Blogging Technology

Those who read the Northern India blog may remember the case of the exploding net-book. The vagaries of the Indian electrical system finally put paid to the poor little Acer Aspire One that had served us so well in both South America and the sub-continent. These days, technology has moved on and things are now cheaper than they ever were...and bigger! That's right, the race to the bottom has resulted in off the shelf components being used virtually everywhere. Most of these lend themselves to the building of 11" and up laptops. You try finding a sub-10" net-book these days. It seems the whole net-book genre has been supplanted by the tablet. That's fine normally, but soul destroying for writing a blog - even one as basic as this. Rant over!

Fast forward past loads of searching to now and we find ourselves with a Toshiba Satellite Click Mini 2. That little mouthful comes in at 8.9" screen and about 1Kg all up. Ignoring the fact the first one had to go back, it's actually a nifty little machine, resplendent in satin gold no less. Time will tell if it is man enough for the job.

Update: Actually, time did tell and it's not! The Toshiba lasted until we had passed through the airport scanners at Heathrow after which it was no more - dead! It worked before the scanner, but not after. Steve spoke to the security staff who were adamant that this kind of thing "never happened". They scan thousands of laptops every day and there has never been a case of one being damaged. Unlucky eh? Never the less, we got them to fill out an incident form and will have to lug a dead net book around for three months so as to put in a claim when we get home. A quick dash to the air-side "duty free" tech shop left us with a Microsoft Surface. Perhaps not first choice but, if it works, all the better. Interestingly, the dude in the shop told us they get loads of people coming in saying their gadgets no longer work after coming through the scanners. We will try and claim off the airport first, but they will refuse - imagine if it got out that they admitted to damaging people's kit! It will probably end up being a claim on the travel insurance. Let's hope it's the only one of this trip.

The new Toshiba Surface is coupled with the trusty Nikon D40 and the 18-200mm DX lens. Just to reiterate, we use this ancient (2006) camera as there is little to beat it in low light situations and, of course, it runs that great travel lens which covers pretty much everything we need. Ancient tech' here, but it beats any cellphone camera hands down.

Pictures are edited in the Gimp and text in Vim. If that means nothing, then good. If you do know what it means, you are probably chortling!