Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every story thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter and pencil markings endure longer than memory. –Jack London
The less technology your life requires the better your life will be.
That’s not to say technology is bad, but I encourage you to spend some time considering the technologies you use and making sure you choose the things you use rather than accepting everything marketed at you. Also remember that every technology has trade offs and unintended consequences. There is no win-win, it’s always a trade off at best.
This is not my idea. I stole it from the Amish. The Amish have a reputation for being anti-technology, but they’re not. Try searching for “Amish compressed air tool conversion” if you don’t believe me. The Amish don’t rush out and get the latest thing, that much is true. They take their time adopting any new technology. They step back, detach, and evaluate new technology — what benefits does it have? What drawbacks does it have? They are actually more engaged with technology than you and I, and this allows them to make better-informed decisions about which technologies to use and which to avoid.
That’s what I try to do. I take my time. If a technology is good today, it’ll be good five years from today. And I am always trying to get by with less, if for no other reason than this stuff costs money. Still, for better or worse. Here are the main tools I use in building this site and living on the road.
Writing
My primary “device” is my notebook. I have two notebooks. One is called a Traveller’s notebook. It’s refillable. The other is smaller and it lives in my pocket at all times and is filled with illegible scribbles that I attempt to decipher later. I usually write with a pencils because I like to erase things. The Pentel P209 with .9mm lead is the best pencil ever made.
I type in Vim on a Dell XPS laptop running Arch Linux, which I have written about elsewhere. I mostly use command line apps and store data as much as a I can in plain text files because these are the simplest things to work with (for me).
Photography
I use a Sony A7RII with a Voigtländer 40mm lens. I also have a Sony 16-35mm with autofocus that I use mainly for video, and I have an old manual focus Nikon 85mm f/2.8 lens that I hardly ever use, but is ostensibly my portrait lens. For the portraits I never take. I also have a Nikon FE2 loaded with either Tri-X or T-Max 3200. I don’t use it much because shooting and developing film has become ridiculously expensive, but the FE was my first “real” camera and I do love it.
I also have a couple action cameras that I use for video.
I like to record ambient sound. I use an Olympus LS-10 recorder, which has the lowest noise floor I can afford (it was $100 on eBay). I use a couple of microphones I made myself and occasionally a wireless Rode mic.
And there you have it. I am always looking for ways to get by with less, but after years of getting rid of stuff, I think I have reached something close to ideal.