Travel

Travel hints

When staying an a hotel room, I've found that a long RJ11 cable is critical. Another tactic is to have two medium length cables and a RJ11 female to female adaptor. This will allow you to setup your Butterfly on a table and be able to hook up to the phone by the bed without leaving tripwires for you (and the maid) to find.

It's good to have a complete selection of ethernet hardware. A 10BASE-T crossover is especially handy for hooking your Butterfly up to another laptop. Sometimes a small 10BASE2 (thinnet) is the way to go.

I like using a security cable to lock my Butterfly to a piece of furniture in the hotel room. Obviously it doesn't make the notebook theft proof but it prevents an opportunist from walking in and walking out with it.

Travel accessories

Here's a list of travel accessories:

Spare batteries
PCMCIA modem
PCMCIA ethernet
Long RJ11 cable
RJ11 female to female adaptor
RJ11 splitter
10BASE-T cable
10BASE-T crossover cable
RJ45 female to female adaptor
10BASE2 T's
10BASE2 terminators
Short 10BASE2 cable
Security cable

Car power adapters

IBM doesn't make a car adapter for the Butterfly. A DVM shows that the standard AC adapter puts out 16.5 VDC. Xtend Micro Products makes a nice one called the MicroBolt M307.

Note: The MicroBolt M307 is also works with the ThinkPad 560!

Toys

The best toy I've gotten recently is the DeLorme TripMate. It's a rs232 GPS receiver based on the Rockwell Zodiac chipset that also comes with the Street Atlas software that has all streets in the US. You can download sections of the map onto your internal disk but you need some kind of access to a CDROM drive.

According to a recent mailing, you can order it directly from DeLorme for $125 (plus $7 shipping) using the priority code BE110. The code also lets you upgrade from Street Atlas USA 4.0 to 5.0 for $25 ((plus $5 shipping). If you buy a TripMate, I recommend also getting the optional external power kit which lets you get power either from the mouse port or a car cigarette lighter socket. It's $39 but comes with the special jumper plug you need to convert your TripMate to accept power from the serial cable.

There's also a neat hack called tripmate.exe that lets you see where satellites are positioned in the sky.

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