New Fun Blog – Scott Bilas

This has been on my mind a lot lately so I wanted to take a detour and write it up.

Ally and I decided to move to Peru to live for six months (her blog talks about who/what/when/where/why/how). I would have preferred a year but Ally’s got to go to school in the fall, so six months it is.

My boss Matt at Loose Cannon is super awesome and instead of firing my ass he decided to try to make it work. He gave me a very long term mostly research and prototyping project to create our next gen animation system. Intimidating as hell but cool. That means I don’t absolutely need to be online all the time.

Matt does want me to continue doing code reviews on our game if possible. This requires a fast turnaround to avoid blocking checkins for too long, especially as we get close to shipping. So it’s preferable if I can be online during normal work hours or at least a window of time during each weekday. Peru is 3 hours ahead of Seattle so that means I can go see pyramids in the morning and still get online and working by normal Seattle core office hours.

Anyway, I’ll be working remotely for six months. We’ve already passed through four hostels in three towns, and have finally gotten a real apartment in the comfy Yanahuara district of gorgeous Arequipa. We’ll do extended-weekend trips every couple weeks (which means working on buses to/from) and then move up to Trujillo in a few months. Lots of mobility required and it can’t interfere with my work. I really do have to keep a regular schedule.

This brings up several super important requirements, which I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and working on.

1. Data and hardware must both be secure. If I can’t work because my laptop was stolen or I had a hard drive crash, then I lose a lot of time.
   • Our personal data must also be secure. As we’re managing all of our finances online now, we can’t afford passwords and credit card info and such to get out.
   • I also have to figure out a way to work with Ally’s, um, let’s say “lack of interest” in security.
2. I need at least periodic access to the internet so I can check in at work through the VPN. This means stealing wi-fi, buying cell-based broadband, plugging in direct, or using sketchy public computers at locutorios.
3. For longer term, I need a comfortable work environment. It’s still 40-50 hours a week, remote or not. Can’t work hunched over every day at the carpal tunnel festival. But I’m not bringing a whole office with me, it’s got to be small and light.

I’ll probably talk about #2 and #3 at some point but next I want to talk about travelling securely. At least, what has been working well for us.

Posts in this series:

• Working Remotely (current post)
• Travelling Securely
• Keeping Physically Secure
• Keeping Portable Data Secure

I’ve been winding down all the stuff at work and home in prep for moving to Perú. Going dark for a bit until I can find an stable internet down there.

Back in a few weeks!

Keeping Mobile

Ally and I are going to be in Peru for six months next year. We want to be pretty mobile so that means two things: we need to take a minimum of stuff, and what we do take should be as small and light as possible. By “minimum” I mean that we should only take down what we can’t find there easily. Electronics tend to be insanely marked up in foreign countries over what we pay in the US, due to duties and such, so it makes sense to take those with us.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about electronics lately. Backup hardware, backup hard drives, encryption in case anything is stolen, etc. I’ll power or charge everything on USB that I can, because USB bricks are easy to find and not too expensive. I have little retractable cables for charging my iPod, PSP, DS, and phone using USB. We’re also taking my friend Joel’s Wii down because it’s so portable, and using a USB video capture card to use a notebook computer screen in place of the TV. All of this plus three notebook computers (one for her, one for me, one for a backup) and a couple cameras should all fit within a small backpack.

Now, the three computers sure sounds like overkill but I want to get paid while I’m down there! I need to make sure I have a backup computer to work on if anything goes wrong with my old Vaio. And I already have a Band-Aid keeping it together right now. Plus, the third notebook is something I happen to have laying around from years ago that I currently just use for hosting Firefly and Bittorrent.

But anyway, back to Peru. Who can go without music playing while they’re working?? Earphones get tiring after a while and it’s no fun when Wii-boxing! Ally’s computer has better speakers than mine, but they’re still too tiny to sound decent.

The BlackBox Mini

Well, I just got a fantastic toy in the mail today that I want to recommend because I’m a little in love with it. Even caused me to want to write a blog post about it. It’s the GEAR4 BlackBox Mini. I had to import it from the UK using Expansys, which took a while, but it was worth the wait. I forget where I got the recommendation, but I did a bunch of research on Google before settling on this guy.

The BlackBox Mini is a little stereo speaker box that looks like a really big black shiny stick of butter. Each speaker is at one end of the stick, which gives pretty good stereo audio separation. It’s powered by either 4 AA’s or USB, and it runs on either Bluetooth using A2DP or a direct minijack plugin if you want to run it on your iPod or whatever. It gets plenty loud either way you power it.

Getting it to work with Vista was pretty easy. Vista only initially saw it as a mono audio device, claiming it couldn’t find the right drivers for audio. But when I went to the device manager and manually told it to auto-update the drivers for the unknown Bluetooth devices, it magically found them and everything worked. Weird, but whatever.

Now, I don’t want to set it as the default system output device but lots of apps (like Winamp) let you choose a specific output device, which works great. I have to stress that the audio quality is truly excellent for something of this size. An order of magnitude better than our little built-in notebook speakers or any of the battery-powered portable speakers I’ve used in the past. This thing could do pretty well even at house parties. It sounds far bigger than it is.

The BlackBox Mini even comes with a nice little carrying case. It’s a bit stretchy, which is great because you can pack the little minijack cable and the USB cable in there easily. I also tore out the three pages of the manual that I might need one day and stuck it in the case too.

This thing will be great for car camping, staying at a cabin, or renting apartments in Peru. We don’t have any room to bring real speakers with us, and our notebooks have (relative) crap for speakers. But I really like what BlackBox has been making. Lots of power in a small package!

As I write this, I noticed that they just came out with a Micro version for half the price. This looks a little too small for me: no stereo, apparently, although it may have better bass than the Mini. I prefer stereo over bass. Although the price is something I would have definitely considered. The Mini set me back $75 unfortunately, which is pretty high.

But overall, a huge thumbs up. I’m excited to use this thing down there!