Gregory Todd Williams

The amount of technology we have along on this trip is staggering. Herewith, a summary of the devices we turn on every day for a long drive.

• Powerbook Titanium

  Running every minute of the driving, my laptop is keeping the database of GPS points of where we’ve been. Every 10 seconds it polls the GPS and drops the data into MySQL. I’m also trying to keep up with my mail and blogroll via Adam’s T610.

• Powerbook Aluminum

  Adam’s laptop is mainly being used for internet access and map generation with the horrible Route66.

• Sony Ericsson T68i

  My aging phone, on the AT&T network which is cutting the GSM frequencies for the 68i, isn’t a whole lot of help on the trip. The one thing it does have is lots of unused minutes.

• Sony Ericsson T610

  Adam’s phone, on T-Mobile, doesn’t have any minutes left for making calls this month, but it does have unlimited internet which has been exceptionally useful. It’s not uncommon to find both of our laptops online using Bluetooth for GPRS on the T610 and internet sharing on 802.11b.

• Garmin Foretrex 101

  This GPS is a trooper. It’s tiny, and works well (with some quirks) with the perl GPS::NMEA module. The only downside is that it runs on two AAA batteries, and one set of batteries won’t last through a longer day of driving. Given more time, it would be nice to wire the GPS to the car’s power.

• iPod 20GB

  Adam’s brand new iPod has been great for the long drive. It’s just too bad we have way more music than 20GB, because all day long we’ll think of something we’d like to listen to and realize that it’s on the external drive in the trunk.

• Belkin Tunecast

  The Tunecast FM transmitter works well most of the time, but has some quirks. The display seems to freak out in direct sunlight, and we often has trouble with static (though that’s probably more a problem with local radio usage and my radio than with the Tunecast).

• Sony XM Radio DRN-XM01MK2

  The XM is both good and bad. It’s been awesome to be in the middle of nowhere and be able to listen to a mix of punk, or rock, or jazz, or news like the BBC or Air America, though it sucks that NPR isn’t on XM. Perhaps because it’s an old model of XM, we frequently loose signal for five or ten seconds, even with a direct view of the entire sky. It seems to have lots of difficulty with tall trees and short tunnels as well. Probably fixed in newer models with better buffering.

• 2 Meter Tranciever

  We haven’t gotten a chance to use this yet. Tried twice, once in Oregon and once in Glacier, but no one was on. A colaboration between Doug Meecham and my dad got us a roof-mounted antenna which should work really well in areas with more 2 meter activity.

• Nikon D70

  My brand new camera has been working overtime on this trip. Over 3000 pictures using over 5GB have been taken so far. We trade off on driving and taking pictures and while we didn’t get the automatic one-picture-per-mile setup working, we’ve made up for it by taking tons of pictures with the D70 while driving.

• Canon Elph S410

  With the D70 doing most of the work, and with only one of us able to take pictures at a time while driving, the Elph hasn’t gotten much use. Handy at times, though, given its size and portability.

• 12-Volt Splitter, DC-AC Inverter, power strip

  The four-way splitter is full with the Inverter, Tunecast, XM and Cell charger. The power strip has the Powerbook charger and battery recharger. The hit on gas mileage with all these electronics is noticable.

• Velcro

  One of the best ideas for the trip, we’ve got velcro on everything. We’ve got the GPS, iPod, Tunecast, and XM remote all mounted on the dashboard for easy access.

Now we’re off to Chicago, via Lincoln, Nebraska.