Hardware, software, teleware, etc.

Many people are asking how I manage to get all these pictures and reports on your superhighway doorstep. Well, it involves lots of CPUs. Which reminds me of that old quiz question: "How many electric motors do you have in your house". When you start counting, it easily gets above the onehundred! Nowadays you can ask a similar question about the number of CPUs. Even on this trip we are carrying at least three: the bicycle computer, my digital camera and the notebook I'm now typing on. And maybe I forget one or two.

But that are not all the computers involved to create and update this web-site. So, let's follow what hardware and software are used by me to write this report.

Digital camera

The images you see are taken with our Toshiba PDR-2 digital camera. A gadget as big as a pack of cigarettes. While biking, when I step off to take a picture, I often make two: one with our normal point-and-shoot camera and subsequently a digital image with the PDR-2.

The images are 640 x 480 in size and 24 of them can be stored on the flash-memory card in the camera. There is no flash or LCD screen, which is a big battery saver. One lithium battery lasts me about a month, where I take an average of 10-15 images per day.

Libretto notebook

The next but crucial element in the whole story is the tiny (pocket book size) notebook we carry along. A Toshiba Libretto 50CT. Powered with a 75 Mhz Pentium, with 32 MB RAM and 810 MB diskspace it runs Windows95 like any other desktop PC. It has a 9 inch 640 x 480 active matrix LCD display and a keyboard that is a bit smaller, but after some getting used to, I even use my old ten-finger typing on these small grey keys.

The computer comes with one PCMCIA slot which has for me a double function. Firstly I can put the digital camera into it. The operating systems sees the JPEG images as a D-drive, so using the normal Explorer I copy them from the camera to the computer. Secondly I use the slot for my modem card, a MegaHerz CC-XJ1336.

One of the biggest concerns with such a notebook "on the road", is finding opportunities for loading the battery. One charge lasts app. 1.5 hours and recharging takes 2-3 hours. So whenever we eat in a restaurant, I select the table based on the presence of a power socket. And when you are on a camping and see a small backpack next to the power-pole for caravans, again it's our notebook reloading.

Image editing

For editing the images I use PaintShop Pro version 4. I need it to reduce the image size to 320 x 240 for the web-pages and to 80 x 60 for the smaller icons. With PSP I also created the green/blue icon's and some other stuff. The map you see in the background was scanned from an atlas and then processed on a Linux system with PBM-Plus. Unfortunately I didn't bring the PBM-Plus tools for Win95 with me on this trip, because daily I do a huge amount of repetitive image-editing (like rotating vertical images) that on my usual Linux platform could have been automated easily.

I got compliments for the speed of getting all those images. This is how: First of all, keep the image sizes as small as possible. Next, use JPEG for photo's and GIF for drawings. For JPEGs try to compress as much as possible. I use at least 20 for images that are part of the trip-reports. For the GIF files, try to use the least possible number of bits-per-pixel. Default is 8, but 3 or 4 is often enough.

The animated graphics you see (the maps) are created with MS GifAnimator which is part of Frontpage. Again drawing the images with PSP is the biggest part of the work.

Web pages

All the web-pages are created by hand in HTML. The only thing I need is a straight forward editor (in my case Program File Editor) and a good memory of all the HTML-tags. When memory fails, there are luckily sufficiant people to help me out (Thanks, support group :-)!

My web-pages contain a lot of tables. That's the only way to position everything where you want it. I think that on the Fra Kapp A Cabo home-page the tables are nested five levels deep. A lot of formatting is also done with one-bit transparent images. If you want to know more about this, read the book "Creating Killer Websites". Amazon.Com will definitely have it in stock. To get the home-page circles rightly positioned on the background map, the trick I used was to create a page with only one single frame. That way you get rid of the margin problems. Are you still with me ... ?

On my notebook I keep a directory structure 100% identical to the one on the web-site. That way I can check all the links without the need of a connection to the Internet.

Web site

Which is the next element. That's the place where you get it all from. In my case www.schaik.com is stored at SimpleNet in the USA. They are my service provider. All pages and images are stored there as well as our e-mail.

Internet connection

Because we travel through many countries, I also need a way to connect to the Internet, of course with the lowest telephone costs. For that reason I have taken a Compuserve subscription, because they have dial-in numbers in all the countries we travel through. Here in Norway I just call Oslo, but in other countries I hope local calls will be enough.

So the procedure is as follows: after editing the images and writing the stories in HTML format, I ask the camping owner if I can use his phone for a call to Oslo. When permitted (until now, nearly always), I call Compuserve (with Win95 dial-in networking), which gives me the TCP/IP connection I need. Then I start FTP (I use WS-FTP95) and make a connection to my server at Simplenet. Then I upload all the new images and text files.

When I have done that, you can use your normal web-browser to get it all from my server in the USA. Even when I'm not connected.

E-mail

For e-mail I use Eudora as a client program. My e-mail server is again located at Simplenet in the USA. So before or after uploading all the web-pages I download the new e-mail waiting for us (keep it coming ...).