Where’s the peanut butter?!

Yahoo! Tanya and I ordered tickets yesterday for Morocco. We’ll be
there for the second half of June (leaving a month from yesterday)
visiting her sister who’s there with the Peace Corps until the end of
this year. I’m really looking forward to this trip - our itinerary
takes us in to Agadir after about 19 hours in the air.

For the trip I’ll be looking for a portable mass storage device to
dump pictures on to. It looks like the best option right now might be
the href="http://www.apacer.com/apacer_english/product_html/share_steno_cd211.asp">Apacer
Share Steno CD211 (USB OTG laptop enclosure) but there are many
other options listed href="http://fhoude34.free.fr/PortableHD.htm">here. I’m skeptical
about getting into this market because I know there are many choices
that are either overpriced or complete junk, but a number of people
have good things to say about that Apacer on the href="http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1023&message=13071860">dpreview
forums. Also I love the idea of having a USB OTG enclosure. USB
On-The-Go means I should be able to bring more music for my iRiver,
and the enclosure means I don’t kick myself a year from now when I’d
really like a bigger capacity device but can’t upgrade.

UPDATE 2005.05.19 On portable media storage

Damn this turns out to be complicated! There are a couple options:

• dedicated backup device - there are many dedicated flash to
  hard drive backup options. These have the drawbacks of being pretty
  inflexible for the price, from no-name vendors, and (apparently)
  really flaky. Reviews come out touting how great Portable Storage
  Device X from Manufacturer Y is, then two days later people get the
  device and learn the battery life is awful, or the device doesn’t
  work, or it doesn’t work like someone had wanted.
• USB On-The-Go enclosure - there are many of these, too, but
  they also have a number of problems. Primarily, the state of href="http://www.usb.org/developers/onthego">USB OTG seems to
  suggest that hi or even full-speed USB OTG devices may not really be
  on the market yet. USB 1.1 is really impractical. Then, many USB OTG
  devices don’t seem to provide enough juice to power USB devices. For
  instance I read complaints about the Apacer device I mentioned that if
  it’s running on battery power, not AC, it can lose pictures when
  transferring!

The power for external devices issue seems to be the reason that
iRiver axed formal support for USB OTG in their US release of the h300
series players. Evidently if you upgrade it to the Korean firmware
(which, I hope, has an English UI language option…) you get the USB
OTG functionality, but if you want to use it to access a keychain USB
drive, for instance, you need to hook up some hack with a spliced USB
cable that piggybacks in a battery pack with a bunch of AA’s so you
can power the jump drive/card-reader/whatever.

Why can’t this just work?

I’ve known a couple of my cousins were living in Tibet for a while but
not really had a good sense what they were doing until today. My
sister forwarded me a catalog from the href="http://tibetcraft.com/">Tibet Artisan Initiative (TAI) where
I see Matt McGarvey is on their href="http://tibetcraft.com/who_we_are_07.html#TAI_Family">meet us
page. The TAI was created as part of the Tibet Povery Alleviation
fund towards the goals of:

1. Alleviate Poverty: Assist Tibetan entrepreneurs to increase
   production capacity and revenue, and in turn create new forms of
   employment.
2. Incubate creativity & entrepreneurship: Provide product
   development, marketing, and business education to Tibetan
   entrepreneurs in order to increase the competitiveness of Tibetan-made
   merchandise, while assisting Tibetan entrepreneurs in developing
   greater market access and market share.

Cool!