Laptop replacement for touring

Mark Boyd has been taking a notebook along with him on tours for years now. Although he has completed some incredible tours all over the world he has freely chosen to take along a notebook to allow him to create his online touring journal.

Recently Mark obtained a new device that he feels will allow him to eliminate several pounds of extra weight while still allowing him to complete his webpages while on the road.

Here's his report:

I started touring with an eight pound Winbook 'desktop replacement' notebook. After I beat that computer to death, I switched to Toughbooks which weighed as much, and weren't as fast, but were a lot sturdier. Last year I switched again to an iBook G4 which only weighed five pounds. Of course there was always another pound or two in cables, power supplies, etc. And of course my camera, batteries, and battery charger add at least another pound. Then there was the need for cushioning and pannier space to carry all that stuff which meant another couple of pounds. So, even with the ibook, doing web pages on tour added at least ten pounds to my load. Now I think I can get rid of that pannier, and reduce the total weight I have to carry for that purpose, to about three pounds.

The secret to this drastic drop in weight is my new laptop replacement; a Zaurus 6000L "Personal Mobile Tool." This is looks like a large PDA, but is really a very portable computer running Linux.

With the 6000L, a small usb keyboard and a couple of flash memory cards, I can do almost everything I have been doing with a laptop. Of course I can't do it quite as easily, but I am willing to make that trade off to save seven or eight pounds and one pannier.

The Zaurus 6000L has a 640x480, 16 bit color, display, which makes it usable for working with images from my camera, viewing web pages, and displaying text. It also has a usb host port which makes it possible for me to connect a usb keyboard for easy text entry. That same port can be used to transfer images from my Pentax 33L camera to the Zaurus. Or, if I don't want to use the Zaurus' usb port to transfer images, I can take the flash card from my camera and put it in the Zaurus's Compact Flash slot or its SD card slot. I can use the card in the other slot for storing my images. The CF slot can hold a MicroDrive if I need a lot of storage.

The Zaurus expansion adapter, which I also have, adds a second CF slot and a second battery. The second CF slot means I can copy from the CF cards my camera uses to a second CF card, or Microdrive, in the Zaurus. The extra battery means I will be able to tour for several days before needing to recharge the batteries. This is useful because my camera can also handle several days of touring before needing to be recharged.

Just being able to create html (using a text editor) and get images from my camera isn't enough. The Zaurus comes with the Opera web browser and a text editor which I can use to view and create web pages, but I also need to be able to reduce the size of images from my camera to fit on web pages, crop them, and rotate some images 90 degrees. Because the Zaurus runs a special kind of unix - an embedded version of Linux - I can do these things using "convert", a unix program, which is part of the ImageMagick suite of image processing programs. The Zaurus comes with libjpeg which convert uses to process jpeg image files - the kind of files created by my cameras, so convert only take about 250kB of memory. It is the only program I had to add to the stock Zaurus 6000 in order to be able to create my webpages.

Now I have a one pound device - two pounds with power supply, cables and keyboard - which I can carry in my handlebar bag and use on tour to create web pages and ride reports. How can I get those reports from the Zaurus to the web? Well, if there is a WiFi hot spot, I can use the Zaurus' built in 811b to connect and upload my stuff. If there isn't, I can transfer it, via the USB port, to my flash drive and mount that at an internet cafe. In the US, I could also use a CF modem to connect via phone line to an ISP.

If all this sounds too good to be true, maybe it is. Lets also consider the limitations of the Zaurus. First there is eye strain. The display is lovely, but only four inches diagonal, so things, although clear, are quite small. That makes extended use pretty hard on my eyes. The small usb keyboard I'm using with it isn't great either, since small and light were the highest priorities. Then there is the software. Opera is great, but using a text editor to do html isn't as easy as using a WYSIWYG html editor. Convert runs from the command line, so you better be comfortable with using one ;-}. None of this software is hard to use, but only Opera is "for the rest of us." Zauruses are great toys for geeks, but not so good for computer illiterates. Finally there is the performance.

The Zaurus uses an Xscale 400 MHz processor and only has 64 MB of RAM. It does quite an adequate job when editing (using the supplied text editor) and when displaying web pages (using Opera 7, the browser that comes with it), but, compared to what I've been using, the Xscale processor is very slow at image processing, so I've have to adjust my approach to image processing to work with the slower processor.

In the past, I've copied images to my computer, edited them individually using image processing software, and saved the edited image at a reduced size for web use. This year I plan to copy each day's images to the Zaurus, then run a simple shell script that invokes convert to create web sized images in the special directory where I'll create the page.

After I've created the text part of the web page, I'll do any final adjustments - cropping and rotating with convert - before adding links to the images to the page. Because I'll be working with small images, the limited processing power won't slow me down.

And a last, but quite major, problem. Right now (November, 2004), Zaurus 6000Ls are available for $500 from Amazon because Sharp has discontinued them. They were $700. The expansion adapter is $170. I don't know how long they will be available from Amazon, nor do I know when another manufacturer will have a PDA suitable for creating web pages while touring. That's why I bought my 6000L. That and the fact that it is such a neat geek toy!

Useful Zaurus 6000L Support page
Review of the Zaurus 6000L

Submitted by Mark Boyd

Mark contributed this web page to the Bicycle Touring 101 website but prior to doing so he created a similar page about this device using the Zaurus 6000L. As you can see he was able to create a very effective webpage.

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Copyright © 2004 - 2007James Noble All rights reserved.