Amy Scott sightseeing

This Week in Nomadtopia

July 26, 2011 |

Here in Nomadtopia, I’ve been hard at work (or hardly working? depends on the day). I’m going to be relaunching my editing business with some new offers and a spiffy new website.

In case you missed it, the other day I posted a list of 7 Steps to a Life of Travel. In the coming weeks I’ll be doing a longer post on each step, so stay tuned for those tips and resources on how to put all the pieces together to create your ideal travel-centric life.

As usual, I’ve been encountering lots of interesting resources and information recently. My new favorite thing is Boomerang, a plugin that works within Gmail. You can set it up to send a message back to your inbox if the person doesn’t respond (so you can follow up), or to send messages later. This is a great feature for someone like me who sometimes works crazy hours or is in different time zones than friends, family, and clients—this way I can compose messages when it’s convenient for me, but schedule them to be sent at a time that’s more convenient to the recipient (or that doesn’t reveal that I’m responding to work email at midnight—ahem, not that I ever do that!).

Besides Boomerang-ing lots of emails, I’m researching laptop computers and other things I need to buy while I’m back in the States (electronics are very expensive in Argentina!). Things have certainly changed since I bought my first laptop almost six years ago, and I’m really excited about having a faster computer with ~six times more space on the hard drive! I’ve been pretty lucky with my trusty Toshiba Satellite, and since the new computer will accompany me through many more adventures, I’m looking for the best balance between weight, size, durability, performance, and price. Any tips are more than welcome!

There are certainly other technological concerns for road warriors as well, including data backups and security. Here are two interesting resources that I’m planning to try out: Prey, an open-source project that allows you to track your laptop’s location and disable certain features if it’s stolen—cool! The other is Crash Plan, which looks like an affordable solution for unlimited cloud storage and backup. I love Dropbox and Sugar Sync, but this looks like a better choice if you have a lot of data you need to back up. If anyone has experience with either of these, I’d love to hear more.

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