Mac SEs in India

[marcus.banks at anthropology.oxford.ac.uk]

Responding to Tim Bryson's request: "A friend of mine plans to take a Mac
SE to India for a year..." [etc.], <aklujkar at unixg.ubc.ca> advises against
it and suggests a Mac PowerBook.

Frankly, I would advise against even this (especially if the budget does
not permit it) unless the friend really has to have Mac fancyness (eg.
non-Roman screen fonts), and I would certainly advise against the SE which
must be reaching the end of its little life anyway.

My planned option for overseas work, and already implemented by colleagues
on trips to India and Africa, is to buy a cheap palm top. So long as your
fingers are not too stubby you can do all the basic data entry you want (in
Roman script, admittedly), most of them run for hours on easily-available
AA batteries, and you can slip the smallest ones into an inside pocket for
security. A friend recently stored the manuscript of an entire book on a
solid-state memory card, revised it on a palm top in the field while also
entering new data, and downloaded the whole lot onto his Mac when he
returned home.

Marcus Banks, Oxford