. Over 100 feet of cables. Total carrying weight is approximately 15 pounds for all of this gear and their associated power cables. If I have my foreign power adapter kit, that adds another couple pounds. Total battery life if all devices are used sequentially is roughly one day.
Clearly, I don’t need anything else to carry. Nevertheless, I’m looking to replace my phone with something that’s either integrated with my next PDA, has a better camera, or both. A USB storage key is definitely on my shopping list, possibliy one that’s integrated with a camera or MP3 player, just for maximum gadget redundancy. I also am quite covetous of a pistol-grip flash-memory based video camera that Nob Seki of Six Apart’s Japanese office showed me a while back. That thing was freaking cool.
