Position – 10deg, 5min North; 131deg, 55min West. Cruising to Nuku Hiva

As I retired from a computer systems integration role at Lockheed Martin, I consider myself somewhat of a geek/nerd. Therefore, I will occasionally add technical information in my blog. So, here are the electronics joining me on my cruise:

• Mobile Phone: Motorola Nexus 6 with Android 7.1.1 (Nougat). It’s a bit dated, but since it is a Google Fi world phone and automatically jumps to known WiFi for talking, it does all I need for this cruise.
• Tablet: Samsung Galaxy Tab S2. Also a bit aged, but I only use it for reading. It’s stuffed full of Kindle books (I’ll talk about that later).
• Laptop: MSI GS65 Stealth. This is a gaming laptop. I bought a year of Adobe image software for this trip, so I wanted to ensure the PC had the power to work image and video renders. I won’t need it much, but there is the added bonus of the hand full of single-player video games I have stored on it. That will also be a separate post.
• Storage: Western Digital 4TB “My Book” external hard drive (USB 3.0). Laptop memory is very expensive, and I was worried about access to my home PC data. I didn’t trust cloud services while on the ocean, so I copied all my files on the external drive. This also gives me all the room I could possibly need for storing photography during the 4 1/2-month journey. Details about the camera will be yet another separate post.

The laptop used all the money I saved on the phone and tablet, but it is quite nice (good keyboard). The only strange this is I can’t open MS Office files by double-clicking on icons if the file is on the external drive – I have to open the software and then open the file from within the software. Spooky.