TechNomadic – Living in the Wild

Long Story short, my family of 4 hasn’t travelled internationally since the pandemic. So, now we’re on the road internationally.

Deciding to leave the cushiness of MSFT at the end of 2022 left me free to pursue my own adventures. With that comes the freedom of not being tied to one single geography. I mean, I moved to the Pacific Northwest in the first place, to join MSFT in 1998, then stayed, and returned for 24 years. With new kids in tow, the anchor is always something on the lines of “but the kids are in school…”. It took quite a while, but I was inspired by a neighbor to just hit the rod. That neighbor has 3 kids under the age of 10, and they’re doing “Semester At Sea”. We’re not doing that particular program, but I was inspired enough by their example to say “It’s ok to take kids out of school when they’re young. We can ‘home school’ on the road and give them great lifelong experiences to boot”.

So, here we are.

I have blogged and video’d about “what’s in my tech bag”, but here I’ll give a little rundown of what it takes to run a little tech rodeo from the road.

I can’t totally ignore the family’s tech needs, so I’ll throw some of that in here.

First off though, is a universal charger. an absolute MUST. I did a whole video on this, but basically, you need something that has universal plug adaptability.

Chargers/Adapters/Batteries

EPICKA Universal Travel Adapter, GaN 75W

That’s the one that I have. It can plug into any outlet in the world, and provides 75W of charging, which is good enough for any of the devices that I’m carrying. Maybe I would get an even beefier one, but weight consideration does come into the picture a bit. What’s super important here is the cabling. Of course if you have various Apple tech, you need the puck, for the watch, a lightning cable, if you’re still dragging around anything earlier than iPhone 16, and a USB-C for everything else. If you get an iPhone16, or any Android device, then USB-C is the main thing. Getting the right cable though, makes all the difference in the world. You want one of those cables that’s capable of negotiating the smart charging rates with the charger. Forget about the $5 cable you can get a 3 pack of. Go ahead and spend the $30 on a really good cable. It makes the difference of being able to charge your phone in 20 minutes, vs hours. Same with the laptops. Right cable, charge in 10s of minutes. Wrong cable, and you’re looking at overnight. Do NOT borrow cables from people you don’t know! It’s easy to put key loggers, and other virus like stuff into a cable these days. You might find that quick encounter at the airport “can I borrow your cable”, leads to your bank account being available on the internet. So, carry extras, that you can trust.

Compute Devices

I have with me my MacBook Air, and M4 iPad Pro. It turns out, I like using the iPad as a daily driver. It’s light weight, screen is super crystal clear, I can type and view in the relative early morning or late night darkness, and it’s great on a plane. The MacBook is good for programming. I’ve gotta say, if my dev tools worked from the iPad, I would not bother with the MacBook at all. It does not provide any additional value, and I find it less flexible as a device.

I did NOT bring the Apple Vision Pro goggles, nor the insta 360 camera. The goggles seem a bit too fragile to be a part of the rough and tumble of international travel, so they’re safely at home, sitting pretty, doing nothing. If we do settle into a spot for a while, I might go and retrieve them. I do want to film in 360, but I’ve had enough experience with the insta360 X3 to know that I want a lot higher resolution, so I’m willing to pick up something new in this category. Not going for super pro high end, but something better than that entry level device.

Phones

This is an important category. I have a mix of devices that use T-mobile and mint (which is now part of t-mobile). These phones work internationally without too much fuss, but the experience is sub-par. You’re typically going to be on a LTE network (not the 5G you might be used to), and you’re going to run into various restrictions, or price increases, or limitations on number of calls, etc.

I have purchased a Samsung A35 in India, and installed a Jio SIM card. This gives me full-on internet 5G access, which is great. I setup this phone with its own Google account, so that it can be independent of all our other socials. We also setup WhatsApp, so that we can connect to whomever we want. I did not bother to go with the super high end flagship Galaxy S24+ super macho. My thinking is, I need a daily driver, that can act as a hot spot. I’m not going to use this thing to take night shots of fireworks displays.

Of Note: It’s super easy to buy a ‘unlocked’ phone when you’re outside the US. They just come that way from the start. A key selling feature of phones in countries outside the US, is that they come with the ability to have multiple SIM cards. I know ‘e-SIM’ is all the rage now, but good old fashioned cards you snap into the phone still exist. This particular Samsung has two SIM slots, which is particularly useful if you find yourself flipping between countries, or even parts of the same country where one provider is more dominant than another.

Another note: In the world outside the United States, “the internet” == “WhatsApp”. I mean the remotest rural farmers have smart phones and WhatsApp, and that’s how they stay in touch. So, it behooves you to have a WhatsApp account.

Payments

How do you pay for stuff. In India, and increasingly many other places around the world, there are digital micro payment facilities. India has a base technology called UPI I think, and various services and payment apps based on that interface. Google Pay is very popular. You can pay everything from rent to taxi fair using Google pay. It’s much safer and faster than trying to carry a bunch of cash around.

If you’re a ‘foreigner’ wherever you are, then you’ll definitely want to have a mix of cash, credit cards, and universal pay services, such as PayPal, Amazon Pay, or others. A mix of credit cards across visa, master card, AmEx, ATM/debit. But, also, things like Xoom, Remitly, Venmo, and the like. Best to have them all setup before you depart from wherever you’re departing from. One way or another, you can tie them into the local system. It even helps if you’ve got a little bit of crypto you can leverage if needs be. Under no circumstances should you carry a large amount of gold. It will be confiscated at the first industrious border check.

Schooling

When traveling with family, this is perhaps the biggest consideration. How are you going to keep the kids on a learning track, while participating in the goodness of the travel. You don’t want them to totally lose the discipline of a structured learning environment, but you also want them to soak in what’s around them.

Our kids are in 5th and 3rd grades. Consulting with their teachers, they essentially said “pickup workbooks for their current grade, and the next grade up. Do exercises out of those workbooks, and they should be fine”.

I came up with a learning plan with the kids. We decided what amount of math and reading would be reasonable for each day, how we’d go about it, how we’d check it, answer questions, and the like, and then we just stick to it.

For math, they do three pages of problems from their current grade, then 1 page of “stretch problems” from their next grade level. On reading, they’ve got chapter goals, minimum of one chapter from current book, but they can do more if they like. They’re both avid readers, so the reading part is no challenge at all.

On top of that, they’ve got religious studies goals, as well as language learning. I even get in on the act, because they taught me how to write Arabic numerals. In addition, they give lessons in things they know. One is an ‘artist’, so we get drawing lessons.

The key is to incorporate the lessons learned into daily life. I gave a mini lesson on why there are 360 degrees in a circle, which led to why arches are strong, which led to observing the placement of keystones in arches in the wild. It’s that kind of ‘pulling it all together’ that makes the whole learning enterprise more fun, sooner rather than later. My son has taken to counting change that we receive from vendors, to ensure it’s correct.

Of Note: If we stay in country long enough (greater than 3 months), then we’ll consider local physical schooling options. Primarily it’s to ensure the kids interact with other kids their age. Although we are awesome parents, and we provide for their every need…. They need to socialize.

Living The Life

While all this is going on, there is a backdrop of a Tech Studio that I’m running. There are meetings to be had, events to be arranged, blog entries to be made, videos to be recorded. The beat goes on. Part of being TechNomadic is turning the cliche of “You can work anywhere” into a reality of “we are working everywhere”.

We are learning. How to balance the needs of family, with the desires of being world citizens, while continuing to pursue life’s goals and dreams. I would say that the current state of technology makes it easier than it has even been in the past, but it takes a concerted effort and organization to do things as right as possible.

So, we are TechNomadic, and loving it!