Well today I leave for a week & half long camping trip with my wife, smartphone, and trusty MacBook Pro. Although I don’t anticipate needing my computer or smartphone for business use, I figured it might be fun to bring a little tech into the world….. We’ll see how my wife feels about that when I get there. So I thought I’d write up an article on the gotta have tech tools you can carry with you while your in the wild.

Shozu me what your doing!
First in my arsenal has to be twitter.com. Beyond being a tool to keep people informed of the big question, “What are you doing?” this could very well be used as a necessity of survival if one were to be trapped in an area that still had cellphone coverage but for some bloody reason you can’t make a phone call. Ok, it’s not that much of a survival tool, but a great way to let friends and family know what your up to out there. And for a guy who hates to tell the same story over and over, If someone chooses to follow me during this trip, I might just save myself a 20 min conversation where I have to relive my trip to someone who honestly doesn’t really care anyway….hmmm, that does sound like a survival tool. However there is one large drawback to twitter.com, other then the fact that it goes dark more then London during WWII. How am I going to take pictures and post them to twitter without access to a computer? Well I have an option! Enter Shozu! Install this little guy on your cellphone and now you can take pictures on your camera phone and post them directly to twitpic.com which then creates a twitter with a link to your hosted picture! To the left is a twitpic I recently sent after finishing the dangerous job of loading my car full of more junk then I ever thought I needed. Now we are really only scratching the surface of what Shozu can do, you can connect your blogs to it so you can post from your phone, yeah that sounds like fun, maybe if I had monkey size hands! Post images to your blog, which I have personally used while attending the Kansas Republican Caucus. You can also use Shozu to update your Facebook status, yea like your not already using twitter to do that…. Or just see what your friends are twittering about. In addition to posting pictures to your flickr, picasa account, and a ton of other sources.

Where ever you are, there you are!
Next up is your wrist watch… I know who carries one of those these days… Well in a pinch you can draw one out, and use your cellphone clock to draw on the hour hand. So the key to this survival tech tool is to hold your watch horizantally so the face of the watch is facing your face. Line the hour hand up to where the sun is at. So right now it’s 1:05pm. So I’ll allign my watch so that the hour hand points to the location of the sun. Then mentally draw a line that is halfway between the 12 o’clock hour and the hour hand of your watch. For me that would be directly between 12 and 1. This is your North South line. In the Northern Hemesphere North is going to be the direction on that line that is furthest away from the sun, while in the Southern Hemisphere it’s going to be the end of the line that is closest.

Now to determine your location! If you have a map, pinpoint two physically noticable landmarks in your line of sight and note their degree heading from you, now that you know which way North is (hint: compass is set on a 360 degree scale, North being 0 or 360, while South is 180, East being 90, and West being 270) Draw a straight line from the first landmark with the same degree heading you just noted. Now repeat this step with the second landmark, where they intersect is where you are at!

This isn’t an exact science, but it’s going to get you very close to the North line. Keep in mind this tech tool fails on a cloudy day, so I wouldn’t recommend it as your only Navigational tool. Sure a GPS would be a far easier method and would help out tons more. But, what fun would that be!

McGuiver would be proud!
This last one isn’t so much tech related as it is just very cleaver! I recent was reading in the SAS Handbook of different survival techniques. They mention taking a lighter and wrapping it in 6ft of Duct tape. Your going to need a lighter to start your fire, and in just in case your in need of a McGuiver fix, you’ve not got 6ft of duct tape that takes up a lot less space then the bulky roll you bought at the Hardware store.

Well I’d like to keep posting on this topic, but truth be told I gotta run! it’s time to get camping. If your interesting in following my adventures in the Blackhills be sure to follow me at twitter.com/jamesedwards or at jim.edwardsdesign.org.