My Every Day Carry (EDC)

First up, let’s get it clear, I am not a crazy prepper.

I love my gadgets, and I like to keep them powered!

When some one first sees my Maxpedition Fatty and scoffs, it isn’t usually long before they are back asking if they can use my charger for their phone or do I have a screw driver they can borrow.

I have divided the kit for the purpose of this post into: Tools, Writing, Charging & Cables, Medical & Boo Boo, Wifi and Apple connectors.

In the past I have written before about the kit that I use for overseas travel, such as my iPad Mini in a waterproof LifeProof case along my iPhone 5 also in a LifeProof case.

I know looking at the picture above, it looks like a lot. I assure you, I use almost everything inside this case at least weekly.

So I will run through my different sub groups so you can see what I have:

Tools:

So what I have in this section is:

• A tiny Gerber Multitool. I use the straight blade to open boxes and I really like the spring opening pliers

• Stanley pocket screwdriver set – I like the former factor giving me 4 different heads (2 different sized phillips head, and 2 blade) all in a hard plastic pen body

• Streamlight Stylus Pro torch

• Small water tight container that contains some spare cash and a pair of needle nose tweezers

Writing:

Nothing is worse than needing to take a note, or leave a note such as in the recent case of our trip to Horse Gully Hut - I left an emergency note on our car’s dashboard so people knew were to look for us.

In my daily kit is the following writing items:

• Rite in the Rain spiral bound pad

• Space pen -Mate Black

• Maxpedition Trekker all weather pen

• The last item is a just a generic metal body black ink pen – looks less tactical.

Medical / Boo Boo kit

Firstly, I am sorry for this blurry picture, in this kit is enough things to just make me feel better, rather than cure the ills of the world.

It contains:

Tissues

Panadol x 2 tabs

An alcohol wipe

Gastro stop type pills or mouth dissolvable buttons

The only thing missing from this group is a bandaid that is normally folded inside the container

Now for the most used group of my kit

Charging & Connections

I am an apple boy, not a fanboy but an apple boy – The OS  does what I need.

By gosh does the iPhone and iPad mini chew the juice! Hungry little things.

The above includes:

A YellowStone short iPhone 5 lightning charger

Pebble Smart watch magnetic charger

Fitbit force usb charger

Small “BlueLounge Kii’ that I have shaved down to fit through the charging port of the LifeProof Fre case.

Griffin short usb connection cables – Mini, Micro and large apple connector

Plox 6000mAh usb external battery with inbuilt micro us charger

Belkin extension usb cable

USB power adapter from the iPhone 5s it’s small and easy to carry.

LifeProof Fre 3.5mm audio adapter so I can use headphones with the waterproof case on (the apple EarPods work without using any adapter)

Apple and Wifi converters plus USB and EarPods

Now this group is one that is not used as often, but when it does – it’s a real saver.

The first is the white USB stick - this is a Huawei E355s-2 - one of the most versatile HSPA+ modems I have ever seen. I picked this one up outright from Celcom in Malaysia.  I pop a sim in, plug it into anything with a  USB port - the battery above, the wall charger above etc and it creates a mini wifi network.

I am a massive Amaysim fan here in Australia, in essence they are a 4G reseller of the Optus network. I have 2 accounts with them - my phone is on the 49 unlimited plan - unlimited calls and sms (in AU) with 9gig oData.  The USB stick uses their $99 for 10gig (lasts 365 days or until 10 gig used).

I can not rate them highly enough.

Also above you can see the following

Apple micro USB to Lightning converter

30pin to lightning converter

30pin SD card reader

With three items above I can easily convert any USB micro cable to a lightning charger, I know people will be saying ‘but there is a lightning SD card reader’ yes - but it is longer - on a short cable. I like the compact nature of these 2 items.

EarPods - these fit inside the LifeProof Fre case without a converter

Sandisk 4gig USB stick with tiny micro light - cheap and nasty - about $5.

EDIT: Update March 2015

I have removed some items, either because they no longer work, or are no longer needed.

1. I have upgraded my phone to the iPhone 6 plus, with the Lifeproof Nuud case. Every Lightning cable other than the Apple provided one no longer fits inside the charging port so I have ordered a short genuine Apple cable (30cm)
2. The BlueLounge Kii is gone - see above
3. Fitbit Force replaced with the Fitbit Charge HR and matching cable
4. Plain metal black pen stopped working so was binned and not replaced

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DIY Charging Station

No doubt you have guessed I love my gadgets. The downside is they seem to breed, taking up more and more power points along with migrating to new habitat - beside the bed, beside the TV and the kitchen bench. While in a local home wares store on the weekend I noticed a faux leather desk organiser. With a power drill and some wood-boring drill bit, the pics show the result.

Now my Pebble watch, my Fitbit Flex, my iPhone, my iPad mini, iPod Nano, Bluetooth headphones, and battery packs along with their cables have a home. nice and tidy. I can even fit my 11in Macbook Air in the rear 2 spots.

So for around 20 bucks it is all neat and tidy.

New Toys

Since our last holiday a few new electronic toys have been added to my pack.

• We sold our 2 x GoPro 2s
  • Replaced them with 1 x Go Pro 3 black and 1 x Go Pro Silver.
• Sold our Spot Tracker
  • Replaced with a Delorme InReach 2 way GPS tracker / communicator
• My underwater point and shoot was lost during our trip to Penguin Island, off the Western Australian Coast.
  • Point and shoot replaced with a combination of my iPhone 5 (now in waterproof LifeProof Fre case) and my new Samsung NX1000 Mirrorless 2/3rd DLSR
• iPad 2 given to my partner as I updated
  • Updated to iPad Mini

A note for any one who uses @gopro and #iPads

As we are in the testing stage for our upcoming trip to Burma and Malaysia, I was testing our new GoPro3 Black on the weekend. It is planned that after we use our cameras (GoPro included) we would use our iPads as quick offload of photos and videos and then using FTP upload to our wireless HDD. I managed to procure a SanDisk 64GB Micro SDXC, knowing the battery on the GoPro would die long before the card was full.

All fine and well UNTIL I plugged the card into my iPad mini. You get the following errors “Contents Unavailable.  The connected storage media may be damaged” or “Contents not Available.  Cannot read the connected storage media.” which as you can imagine a pain in the bum. But glad to have found it out now.

I do have Micro SDHC and they don’t suffer from the same issues thankfully but they are only 16GB.

Here is some further info:

http://www.simondean.org/2012/12/gopro-hero3-ipad/

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