Any of you who know Santa will know that he’s a pretty peculiar fellow. Not only does he dress in ridiculous clothes and sport an odd beard and haircut, he also only comes around once a year, and sometimes he just doesn’t bring you what you want!

So this time around we wanted things to be different, we wanted to get what we wanted, and we wanted to get it before Christmas. After all, you never know if he’ll find time to reach you at Christmas with those billions of kids he’s got to see. All of this required us to twist Santa’s hand a bit, and even though he looks old, he’s still pretty strong (probably from carrying all those toys), so it was no mean feat.

But in the end, as with most things in life, if you’re determined enough, you get what you want. And in our case it was a shiny new Kohjinsha tablet PC. Ok, we didn’t get exactly what we wanted, we were hoping for the 811 model with an 800MHZ CPU but we got the 610 with a 600MHZ. He claimed to have given out all of the 811 model to kids he liked better! After some more arm twisting though he did upgrade the ram to 2GB though

How the Kohjinsha looks in Santa’s boardroom.

So why did we go to such lengths to harass the poor old man for this toy? Well we needed to get an extra notebook before traveling the world and we wanted it to be very light. This one weighs less than 1kg. We also wanted it to have a big hard disk. This one has 120gb, lots of ram - we got 2gb in this one. It doesn’t need to be too fast so we can live with the 600mhz cpu. And of course, it comes with all the usual gizmos, wlan, lan, bluetooth, CF/SD/etc card reader, touch screen, rotateable screen to turn it into a tablet PC, etc

Best of all though is the price. Coming close to US$900, it’s hard to find anything similar that costs anything close to that. Sure, there are other UMPC’s, especially linux-based ones, but most have no hard disk and only 2-4gb for storage (in contrast this has 120gb), and the screen resolution of those other ones is usually far worse than this. So while we still have to test this out on the road, so far it looks pretty good!

Oh yeah, Merry Xmas, Happy Holidays, and Best Wishes to all our readers in this festive season!

If you were traveling the world, bringing your mobile office with you, computers and other tools you use to earn a living, would you feel safe leaving them in a hotel room? What if the hotel room was in a poor country known for theft? We think this is a major security issue! So after some research, we decided to bring a portable safe with us!

Our Portable Safe

Now I know most of you are thinking that this looks very little like a safe, in fact it looks just like an ordinary backpack. But under the layer of weather-protective cloth lies a mesh of stainless steel cable that protects the contents from all but the most determined of thieves.

As we jostle among crowds on busy streets it helps protect against slash and grab theft. Even the straps have steel cables to protect them from being cut out from under you.

When we’re trying out some food at a local restaurant, we can latch the strap to the table to prevent it from being snatched! And when we need to leave our belongings in a hotel room where staff may earn less in a month than what many people make a day, we can use the integrated steel cable and lock to loop around some non-removable object and prevent a thief from snatching the whole pack.

How the mesh looks under the cloth. The cable coming out is what is used to secure it to a fixed object.

Did we test it out? No, we didn’t want to cut up our new backpack only to discover that the steel cables took a lot of work to break But if we’re unlucky enough to have someone try to slash it somewhere in the world, we hope that at least our belongings will be safe

If you want to get one for your travels, or check out some other anti-theft travel products you can go to: www.pacsafe.com

Thank goodness for these inventions!

This is a question we are constantly asking ourselves and working out answers for. In our travels we will encounter everything from tropical weather to below freezing, tropical downpour to heavy snows. How can we travel light and still have all the necessary clothes for these different weather conditions and locations?

This is how we looked when we forgot to pack proper raincoats!

The disposable raincoats we were wearing didn’t seem to work. It’s better to dispose them BEFORE wearing

Oh yeah, the tired look on our faces, that’s from the 6am flight not the rain

Another thing we have to take into consideration is what equipment to bring with us. We’ve already outlined most of our mobile office in this post. But since then we’ve realized we need another notebook computer.

We want something very light (as close to 1kg as possible), but we also don’t want to spend too much on it since we’ll be staying in so many places that the possibility of it getting stolen increases. We’ve seen some nice ones under 1kg, but the keyboard and screen are too small for Grace to work effectively on them.

Many people have suggested we take backpacks with us instead of suitcases. That seems like a good idea, but to fit clothes for cold and hot weather into a couple of backpacks and make sure that the one Grace is carrying doesn’t break her back is a lot more complicated

So what are we taking with us and how are we going to pack it? Well, we’re still not sure yet, we’re definitely taking a couple of warm jackets each, some all weather pants, and plenty of other clothes in between, and we’ll make sure to post a video of our beautifully packed suitcases… or not

Oh yes, if you’ve read this far then I’ll remind you that you can stand a chance to win a magnificent Sony Photo Printer, by just subscribing to this site by email. When you subscribe you will receive each of our posts by email, complete with any pictures they include

A while back I said I would review what I like and dislike about this camera. Before I reviewed it though, I wanted to have enough experience using it so that I could give an opinion based on more than an initial impression.

Main reasons why we chose this camera:

1. It is light, small
2. Has a built-in 60gb HDD
3. Has some of the most advanced consumer/prosumer camcorder features including recording to HD format.
4. Another plus, was the fact that sony had some accessories for this camera like a bluetooth mic which could easily be added without any cumbersome cables

After our first trip to HK and Macau, we realized that even with the two small batteries that came with the camera, we didn’t have enough juice to cover a full day of filming so we went and bought the most powerful battery available. It’s a bulky battery and juts out of the back of the camera, but it lasts 4-6 hours which is great

Side view with the huge battery jutting out of the back

The photo button is at the top where my index finger is, and the video button is on the back where my thumb is.

There’s a flash at the front, and also a button to activate backlight compensation. That button would have been better placed on the back!

Here are some of the things I like about the camera:

• It’s small and compact
• It can take pictures at 4 mega pixels even when recording videos
• It has a mic and earphone jack which many small cams don’t
• It has a special connector for Sony accessories like the bluetooth mic
• The 10x zoom covers most of our needs
• Because of the built-in hard disk it’s easy to upload the videos to the computer
• 60GB holds so many hours of footage when recording SD that we can go for weeks without deleting anything

There are many pros to this camera, but there are also some bothersome problems:

• The manual focus is so cumbersome to use that it just isn’t practical
• The auto focus can be very frustrating when filming nature as it may focus on a branch close by rather than the animal behind it - this is the single most frustrating thing I’ve found with this camera
• The auto focus in the dark is so slow that it makes it very hard to film at night or in low light conditions
• There is a lot of electric noise in low light conditions
• Even on a sunny day the shutter speed of the still camera isn’t too fast and can lead to blurred shots
• The HD format is not recognized by any editing software except Sony’s!

In summary, this is probably the best camcorder of its size, but I would really like to see one that allows better manual controls of focus, aperture, etc. Also, I want to use the HD footage I film without converting it!

Sony, please let Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut support this format!