Technology

In order to facilitate travelling, writing (of both literature and music) and recording of video and my own compositions and music I encounter incidentally I have been busy acquiring a reduced and miniature cyber world of technology. Thank goodness I have lived long enough to take advantage of some of the utterly incredible equipment that is now readily available at entirely affordable prices.

My equipment consists of the following (for the geeks among you)

An Asus Eee PC1005HA (I originally bought a 1008HA but it seemed insubstantial and after a hard disk head crash was promptly returned to Amazon) The 1005A is slightly heavier but benefits from a removable battery (with a slightly longer life than its counterpart of up to 10.5 hours) and is more readily upgradeable with respect of RAM (having a single screw removable cover) so that my system now has 2Gbytes, the better for video and music processing. It's also about £40 cheaper but slightly heavier though very compact and most attractive in white. Sadly the CD/DVD ROM drive I originally bought is dark blue (to match the now deceased 1008A) but it's also neat and functional, but requires the use of two USB ports in order to operate, so another good reason for the 1005A which has three.
The program I have chosen for music composition is Acoustica's Mixcraft 4, which has some excellent features and imitates Apple's Garage Band (we shall see how well!)

To enable the programming of its virtual instruments I purchased a Korg Nano Key, 25 key velocity sensitive music keyboard, which isn't great, but it is small and very lightweight and which links, via one of the three USB ports, without any fuss whatsoever!

I selected the Zoom H2 Handy recorder, on the recommendation of my friend Lex Luthier who pointed out its advantages over the more expensive H4. More of this later, but suffice to say that it will enable field recordings and will act as a quality vocal mic for recording as well as producing quality MP3 files and having a massive storage capability.

For video I bought the Kodak ZX-1 which will allow recording of HD60 quality video, when required and has a pretty good jpeg facility, though it is less effective in poorly-lit situations, but it's very good in every other way and can store up to 16Gbytes of data and has its own editing software and will upload directly to youtube and facebook with easy-to-use software.

I have a Kubik digital MP3 player which also features a digital camera for both jpegs and dv and will record sound and display text files. It also has 16Gbytes of storage. I have some Koss lightweight headphones which are wicked!

Last, but certainly not least, I will be taking my trusty old ukulele Jeni-Frank as it is both extremely light and has the best sound and tone of any of my ukes. It's not the same era of technology coming as it does from 1940's Burbank, California, but it is the best instrument for portability and performance that I can manage on my journey.

I'll need some time and experience to get the best out of them, but at least I can carry them with me on my journey, and they should allow me to engage in a multi-media creative experience and stay in touch via Skype and other internet connection portals.