Gizmo Report

On this trip to China I carried a Toshiba 510CDT laptop and external
floppy drive, a palm V and cradle, a Nikon CoolPik 950 digital camera with
wide angle, telephoto lens and converter, a standard Nikon F camera with 2
lenses, a small shortwave radio, a sony tape player, and a digital voice
recorder. I also brought a transformer to step the 220 volts used in China
down to the 110 we use.

The laptop was absolutely essential. I used it to load the pictures from
the camera with a pcmcia card unit and, with photoshop, to review the
pictures and decide which ones to keep and which ones to try to send back.
I also used it to prepare reports that I would put on floppy to email
back. And, most importantly, I used it where there was projection
equipment to give presentations. I had a cd based tour of china with me
that we used from time to time and also an excellent Chinese language
program with a good dictionary that would pronounce the words. I did have
some problems with it. It crashed soon after I got to China and had to be
completely restored. Fortunately I was able to round up the resources to
do that with the help of my Chinese hosts. I had not brought a complete
set of OS, drivers, and application cd's . I would recommend that. But I
had brought most of my applications, including a complete manual for the
Nikon digital camera on CD. I didn't bring the laptop manual, which would
have saved me a few days of fooling around. I found that the laptop would
autosense the incoming voltage and run on 220, so I quit using the
transformer for the laptop. I should have known that ahead of time.
Biggest lession about the laptop was that I should have had it completely
set up and tested earlier before I left to identify problem areas. It was
a little heavy, and the 2 gigs was a little small. I would recommend one
of the lighter models with at least 4 gigs of disk storage and 64 megs of
ram. You will need both floppy and cd drive. We found that some models of
the Toshiba did not recognize the pcmcia unit for the camera memory, so
that has to be tested before you leave. I looked for some kind of backup
drives before I left to hold the pictures, but I didn't find anything I
could get quickly. The "flip drive" was just on the market, but I couldn't
get one at the last minute. Putting all your pictures in one basket is a
little bit scary, so I would have liked to get some way to back up that 1
or 2 gigabytes of stuff.

The palm V was some help with addresses and schedule. This trip was really
heavily scheduled and it helped to put that into the kind of planner that
most palmtops have. In retrospect, I believe I would have prefered the HP
620 and to have been able to take notes more easily and to more completely
substitute for a laptop in other ways. The fact that the palm V doesn't
have batteries and has to be recharged with 110 voltage was a
disadvantage, also. One of the palms that uses batteries would have worked
better. Fortunately, one of the application cd's I had with me was the
palm software, so I was able to reinstall that and keep using the palm.
Some kind of palmtop is a real help.

The best payback for the size is the short wave radio. The sense of
isolation in China is profound, as is the language barrier if you don't
speak Chinese. In both the cities I spent the most time in, I was not able
to get the english language China Daily on a regular basis. Being able to
hear the news from VOA, BBC, Radio Nederlands, and others, was a great
treat. The radio has a great alarm and stores two clock settings. I always
like to know what the time is back home, so that is a feature I
appreciate. I had another clock with me, but the radio is what woke me up
each morning.

Similarly the tape player is nice for that reminder of whatever kind of
music you like and can help cut the drearyness of the long plane rides. I
frequently listened to old rock while I typed up reports and worked on the
laptop.

The camera was great for taking pictures to send back via ftp and email
attachments. The Nikon uses memory units that come in a variety of sizes.
I had several, one of 80 megs which holds quite a few hundred pictures at
the lower pixel levels. But unless you have a laptop or something else to
hold the files, you will need several of these larger memory units. The
pictures were usually not as high quality as I like for my own general
use, so I also had a conventional camera with me that I also used to take
pictures I thought I needed the higher resolution for. Still the digital
camera was very useful and small enough to be easy to carry around. I had
a little trouble with batteries. After I ran out of batteries I had
brought with me and switched to Chinese batteries, I found that I might
only get a few days out of each set of 4 double a's. Not a big deal, but
in retrospect I'd bring more batteries with me from the states. I brought
a converter to be able to run the camera on regular power. That would be
in case I had to dump the files with a serial link, which has the
reputation of being very slow and energy consumptive. Fortunately, the
pcmcia card transfer worked all the time, so I didn't need that.