We took a laptop along for a few reasons.
Firstly, I carried on working while we were there. All of our key business systems are based in the cloud, so this was a test of how effectively I could carry on working from anywhere on earth.
The answer – well ask the clients. Other than getting back to them with a seven hour delay, they couldn’t tell at all. This says a lot for mobile working and long holidays 😉
Second, I wanted to back up photos and videos from the cameras we took and to maintain a blog of the journey while I was there. That worked really well and made sure I had a backup – last time we did a journey like this, someone stole my video camera.
Third, I wanted to be able to do research and use the phone at the same time. Sometimes, you may need to be browsing the web as you call a hotel. This makes it much easier.
I took an 11.6″ ASUS touchscreen Windows 8 laptop with me with a decent battery. It worked an absolute treat. I also knew that if push came to shove, I could get a sim card and tether it to my iPhone to get internet access.
If you read the Skype section, you will know that I didn’t bother in the end. Wifi was perfect, so both the laptop and iPhone were separately connected.
Security
I tried to imagine what could go wrong and cover it in advance.
Encrypting files
Encrypting files is important, so I installed TruCrypt. This is free and can provide whole drive encryption or you can create encrypted folders to store files in. This was the only option for me as Trucrypt does not yet support Windows 8 fully. But it is in development.
I also used Boxcryptor to encrypt individual files at the recommendation of a friend. This works fine for important work files without encrypting an entire folder.
Securing your traffic
To connect to the internet from wifi hotspots opens you up to a wide variety of security nightmares, so I figured installing a Secure VPN would be a good idea. This would mean my internet traffic was just shared between me and the US government.
The VPN was a source of a few issues actually, though these may be specific to my laptop. At one point, I spent around 10-2 hours trying to sort it out in McDonalds and eventually discovered that it was disabling the DHCP server somehow. I have no idea what that means but closing down processes a few times, (they kept popping back up) and restarting programs before rebooting, eventually did the trick.
Once the VPN is up and running everything works perfectly including Skype, apps and all my cloud based stuff.
Securing your phone
The Secure VPN I chose also supports the iPhone so I configured it as per the instructions and it worked like a charm. Smartphones can do a lot of auto connecting to your favourite sites like Facebook and nasties like Facesniff and Firesheep can intercept this, so having this is a real must.