It was only a couple of years ago that the only way to have a decent navigation, communications and entertainment system in an overland vehicle was to either 1) buy 3 separate and non-integratable systems or 2) install a laptop (or with much more effort a ”carputer”). We’re lucky today, in the simplest fashion we can throw a phone in a cup-holder and have all three.

For the compact overland vehicle, a tablet is the best option. Not only are they cheaper and more flexible than laptops and carputers, but they offer higher security (you can grab it and take it with you), they easily integrate with the vehicles audio system, they are light and easily mountable, they are relatively inexpensive, there are hundreds of decent apps (and many more that are awful!) and the touch interface is easy to operate.

While there seem to be an endless amount of tablets on the market, and in-line with ”Sturgeon’s Law”, many of them are awful. For practical purposes I’d suggest that there are only 4 tablets worth considering, and 2 on those are of the 10” form factor and therefore I reject them as being too large (though if you have a larger vehicle, they may work for you).

• Apple iPad (9.7” display at 2048x1536 at 264 ppi, aspect ratio 4:3, dimensions 242x186x10mm)
• Apple iPad Mini (7.9” display at 1024x768 at 163 ppi, aspect ratio 4:3, dimensions 200x135x8mm)
• Google Nexus 10 (10.1” display at 2560x1600 at 300 ppi, aspect ratio 16:10, dimensions 264x178x9mm)
• Google Nexus 7 (7” display at 1280x800 at 216 ppi, aspect ratio 16:10, dimensions 199x120x11mm)

I’m using the Nexus tablets as generic Android tablets, feel free to substitute your favourite Android tablet.

The 4:3 aspect ratio is ideal for driving. While there are a few Android devices with this aspect ratio, the majority of them are no-name brands with the baggage that brings.

So, even though the iPad Mini has a lower resolution and ppi than the Nexus 7, it’s still a better tablet for in-vehicle us. It’s not the amount of pixels - it’s where they are. The 4:3 aspect ratio utilises the screen in a way that is better for the touch targets, and is better for mapping and navigation apps (as you can see more “ahead”) - which is likely to be the primary use of the device.

Of course, you are giving up some resolution - hopefully that’ll be fixed later in 2013 if the rumoured Retina iPad Mini is released.

My setup consists of the following:

Apple iPad Mini Wifi+Cellular (Verizon) 64GB
Google (LG) Nexus 4 16GB Unlocked GSM phone (on a T-Mobile $30 per month unlimited data plan)
Short Monoprice cables, for neatness
RAM Mount RAM-HOL-AP12U iPad mini cradle (the X-Grip RAM-HOL-UN8BU isn’t solid enough for off-highway use) - replaced by RAM-HOL-AP14U
Other RAM mount components for the dash
RAM Mount RAM-HOL-UN7BU X-Grip holder for phone

TL;DR, the iPad Mini is currently the best tablet on the market for an overland vehicle as 10” tablets are too large, and it has a 4:3 aspect ratio.

UPDATE: Sold in April 2013

Regrettably, I’m putting up my Dormobile up for sale. It’s a great base vehicle that’s in pretty good condition for a 41-year-old, but I’ve realized that I’m not going to have the time to perform the restoration I would love to do.

That said, it doesn’t need a full restoration. Put a couple of $k into it, and you’ll have a very useable weekend vehicle, as long as you don’t plan to drive 80 mph everywhere.

It’s a rare 2.6l 6 cylinder Series IIA, and also unusually it’s a 1972 Series IIA as it was registered in the UK after the Series III became available. It’s spent most of it’s life in South Africa, and I discovered it in Nevada in 2008. It’s a Right Hand Drive vehicle.

It comes with everything Dormobile, yes, including the kitchen sink! The only thing that’s missing is the rear-door table. They may be available from Dormobile in the UK, who still supply a lot of the original Dormobile parts.

It’s drivable, but recently developed a leaky petrol tank. The brakes need some work also, as they are currently more entertaining than I like… Get those fixed and give it a good service and you’re good to go.

There’s lots more info on my website - http://www.nickt.com/dormie, and there are lots of photos in the gallery. The original specs and the BMIHY (“Gaydon”) Certificate are also available. You can download a PDF mini-brochure too.

The Dormobile has a clear Colorado title and is currently in storage in Golden, CO. Please send me an email if you’re interested and would like to find out more. I’m open to offers around $12,000.

If you’re after a Land Rover Defender in the US, here’s an idea. It’s possible to pickup a used one in the UK or Europe (which of course may have fared better away from the UK’s salty and humid atmosphere, and will also be left-hand drive), which now in 2013 means you’re looking for a 25 year old truck (1988 or older) to conform with the NHTSA requirements. Clearly, anything that old will need a restoration, and the older engines are a bit anemic. Why not swap out the engine while you’re on?

Later in 2013, Ford introduces the replacement for the Econoline series of vans. Bringing the US into line with the rest of the world, the love of ”White-Van Man”, the Transit will arrive as a 2014 model with petrol and diesel engine options - we’re interested in the diesels, particularly the 3.2 5 cylinder diesel.

In the rest of the world, it’s a ”Duratorq”, though in the US it’ll be branded as a Powerstroke. It’s a nice engine with about 200 horsepower and 300 torques, it’s built in Ford’s engine factory in Port Elizabeth, RSA, shipped to the US and popped in the Transits in Kansas City.

This engine clearly has to meet all the current and near-future emissions regulations. To meet these regulations, the US version of the engine will have a selective catalytic reduction system (probably a urea reductant) to reduce nitrogen oxides. It’ll run on B20 and well as ULSD.

Now the Duratorq line of engines is better known in Land Rover circles as the “Puma”, and the 2.4l and 2.2l are used in Defenders from 2007-2011 and 2011-on respectively. These engines are part of the “ZSD” line, as is a certain 3.2l inline 5 turbodiesel currently used in the Transit around the world, and about to arrive in the US as the 3.2 Powerstroke in the 2014 transit…

And the good news? These engines fit in a Defender. Bell Auto Services in the UK have fitted a 250hp (which is about 150hp more than my 300 Tdi) into a Defender 90. Twice. Nene Overland are also offering the engine in their iCON range. Beef up the transmission with the MT-85 manual gearbox or a ZF autobox and you’re good to go.

A fully restored, US-legal Defender with a 200+ hp EPA approved engine? Sign me up!

After discovering the Lee gives a fright video sitting on my computer, I did some digging and found the photos from our Southern Africa trip in November 2002.

A few years ago we did an extended trip around Botswana and Namibia. Sitting around the campfire, we started to tell ghost stories - beware the dark!

Lee gives a fright from Nick Taylor on Vimeo.

I’ve spent some time in the Sahara, but never been to Chad. The Ennedi Plateau looks like a place well worth exploring.

If you’re looking for towers to climb, check out this video produced by Camp 4 Collective for The North Face. Fantastic location, climbing and filming.

Towers of the Ennedi from Camp 4 Collective on Vimeo.

Baked Blogs - not for everyone…

I’ve neglected this blog over the past year or so, and all of the infrastructure. nickt.com was hosted with Media Temple (mt), and a great job they did too. Solid uptime, great communications and extremely responsive customer service (on the rare occasions I had to call upon them for support). However, it was costing me over $600 a year, and while at one time that was ok, my needs have changed and I no longer need a dedicated VPS and complicated hosting.

I’ve used Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in the past, but as I was using it to backup gigabytes of photos and videos it started to get expensive and I stopped using it. However, it seemed an ideal place to stick a blog as it’s storage requirements are modest. S3 buckets can be setup to serve static content, which is an ideal way to move away from the complexity of mysql and PHP.

Last week, reading Hacker News I can across Matt Gemmell’s article on Octopress and was inspired to get to a baked blog, and read a few more articles. I quickly setup S3 but the time-consuming part was setting up my client Mac with the Git/Ruby/Jekyll/Octopress environment. Here’s how I did it:

1. Installed the latest Xcode from the App Store.
2. Installed Macports.
3. Installed git from Macports.
4. Setup git.
5. Ruby Version Manager from Macports won’t install on OSX Lion so I installed homebrew.
6. Installed wget from homebrew.
7. Installed RVM from homebrew.
8. Installed Ruby 1.9.3 (the version OSX 10.7.2 ships with is 1.8.7 and Octopress needs 1.9.x).
9. Installed (cloned) Octopress from github.
10. Installed the Ruby Gem Bundler.

And that got it installed on two of my Macs. I have the slightly scary setup of using Dropbox to sync across my Macs, and the git repositories are in Dropbox. As I’m the only editor, and the files are small (so very fast syncing), I don’t think it’ll be a problem.

Migrating posts from Wordpress

Now this was trickier. There are basically two options. Use the database and run some sql and hopefully everything will be converted from HTML to markdown. You can read about that here and here or dump the XML from Wordpress and run the exitwp script. There is also a forked version of exitwp.

Initially I couldn’t get the script to work. I found a hint here, and that helped me make the following changes:

parallax:exitwp nickt$ git diff

diff --git a/exitwp.py b/exitwp.py
index 4dd9c83..0aeb6bb 100755

def html2fmt(html, target_format):
-    html = html.replace("\n\n", '<br>')
-    if target_format=='html':
-        return html
-    else:
-        # This is like very stupid but I was having troubles with unicode encodings and process.POpen
-        return html2text(html, '')
+    #html = html.replace("\n\n", '<br>')
+    #if target_format=='html':
+    #    return html
+    #else:
+    #    # This is like very stupid but I was having troubles with unicode encodings and process.POpen
+    #    return html2text(html, '')
+       return html

And after removing that chunk of code I had all of my Wordpress posts ready to move to my new Octopress blog. That said, not everything is clean. Not only are there some formatting errors but not all of the HTML was converted to markup. But, with all the files in a format that mostly works, I can clean them up at my leisure, though if it never happens it doesn’t matter…

Now all I have to do is write more.

Desert Camping

I like camping in the desert.
The Defender is the best way to get there…

There has been a lot of chatter this week about iPhone location tracking. I downloaded the iPhoneTracker app to take a look. This app finds the latest backup on your Mac, and pulls the lat/long data and presents it on a zoomable map.

Here’s my results:

I noticed something I didn’t expect. I have a Verizon iPhone and I don’t take it when I travel internationally. The points you can see on the map in Europe and Central America come from data collected from my last GSM-based iPhone 4. When I moved to the new phone, I did a backup and restore.

So if you do this, the consolidated.db data contains location data from all your iPhones, not just your current one.

I’ve used an Iridium satellite telephone for years. It’s an insurance policy - I travel all over the world, and to remote areas in the US and having the ability to have simple and reliable two-way communications is worth the $40 per month standing charge (and about $1.50 per minute).

Iridium uses a constellation of 66 operational satellites in low Earth orbit, and is the only satellite telephone communications company that gives complete global coverage, even at the poles.

My handset, a Motorola 9505, is large, bulky, heavy and slow - it’s starting to show its age. After a software upgrade a few years ago, it’ll now send SMS messages and emails, and there is also a data connection kit (with a DB-9 serial connection), though at a maximum of 2.4kbps, it’s barely usable and once I had the ability to send SMS messages and emails, I gave up using it.

I put up with both the age of the handset and almost $500 per year of standing charges as there were no other options (other providers didn’t give the coverage I require).

Lately, however, Inmarsat, a well-know satellite communications company unveiled their new satellite phone, the IsatPhone Pro. It’s still like a cell phone from the year 2000, but it’s lighter, faster and more compact than the Motorola 9505. It uses the Inmarsat 4 constellation of satellites, 3 birds in geosynchronous orbit to give almost global coverage (the exception being the polar regions). These are the same satellites that provide the BGAN service.

As well as the phone being better, the service is also cheaper - the basic service is $20 per month, so it’s half the cost of the Iridium service.

This convinced me to get one. In July 2010, you can find brand new ones for around $500.

My quick testing shows that it performs well, though as I’ll only ever be in the footprint of one satellite (and you get the best service if you point the antenna at the satellite - so you need to have a general idea of where it is), the coverage in more challenging areas (canyons, forest, etc.) may not be as good as the Iridium network.

Out of the box it comes with the ability to send both SMS messages and emails, and has a built-in (Navstar) GPS, from which you can email position data (a fantastic feature from a safety and security perspective). Sending and receiving both SMS messages and emails is speedy, with a delay of just a few seconds between sending and receiving.

In summary the IsatPhone Pro is better, faster and cheaper than the Iridium/Motorola 9505. I’m liking it so far, and I think it’ll make satellite phone ownership available to more people.

Recommended. Field testing from Central America coming up soon!