Many questions arise when you start planning a really long trip. As a woman, I started wondering which birth control methods are friendlier for someone on the go. (Any methods that I don’t mention are ones I have no experience with but ruled out because of questionable effectiveness, bulk, or frequency of having to fuss with it.) Don’t get me wrong: I’m using birth control for its secondary benefit, which is controlling my menstrual cycle. This is a pretty cool superpower when you need to limit the quantity of feminine hygiene products you have on you.

Into the wee hours last night, I wasted a bunch of time wrestling with how to handle photos for my blog. My technical goals for the photos on my blog are as follows:

• Performance: compressed file size without sacrificing too much quality
• Right-sized: not thousands of pixels high and wide, more like 800x600
• Organized: stored in Github in a sensical way

Because the most restrictive of airlines I’m flying has a carry-on allowance of 7kg (about 15lb), I had to consciously choose what to bring with me. My top priority for any item was for it to be as lightweight as possible, and I balanced that with other features (e.g., anti-theft, quick-drying).

My backpack weighs 6.6kg, and my travel jacket and neck stash weigh 2.1kg.

Being limited to 7kg of stuff, I opted not to bring my laptop (1.82kg with case) and instead threw down the money to buy a tablet (800g with case and keyboard). But how would I publish any musings about my travels without a laptop? I knew I wanted to use Github, but I wasn’t sure how well it works with tablets.