Equipment

Equipment & Devices I'm Taking With Me

Anorak

I'm not a traveler : I have no idea what I should bring with me or not. The only « experience » I have is my last « trip » to Texas where I took a lot of unused things with me, including an heavy parka with a hood (called anorak in French).
The temperature in the afternoon (late February, beginning of March) was so hot that I had to wear a hat and carry a flask with water.

I've studied a little bit what the couchsurfers I'have been hosting were carrying. My conclusions are that I might need :

• a microfiber towel, that looks useful, they dry fast, they're light.
• a light computer or smartphone.
• paper, pen.
• camera.

Equipment I'll carry

Panasonic DMC-LX5

An iPad which I'll use as a laptop (mail, web browsing, blogging,... ). Also I'll do video conferencing with relatives.

An iPhone, is contains too many handy apps, including Google Maps, which means that I may have no more troubles getting lost.
EDIT: my iPhone is useless since I'm unable to buy a SIM card here.

My Panasonic LX5 camera : it's small, it as a fast lens (f.28), wide angle (24mm), create RAW files, but doesn't zoom (90mm), I'll carry a second battery and flash card. Also I have an adapter on the iPad which allows me to transfer the pictures from the camera to the iPad.

Software I'll use

Animated Gif / Caveau de la Huchette - July 2012

I'll try to take as many picture as I can and post them here, including panoramas, animated gifs, movies, stop motion movies.
.
The iPhone is a perfect device for that, I'll use the following apps :

• Photosynth, see http://bit.ly/LvswFQ for an example of a 360° picture. You need Silverlight (http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/ to see the images, it works fine with Chrome and other browsers). 
• Cinemagr.am for making animated Gifs.
• Stop-motion (self explanatory) or OSnap!
• Instagram for square format photos
• SocialCam to shoot movies
• BeFunky photo editor
• other apps...

Equipment I bough in Mexico

Cheap power adapters : 14 pesos at Steren (vs 89 at Radio Shack).

About the towel

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. 

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (c) Douglas Adams.