What's in your gadget bag?
Posted by Doug Tue, 08 Mar 2005 16:24:00 GMT
I saw a post on Gizmodo titled, What’s In Your Gadget Bag, Dave Barry? If you don’t know, Dave Barry is humorous author (UPDATE: I had originally said he drew “Dilbert”. I had thought Barry got his start as a cartoonist, but I guess now). He’s a very funny guy. This short article about the gadgets he carries doesn’t disappoint. In fact, it inspired me to write my “What’s in your bag” post.
I commute daily somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes each way on the bus. I have a Jansport backpack I’ve used for years. The back compartment has a MacCase 12” Sleeve for my PowerBook.
I cary an firewire enclosure cable for my Hitachi 2.5” 60GB hard disk. I’m pretty paranoid about hard disk failures. I use Super Duper! to mirror my PowerBook’s internal disk to this external disk daily. The enclosure came with this cool faux-leather wallet. That’s a good thing because the drive is too tall to fit in the enclosure. So I just cary around the logic board with the drive plugged into it. The drive and logic board still fit in the wallet, so I don’t worry too much about it.
Today I’m carrying my Scandisk compact flash card reader. I was really annoyed when I bought this. The picture on the web site where I ordered it showed that the reader plugged directly into the USB slot. The reader I received requires a separate USB cable to connect to the computer. Yet another cable wadded up in my bag. 
I’m carrying my CF reader because I took some photos last night at Josh and my Cub Scout Den meeting and wanted to post-process them on the bus ride. I’ll post those photos probably tonight.
My trusty side-kick is a Sony Ericson T637 I use with the Cingular network. I got this phone because it’s got both bluetooth and a camera. Turns out the camera is pretty similar to Dave’s “CrapCam”. I thought I’d take more photos of odd and/or unique stuff that I see. The camera is so crappy when I do take photos their uniqueness is totally lost. I guess I should learn to embrace it’s crappiness and use it as an art form. 
Anyway, I’ve started syncing both my address book and calendar to my phone. It’s not like I can do much appointment scheduling, but I can at least see when a day’s already scheduled. One of the cool things I really like is Bluephone Elite. This handy little app sits in my menubar and connects to my phone. When it rings it mutes iTunes and pops up a dialog for me to answer it. I can also take notes on the call with it and send/receive SMS messages. It uses my address book for caller ID. I really recommend it.
I’ve got a mess of other stuff. I cary mundane stuff like Tylenol, Tums, Carmex, and Hals. I’ve got a cheap pair of Sony MDR-10 headphones that sound surpisingly good and are very comfortable to wear nearly all day. I’ve also got a cheap headset for my T637. It’s not bluetooth. I had a “cheap” Jabber bluetooth headset that was bad. It’s actually dead right now. It won’t pair with the phone at all. I started carrying the wired headset though because there’s a fundamental limit (it seems) with phones to only pair with one device at a time. So, I couldn’t pair with my PowerBook and a headset. What I want is to have a caller ID popup on my computer and then immediately answer the call using my bluetooth headset. No dice. I’m also carrying a silly little 64MB USB memory stick. That’s only because who uses a floppy disk any more? The other incidental item I carry is my passport; because you never know…
What’s noticeably absent from this list is “our” camera. The first rule of photography is you can’t photograph anything if you don’t have your camera with you. I told Carla last night that as Spring comes upon us I wanted to start carrying the camera around. I’m not sure how that’s going to work. I guess I’ll probably just start toting our older Canon Powershot A10.
