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Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive

#91

Post by dandelany »

lzw wrote: post #34

My co-founder and I have been doing this for three years. We have two backpacks and we are nomadic. Interestingly, it isn't online services that have enabled this so much as a lifestyle choice. We value travel and figured it was cheaper to run our startup in most parts of the world than it was in our origin city. We don't use a lot of online services for our business. Biggest one is Gmail, really, and hosting. Things…

> We value travel and figured it was cheaper to run our startup in most parts of the world than it was in our origin city.

Has this assumption proved true so far? How true? What was your origin city, and where have you been? I'm quite interested in this strategy, it would be so nice to pair low-cost living with travel.

Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive

#92

Post by BrandonM »

samratjp wrote: post #79

Man, it seems as if the only thing missing is a data bank where you can drop off your hard drive and the bank will store it for you and even lend out free space to others at an interest. Yay virtual currency.

It's not quite what you describe, but bank vaults are actually quite cheap. The computer expert firm I work for has two large vaults (something like 8 cu. ft. each) at a KeyBank where we store scores of hard drives. We make a trip every Friday to rotate our set of backup RAIDs. It's a very simple, straightforward process, and I think our cost is something like $40/month for both vaults. You could probably get a vault big enough for a 2 TB external drive for something like $5-10/month.

Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive

#93

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

jacquesm wrote: post #69
thesethings wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I've read some very moving accounts by people who are nomadic with kids.

That sounds interesting, do you have any pointers?

http://www.weliveonaboat.com/

I used to read Steve Roberts digital nomad site for some time and I found links to familes living on sailboats and travelling but it seems those links are gone. The above was the first one I found on google.

Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive

#95

Post by oiuytghyuj »

Not planning on going quite that far - but we are thinking of saving $200,000 by buying a one bedroom apartment with a few Kindle's instead of a 2Bed place with lots of bookshelves.

All the DVDs are already ripped to a couple of hard drives, the disks but in DJ CD files and the cases thrown away - that saved a 6' bookcase.

Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive

#96

Post by die_sekte »

chrislloyd wrote: post #8

As well as being a bad-ass programmer, Steve Dekorte is also a great example of this neavu-minimalism. His blog and Io show how deeply he has taken this "philosophy" ( http://dekorte.com and http://www.iolanguage.com ). I also don't want to sound too creepy but he has a awesome apartment: http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10954098266 and http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10901308299

Klaus Biesenbach, not a programmer, also has a ultra-minimalistic apartment: http://www.wmagazine.com/artdesign/2009/01/klaus_haus and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdkfvPRejSQ

Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive

#97

Post by Parabola »

I spent the last 3 months living in a tent in the mountains of New Mexico. Between my laptop and my cell phone's tethering, there was no issue at all getting work done. And it was an incredible experience.

If you were willing to move to warmer climates during the winter you could do this all year no problem.

Re: Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive

#99

Post by etherael »

it's hard to ruthlessly trim down your meatspace profile to really be able to just up and leave at the drop of a hat, My 27" iMac and xbox + games are the two pieces that just don't travel well, everything else has been easy enough, even my addiction to large monitors when working I've managed to deal with;

http://www.lg.com/au/it-products/monitors/LG-wide-screen-mon...

This thing + my notebook and some clothes is fairly easily backpackable. I'm stuck in Sydney on contract for the next seven months but I think at the end of it I might just dispense permanently with the iMac and the xbox, the feeling of freedom you have from not being tied to any physical location is something I can't recommend highly enough.

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