What Do You Take On Your Laptop?

I’m writing this as I’m preparing my laptop for our trip.

My first two questions for a trip are: do I take the laptop and do I take the camera?

Both are rather bulky compared to the other items I would take with me, and both are by far the most valuable item I’d have.

For many trips, I leave them behind so I don’t have to worry about them. It can be easier to just enjoy things that way, and sometimes it’s nice to not have e-mail and Haskell available as distractions. I find myself doing things I wouldn’t otherwise be doing sometimes.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s nice to be able to have a secure way to check my e-mail on the road. (I never trust public machines/terminals, way too easy for them to become infected with spyware.) Sometimes it’s nice to have things to do, too. So here’s what I’m loading my laptop up with for this trip:

  • A full sid mirror, binary-only, for its architecture. I already have a copy elsewhere on the LAN, and I have enough spare disk space, so it makes sense. I always hate being stuck somewhere without a ‘net connection and really needing some package.
  • Several books, mostly from Project Gutenberg.
  • Updated recent checkouts of stuff from my darcs repository.
  • Maps, lists of free hotspots, and information about the cities I’ll be in
  • Current copies of my e-mail (via OfflineIMAP) and Usenet news (via newsx) to read/work with
  • Docs and references for GHC and any other programming tools that I might wish to use
  • Some MP3s
  • One CD-RW, in the drive, in case I need to exchange data with anyone

What does everyone else load up on their laptops?

3 thoughts on “What Do You Take On Your Laptop?

  1. David Lazar says:

    Hi, I’m facing a similar situation here, and I thought I might abuse your experience. ;-)

    So, I’m going to be offline for a while, and I wanted to have a local mirror of ‘testing’. I already downloaded it with “debmirror”, but I wouldn’t keep it on my harddrive, so I thought of writting it to DVDs.

    I’ve struggled with debian-cd (which apparently can’t make etch snapshots without a little hand-holding), and I’ve managed to get as far as “make list”, but “make bin-official_images” fails.

    So, my question is: is there a simple way of getting the archive on the DVDs, and make it accessible to apt? (I don’t need the DVDs to be bootable or anything). I’m just looking for some pointers, not a full-blown tutorial.

    Thank you very much in advance,
    -=[david]=-

    1. David Lazar says:

      Ok, I’ve finally managed to convince debian-cd into building the DVD images. Sorry if I’ve wasted your time.

      Keep up the good work!
      -=[david]=-

      1. jgoerzen says:

        No problem, but since I’m not terribly familiar with debian-cd, I had no ready answer for you. Thanks for the update.

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