SAN FRANCISCO — Chuck La Tournous was about two minutes into his presentation at Macworld 2013, Tech vs. Wild, when a Boy Scoutish-looking youth in the audience shot up his hand.
“I go camping a lot,” he said, “but they won’t let us take our tech into the woods.”
That sort of anti-geek outdoorsman mentality may soon be going the way of analog television. At the recent Macworld event, the message was that when the going gets tough, the tough get even techier.
“The idea is that tech can be useful in the great outdoors,” said La Tournous, a 50-year-old blogger from western New Jersey and founder of TrailCamper.com. “As a kid, you maybe could have taken your Walkman on a campout, but today there’s a lot of good reasons to take tech with you. It doesn’t distract from the outdoors experience,it enhances it.”
La Tournous, taking an urban hike just a few blocks from San Francisco’s Moscone Center, left Macworld armed with some of the survival products he’s reviewed on his website and headed toward Market and Sixth streets, where the city’s drug-dealing, Dumpster-diving, panhandling denizens can make an out-of-towner feel like a babe in the woods.
While some of La Tournous’ tech tools, such as stargazing apps and waterproof smartphone cases, are clearly more suited for the wilderness, he said others would come in handy in an urban environment gone bad. That would include terrorist attacks, civil unrest, earthquakes or other natural disasters. He got to personally test this theory recently after Hurricane Sandy knocked out power in his home-town for more than a week.
Walking up Market, La Tournous pulled out one of the survival tools he presented at Macworld. It’s a portable solar battery charger the size of a large napkin that can charge an iPhone with just three to four hours of sunlight. If power goes out, as it did after Sandy, the phone can still be juiced up.
Walking down Sixth, La Tournous showed off more tools for times when things go bad. There’s the thermoelectric generator that transforms the heat of a fire into electricity for charging devices just by boiling a pot of water - “All you need is fire,” he said, “so this will get you power even if the sun’s not out.”
Then there’s the water purifier that uses ultraviolet light to clean a liter of drinking water in 48 seconds. “ After Sandy, a lot of towns had boil advisories,” La Tournous said, “so this would have taken care of the problem of getting drinking water.”
After showing off several seemingly indestructible smartphone cases, which would be nice to have if you’re caught up in a riot and your phone goes flying, La Tournous pulled out his piece de resistance: a bottle opener incorporated into a sturdy protective smart-phone cover.
Business, Pages 10 on 02/11/2013