Expat tech

I was reading Roald Dahl's "Going Solo" the other day and he describes heading off to work for Shell in Tanzania as a young man.  The basic deal was he would be away for three years with no trips home.  His only contact with his family was via aerogrammes. 

While being an expat still involves great family and cultural upheaval, clearly it is not what it used to be.  Scribbling on little envelopes of super thin paper is a thing of the past and it is now possible to take various bits of Australia with you.  Because I am a shameless nerd and get excited by this stuff, I thought I would link to a few of my favourite expat technologies.

TV - Cable TV as a whole is pretty awesome - we can maintain our usual diet of expensive HBO dramas and crap reality shows without difficulty.  A particular highlight is the condensed versions of Season 1 of Masterchef Australia.  If you take out all the ridiculous repetition and timewasting, it turns out you end up with pretty watchable show.

In Asia, we are both blessed and cursed with the Australia Network.  It is a blessing in that it shows ABC News and the AFL.  A curse in that it shows an unbelievable amount of rubbish.  So many cooking shows, police dramas and reality vet shows.  It hasn't got a single ABC comedy but they do find time for the full Sunday afternoon arts line up.  It even manages to spoil the good programs it does show by putting them on a year or two late.  So I can watch Catalyst to find out what the latest scientific advances were in 2010.

Unfortunately, ABC iView is IP-locked to Australia, which seems unfair when I am still paying tax in Australia to fund it.  There are ways around this, but unfortunately I know nothing about them. On an unrelated note, Witopia VPN service has a server in Sydney and costs US$40 a year.

Also The Daily Show streams full episodes from its website, without IP restrictions and usually without ads.  God bless you Jon Stewart.   

Radio - There are only a couple of English language stations in Hong Kong, so we got a Logitech Squeezebox Radio for the kitchen.  It is the size and shape of a kitchen radio, except that it connects to your wifi network and streams any radio station from anywhere.  It even has preset buttons for stations like your car radio.  It is mono but the sound quality is amazing.  As a bonus it can also stream podcasts from the web and music from your PCs.  Now we can listen to Jon Faine in the morning and be driven mad by his callers, just like we would be at home.  I mean, why do they bother ringing just to tell him what a terrible job he's doing?

Newspapers - Sure, you can always look at The Age website but you can only read about so many student-teacher sex scandals before you start to wish you could be distracted by the Middle East conflict or the latest ALP leadership challenge.  I want to see the print version.  So we signed up for an absolutely brilliant service called Pressreader.  The paper is presented like a scan of the print version which you can zoom into to read articles.  Better still, every headline is a hyperlink to a plain text copy of the story. 

For US$30 a month, you get access to 2,000 newspapers - including every major Australian paper (except The Financial Review for some reason).  You can select titles to automatically download every day.  The download includes every section of the real paper - so you get the Green Guide on Thursday!  One subscription covers 3 PCs and 3 tablets, so there is no argument over who gets the sport section. 

Phone - Does anyone else remember going to that telecommunications exhibit in the Melbourne Museum in the 80s and being told we'd have videophones any day now?  Skype video chat finally delivers on that promise and it is as awesome as my 10 year old self thought it would be.  Today we watched my sister-in-law blow out the candles on her birthday cake.

The free features of Skype are pretty good, but once we moved overseas we decided to pour a bit of cash into Skype's coffers to see what it can do.

First we bought my mum and Gen's mum an ASUS Eee Videophone.  It's basically a dedicated Skype videophone with a 7 inch touchscreen, built in camera and mic.  It doesn't do anything a laptop couldn't do but it is super easy to use - there is a button to pick up, a button to hang up and that's it.  It was about A$250.

For our home phone, we bought a Skype Dualphone.  This lets you make voice Skype and local calls from the one wireless handset.  Again, we could use a PC but the Dualphone makes using Skype for voice calls as convenient as making a regular phone call.  This was about A$50.

To round out the hardware, we bought a Samsung TV which has Skype built in.  (No, we didn't buy it just for Skype, we needed a new TV anyway.)  It has a little camera and mic on top.  Useful for video chats where you want to be able to see the whole family - although you can only use it when the lounge room is tidy.  I think Sony TVs also have Skype built in now.

Then we got an "Unlimited World" plan which gives you unlimited calls to landlines in 41 countries for A$16 a month.  As the Unlimited World plan doesn't cover Australian mobiles we sprung for A$40 a month for 400 minutes to Australian mobile phones.  This is a bit of a luxury but it is cool that we can get hold of our family and friends on their mobiles without worrying about the cost.

For about A$35 a year, we also got an Online Number.  This is really cool.  It is a normal Melbourne phone number.  When people call the Melbourne number, it puts them through to our Skype account and our home phone in Hong Kong rings.  Better still, if we're not home the call automatically gets put through to our Hong Kong mobile phone.  Whether we answer on our Skype phone or our mobile phone, the call costs us nothing and costs the caller a local call.  Gen has kept her Australian mobile.  We diverted that to our Online Number too, meaning that callers get put through to us in Hong Kong but only pay the local call cost.

Coffee - Ok, so this is not strictly communication, but it is an important piece of Melbourne.  I always wanted a machine in Melbourne but it kind of seems like a shame to DIY yourself out of Melbourne's cafes.  Hong Kong is similar to America in terms of coffee - there is a lot of it around, but most of it is crap.  Coffee shops are everywhere, selling giant milk, cream and sugar-based beverages which allegedly contain some coffee somewhere in them.  There are a handful of proper coffee shops in Hong Kong, mostly run by Aussies and New Zealanders.

We got a Giotto Rocket Premium Plus espresso machine and a Mazzer Mini-E grinder from Barista Jam in Sheung Wan.  Yes, it was stupidly expensive (about A$2,500 for the combo) but they would be closer to A$3,500 in Australia so we're saving money, you see?!  Barista Jam is a cafe/shop which does the closest impression of a trendy Melbourne cafe I've seen in Hong Kong.  It's run by a guy from Sydney called William who knows his stuff and is super helpful.

So there's a few of the pieces of home we've been able to take with us, thanks to modern technology.  And I didn't even mention Facebook, Twitter, email, this blog and instant messaging.  Or, like Gen did recently, you could just send people some handwritten postcards.  Lame.