We love to travel and plan to do much more traveling in the future. Now that we run a small internet business, I’m much more aware of internet access on the road. A lot of people like me do their best work late, late at night when everyone else is asleep so it’s important to have a reliable, free connection in your room. Even though I tried to check (with varying degrees of effort), here are three problems I had just in the last couple of months.

Is The Listing Correct?

A hotel we stayed at during the summer was listed as having free WiFi. Well, they had WiFi but it definitely wasn’t free. They charged $13 per day for it. Ouch! They had a nice business center but even using their computers (or the ethernet jack) was almost as expensive. We couldn’t afford to pay that much so we went without for most of that trip.

Does It Reach Every Room?

One hotel said free WiFi and I verified that they had free WiFi. I guess I should have worded my question differently because not every room could get a signal. Apparently, there weren’t enough wireless routers to cover all of the rooms. Seriously. Unfortunately we got stuck without internet access that trip too.

Where Exactly Is The Free Internet Access?

Another place we stayed at did have free internet access but only in the lobby area. Getting it in the room was ridiculously expensive again. The lobby was super noisy at times and their access system was kind of screwed up. I had to log into their system every 5 minutes or so. It wouldn’t have been that bad but I used a lot of tabs in my browsers. I mean a lot. I would be working on something and click 6 or 7 links to open them in new tabs. When I’d go to those tabs, I’d find out they logged me off already. When I logged on again it wouldn’t redirect me to the page I wanted. So I had to start over with the tabs again. And over and over and over. It probably took me twice as long to get any work done because of that.

Questions I Ask Now

What we’re going to do now is called up each place before we book. We’ll ask them “do you have free WiFi?” Assuming they do then we’ll ask them “do you have free WiFi in all of the rooms?” Hopefully that avoids some of this but maybe we should also ask “how reliable is your free WiFi and internet access?”

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Glad I always have free WiFi at home.

Last year I wrote about attempting to run our internet business from a USB thumb drive while traveling and some of the struggles with that. After doing it for a bit, here are a few thoughts for anyone else who needs or wants to try it.

Pros

Carrying around and packing a thumb drive is extremely easy to do. Just stick it in a zipper pocket of your carry-on and you’re all set. They’re so small and easy to carry that it makes a lot of sense to have a spare or two in case something happens to one of them.

PortableApps.com makes it super easy to get special versions of most of the programs you need like Firefox and Gimp. They’re designed to install on and run from portable drives. They really help you save precious space with their smaller disk space requirements.

Unlike a laptop, I really never worried about someone stealing my thumb drive. I’m not saying that you should leave them laying around but it’s a much less attractive target than a brand new laptop.

The main reason we started down this route was because of the cost. It’s easy to get a USB drive for $10 these days. A laptop will cost at least a few hundred on the other hand.

Cons

Because they’re so tiny, I worried some about losing them. It wasn’t an issue but if you’re the type of person who misplaces your keys often then you might think twice about it.

The capacity gets larger and larger everyday but, when you’re a pack rat like me, it’s easy to hit those limits. My flash drive is 1GB and I struggled to fit everything I needed in that space. I need I should have paid extra for at least the 2GB drive.

Even though it says USB 2.0 doesn’t mean it’s going to be fast. That’s probably one of my biggest complaints with this whole thing. There are a few tricks that really help speed up Firefox (like turning off disk caching) but I still felt the productivity hit while my programs were stuck reading and writing the drive.

Do you love your Mac? Well, if you’re doing things from a thumb drive you’ll need to prep yourself to play in the PC world. Switching to Firefox and Thunderbird made it less painful but still… eww!

You’ll need access to a computer to make this work too. A lot of hotels have business centers but those can’t be pretty pricey. Your family and friends probably have a computer but those might be ancient. Some of the computers at the places where we’ve stayed were actually too old to use. Windows 98 anyone?

Even when you get a decent computer to use, the hours it’s available might stink. Most of my best work comes when other people are sleeping. That’s not the most optimal time to borrow your buddy’s computer that’s in their bedroom.

The last problem was syncing. It was kind of a pain in the butt. Firefox and Thunderbird both use profile directories that store all of your settings. That was handy but copying the files back and forth got to be a nuisance. There were times when I wanted to sync changes on my desktop with changes on my USB drive. Doing that is just a big mess.

Hello MacBook

We got this to work while traveling for several months and it wasn’t all that bad. 46′s computer sort of died, long story, so we decided to shell out the money for a laptop. I finally got my MacBook after all and I love it so far. I’m still using the thumb drive but it’s strictly an emergency backup now.

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Happily blogging from our new MacBook.

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Creating a portable work environment was one of our major motivations in starting an internet business. My main computer is a Mac desktop but I wanted a platform-independent setup for the times when only an internet cafe or a friend’s computer is available. I recently began experimenting with running the business remotely and ran into a few unique problems.

The first hurdle was switching from Mail.app to Thunderbird. All of our email accounts have web interfaces but I prefer using stand-alone applications. Creating the mbox files for Thunderbird from the .emlx files in Mail.app appeared to go smoothly using the instructions here (I also tried emlx to mbox converter). When I double checked the message counts, I realized that Thunderbird had fewer email messages for several of the mailboxes. It turns out the export does not correctly escape the “From” field. A page on Mac OS X Hints got me around that but it was a pain in the butt to do.

The second hurdle was importing my addresses from Address Book.app into Thunderbird. I used the instructions here to do that but lining up the fields took forever. In the end, I still had to do some hand-editing of the addresses to get everything correct. There is not a good way to keep the two lists in sync either.

The third hurdle was moving my passwords into Firefox. I already use Firefox regularly but only use my Keychain to store passwords and notes securely. I could not find a good way to import them (maybe there is one) so I had to manually go to each site and enter the information. A few sites did not ask to store them for some reason and I am still not sure why. A separate password manager tool with hooks into Firefox might work better (it would be perfect if it synced with my Keychain). Maybe Safari 3.0 would work as it becomes more stable?

The fourth hurdle was moving the profiles for Firefox and Thunderbird securely onto a USB flash drive. There is a fabulous program called TrueCrypt which creates encrypted volumes but, unfortunately, does not work with Mac OS X yet. For now, I am clumsily using SFTP to get around the lack of Mac OS X support in TrueCrypt. I installed smaller, portable versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, and a few other programs from PortableApps in the encrypted volume. I got this idea partially from a nice blog post here.

I am getting ready to use this setup for the second time. So far it works fairly well. I still need an automated way to sync the profiles between my Mac and the USB flash drive and am not quite used to using Thunderbird. Overall, this appears to be an inexpensive, viable alternative to purchasing a laptop. I would love to get a MacBook though

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How much is airfare to Europe right now? I need to find out soon. We could use a vacation to Spain to celebrate the big graduation of 46

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