When a pair of rugged adventurists decides to trek 700km across a frozen lake in Siberia, chronicle the expedition in a daily blog complete with photos and videos — and share it all on the Internet — it should come as no surprise when Apple hardware and software features prominently among their gear.
Vašek Sůra and Pavel Blažek set out from the southern end of Lake Baikal in Siberia on February 23 in temperatures dipping below -20℃ to become the first Czech team to make a winter crossing of the lake. They marked their crossing of 500km Monday in stylish fashion. “Please, don’t judge us too harsh,” Sůra wrote in their blog, “after all, we’ve been here for almost three weeks and we need to entertain ourselves somehow :-)”
Last Friday, they posted about the gear they are using on the expedition, undertaken by just the two men with no kites, dogs or outside support to assist the trek or help them with their nearly 200lbs. (each) of supplies. Among the Apple gear is a MacBook Air (128 GB, solid-state drive, 2 GB). They use a satellite modem operating on the Immarsat network to upload and download to the Internet. Their Apple software includes OS Snow Leopard, iWork and iLife tools, and to process the photos Sůra uses Aperture.
The day they were hoping to post a video commemorating the 400km point they ran into some problems getting the camcorder to communicate with the laptop. “Vasek thought that there’s something wrong with the laptop,” wrote Sůra, “but as we have a Mac here with us, I was sure it cannot be in the laptop – nothing can ever be wrong with Mac!”
Of course it was the USB cable.
