Two for the road!
New tools for the traveling office
I’m back in equipment buying mode for my “mobile office”. I move routinely between three locations: the countryside farm in a cork oak forest where I live, my office in town where I spend time when I need more quiet to work, and an apartment on the other side of the country where I stay when there is something interesting going on at the university, or I’m there for a meeting or conference. And then there are numerous holiday rentals on the coasts or off in the mountains somewhere and a number of stay-away hunting trips throughout the year where I also try to get some work done.
I’m not one of these louco digital nomads, but that distinction is more a matter of tax residency than how I get things done.
When I was approached recently about doing some work involving a lot of German news reviews, I realized that this was going to be unnecessarily stressful without an upgrade to my work kit for the road. I already had an idea of some things that could be helpful and had thrown them into my virtual shopping cart at Amazon in Spain some months ago, but as per my usual practice, I kept looking for better alternatives until further research made little sense. I didn’t find exactly what I was after, but what I did get will do for now.
The most gratifying addition to my personal traveling circus is a lightweight 16” portable monitor that can display in portrait or landscape mode. I’ve always been fond of dual orientation display monitors, but I haven’t owned one since the long past days of the Radius Pivot. That thing cost me a stack of cash back in the day.
This time the MSI Pro MP161 E2 was my screen of choice. And it only set me back €100. This thing is a godsend, and should be a help to most translators at home or on the road, as a lot of the documents we work on are better viewed in portrait mode at full page height. That sucks on a laptop and on anything less than my bulky extra 24” monitor for the tower PC I seldom use it is just annoying. In the three years I thought about getting something like this, prices kept dropping, so I figure my hesitation saved me at least another €100.
What I did want but couldn’t find for what I was willing to spend was a Bluetooth connection to that external monitor, especially for coupling it to my phone. Oh well.
I did get what I needed at least. For now.
The other part of this week’s order was a decent lap desk for reading. It has a strong magnetic closure, adjusts to five angles, and has plenty of storage for books, pens, paper and periodicals. I read most things in electronic form, because before I started dating an orthopedist who knew that a change of diet could do more for gout in my hands than any meds or surgery, holding a book was rather painful. And of course I still spent much of the day leafing through hardcopy dictionaries for the obscure technical matters I worked on. I should have invested in something like that adjustable book stand long ago.
I didn’t do that earlier for a number of reasons. When I left the US long ago, I left behind a wonderful little portable light table that a great uncle had built for my tracing work, and I would have liked to have something with similarly useful backlighting. I’ve also looked for many years with envy on the sort of portable writing desks that were common before the Industrial Age, and thought that something like that would be good for the inks, quills and brushes I preferred to use for correspondence that mattered. But then along came The Decline of Civilization with laser printers and fancy fonts that sucked for their excessive regularity and lack of spontaneous ligatures but were good enough for the unwashed masses. And the only craftsman I trusted to do a proper job of building that writing desk to spec got busy paying his bills building cabinets.
I didn’t get what I wanted, but….
Other bits of useful kit in the photo at the top of this post are
a Magsafe phone recharger that I grabbed at a random shop on York Boulevard after visiting my old alma mater (Occidental College) and realizing I didn’t have enough juice left in my phone to call a friend to pick me up at the train station. After more than a year I realized that the back of it converted to a stand with a good viewing angle. I had bought and lost several stands already, so this was a pleasant surprise. With unlimited 5G service on my phone, I realized I actually didn’t need the fiber optic broadband at my office, nor did I need the portable 4G router I had carried with me when away for so many years. So my phone, on that stand, is my Internet connection much of the time, also at home when the frequent lightning storms mess up the WiFi in the house. A laptop battery and a phone are as practically helpful as any UPS I’ve lugged around.
a set of AirPods Pro 2 (the little white case on the right), which work better for a sound connection with the laptop than the earphones my dog ate. But the microphone features on them suck for dictation work, so I’ll be testing a replacement soon for my reliable old Plantronics Voyager earset that I used for years until the charger disappeared in a fit of overeager housekeeping. I’m doing more speech to text work lately, and I need something that will work consistently no matter which direction my head turns.
Do you have your own favored working tools for travels? Please share your experience. I wouldn’t have much of the useful stuff I work with had many friends and colleagues not shared useful suggestions over the years.