A study sponsored by Dell found that over 12,000 laptops are lost or stolen in U.S. airports each week. The airports with the highest frequency? In order: LAX, then Miami, then JFK, then O'Hare, then Newark. Two-thirds of those are never recovered.

What to do? Well, Dell has come out with a suite of security services that might help: Dell ProSupport Mobility Services. The software allows for several nifty solutions for a missing laptop. There's remote tracking and recovery, also called "Lojack" (the opposite of "hijack", from a system developed for stolen cars). This "Lojack for Laptops" system has been around a while, introduced by a company called Absolute Software, but now Dell is putting muscle behind it by allowing you to get it preinstalled. Lose your laptop, call the service, and they'll track down the address where the laptop is sitting (they use the laptop's IP address and then get the physical address from the Internet service provider).

Perhaps even cooler, there's a remote data delete service. Report the laptop missing, and they can wipe your drive clean, so sensitive data is protected.

Of course, there is a hitch. A big one. In order for the search or destroy commands to reach the laptop, the thief has to connect to the Internet. Finding a laptop connected via Wifi can be tough, but, worse, try recovering your laptop from Ulan Bator.

One of the most irritating things about going through security at the airport is when you have to take your laptop computer out of your bag to put it through the x-ray. Invariably, the notebook is always at the bottom of my backpack, underneath 12 pairs of socks, a Frisbee and some loose sugar packets, so all of this has to come out and be reassembled after screening.

The reason that the TSA requires this is that they have a hard time seeing through other electronics that are often in-plane during the x-ray -- things like power supplies, cd-rom drives or other extraneous equipment.

If these electronics could be separated during the screening, the TSA concedes, then passengers could leave their notebooks stowed away during the process. So they called for proposals from manufacturers to design a case that could accomplish this task.

Now, with designs finalized, the world's heavyweight bag manufactureres are racing to bring them to market. Luggage giant Targus expects to have several units on the shelves by September, while Pathfinder has a similar plan.

The real question is how well the TSA screeners will handle it. You know that there will be one or two who forget the new designs are x-ray permissible, which means head butting between passengers and security.

I personally am probably going to stick with my Arc'teryx backpack when on the road -- I can't afford to have multiple bags or a niche piece of luggage when I'm packing light.

In the (very near) future I'm going to write a comprehensive article about why and how to pack light, so make sure you're RSSed up and ready for that in the next week or two.

Consider this the prequel. The most important part of packing light is the bag, and I'm proud to say that I've found the ultimate bag for packing light, the Deuter Futura 28.

I found the Deuter Futura 28 by accident. I was at Whole Earth Provisions in Austin, Texas, getting ready for my 10 month trip around the world. I needed a bag.

I looked at the North Face bags, the Osprey bags, the Arcteryx bags, and all of the other usual suspects. None of them stood out.

As I was about to leave I saw a bag tucked away in the far corner. It was pushed back into the rack so that only someone obsessively evaluating every single bag would find it. That's me.

I had never heard of Deuter, so I assumed they must be some no name budget brand. After just a few minutes of examination, though, I realized just how wrong I was. This was the ultimate bag for the light packer.

TomTom just released their new XL330S model, and this lucky blogger was able to get his hands on one for a test drive.

I'll preface this article with the following disclaimer: I've never been fond of automotive GPS units. I think that while useful to many drivers, they can also have the adverse effect of preventing the driver from learning routes, a city's layout and beautiful niches of the city that go unnoticed unless you're really focused on the outside.

But I agreed to do this review, partially because I wanted to disprove this theory to myself and partially because these new TomToms are just so damn cool.

Despite my unit being programmed in Estonian when it came from the TomTom PR factory, it was fairly simple to boot up and configure. It asked me to set up my preferences, including style of map, voices and other tidbits, then immediately dumped me into a map showing my location under an arrow. All I had to do to power the unit was plug it into the cigarette lighter with the supplied cable. Similarly, hooking the unit up to my computer used the same mini USB jack and didn't need any drivers.

Being a chronic avoider of instruction manuals, I figured I would first just wing the programming of my office into the system – and I was right, navigating was easy. Tap the map with your finger, tap "navigate to", select your city, then punch in your the street and number. It's a completely linear interface that cuts down on superfluous buttons and options and is incredibly easy to use.

This weekend, I broke down and bought a Kindle -- Amazon's eBook reader. The benefits are obvious: the ability to store over 200 books in the on-board memory (with an expandable SD slot), E Ink for paper-like, easy-on-the-eyes reading, and instant access to thousands of titles from Amazon.com.

While the concept of an eBook reader is not new, the Kindle's brothership with the world's largest book store makes it revolutionary.

In short: this thing is a book-loving traveler's dream. No longer will you have to carry around multiple books on your next trip. If you're traveling within the U.S., simply use the Kindle's built in Sprint EVDO Internet access to order new books instantaneously; if you're traveling abroad, the Sprint connection doesn't work, but you can still order the book from any computer connected to the Internet, and transfer it to your Kindle via the included USB.

But there's one market that is bizarrely void of any Kindle coverage: guidebooks. Imagine the possibilities -- no longer lug around a thick, heavy Lonely Planet: Wherever. With the Kindle, you can buy your destination's guidebook from all the top publishers -- Lonely Planet, Fodor's, Moon, whatever -- for a fraction of the cost, and store them in one small, light, easy to use gadget. Plus, the Kindle gives you the ability to search for phrases in your entire library, so pulling up all the information from every guidebook on Ulaanbaatar, for instance, is only a few button clicks away.

How come guidebook publishers aren't taking advantage of this?

Do you remember the commercials for a fold-out couch that showed a six year-old opening and closing it? Engadget posted today about power-assisted luggage by Live Luggage that I think is the sleeper sofa of suitcases.

It's easy enough to use, even a six year old can handle it.

The luggage has been under construction for several years as the company has worked out the design. The premiere, which I suppose is when you can get out that wallet to buy it, is June 26.

Here are the features:

• The handle can adjust to three heights.
• It weighs 23 pounds (10.6kg ) which leaves you 37 pounds for clothing unless you want to pay for an overweight charge.
• The battery is rechargeable and it is recommended that you charge it each night. I suppose it would be the pits to have the thing die on you before you reach check-in. Fully recharged, the luggage will go 1.5 miles (That's six times around a track.) If it does poop out, you can wheel it on your own with out assistance from the suitcase.
• It's as tough and strong as a car bumper
• The user propels the suitcase by lifting the handle and tilting the suitcase.

The manufacture points out in its press release that this is power-assisted luggage. It won't go on its own.

According to the company, the weight distribution is what makes the luggage manageable for a six year-old. For an older person, I can see where this luggage would be an advantage. You do need to be a rich older person. According to Engadget, the price might be as high as $1,365. That's what's listed. That is some suitcase.

I'm all for fancy gizmos and high tech electronics. It's my bread and butter. But what really makes the difference when traveling, a lot of the time, are the simple essentials that you deal with every day.

Clothes, for example. The right clothes can lighten your pack, keep you dryer, warmer, cooler, and happier. Believe me.

Today's Mega Gadling Gear Extravaganza is going to cover all of the clothes I own, which are actually so few that they fit in a single Aloksak plastic bag.

... Okay, I just got a tux made here in Bangkok too (who can resist?), but I'm having it shipped back, so it doesn't count.

All of this gear has been tested personally by me on a crazy around the world trip that I'm five months into, and most of it was being pre-tested in Austin, Texas before I left.

I've seen many a digital camera die a slow and painful death while on the road. Sand that got caught in the lens mechanism. LCD screens cracked by bumper-car-joyrides. Accidental drops on unforgiving pavement. Not to mention those of us who abuse our cameras in adverse situations involving water, dust and extremes of temperature.

For anyone who's ever risked their digital to get a great shot but lost a nice camera in the process, I recommend checking out the Olympus Stylus 1030SW. According to the reviews I've found at Travel Gear Blog, as well as on CNET, the 1030W is one of the sturdiest cameras on the market. In addition to being waterproof and dustproof, the Olympus is also shockproof, crushproof and freezeproof down to 14 degrees Fahrenheit.

How durable is that exactly? According to specs, you can drop it from up to 6.6 feet and crush it with up to 220 pounds of pressure. While the 1030 SW can't match the optics of some of the top-of-the-line point-and-shoots out there, it does offer a solid 10.1 megapixels and the standard digital camera features like panorama stitching and image stabilization we've come to expect from most consumer point-and-shoots these days.

All you skiiers, snorkelers and adventure-travelers take note. Although there are better cameras on the market for image quality, this Olympus packs some great features into a highly durable package. Sometimes avoiding the aggravation of a ruined camera is worth that small sacrifice in functionality.

We've reached the point where high quality digital cameras have become pretty common. It seems that every few months or so the minimum number of megapixels going into cameras goes up a notch. I saw a 12 megapixel camera in the store the other day. What does the common tourist need a 12 megapixel camera for? And why doesn't anyone seem willing to put greater than 3 megapixels in a mobile phone camera?

Many people don't think of it, but that high resolution and extra large LCD is good for more than crystal clear photographs of the sunset in Maui. You've essentially got a photo and storage database inside of your camera that you can use to store and reference all sorts of info while you're on the road. This can cut down on weight and logistics while navigating a busy street or on your own for a daytrip in a foreign city.

1. Map and guidebook page storage: Say you're heading out to Soho in London and you want to take the map from your Lonely Planet along. The London book is so huge that you don't want to carry it around and you don't want to rip a page out because you borrowed the book from your cousin Eddie, so you're buggered on bringing a map with you. But you can take a high-resolution photo of the map page then replay the photo during your travels, use the zoom tool and scroll around the map. Similarly, you can take photos of small sections of your guidebook to reference them later. Of course this only works if you have a few small articles that you want to bring with you -- if you want to bring entire neighborhoods of data, you'll want to bring the guidebook.

Photomaps also work for pictures taken on LCD screens. So if you Google map something back at the apartment and want to bring it with you, take a photo instead of tracking down a printer and wasting the paper.

2. Makeshift binoculars: Can't see a sign three blocks away? Take a high resolution picture of the sign, go back to the image and zoom way in. Even the lower (5-6MP) cameras have better resolution than the human eye.

3. Data storage: Unless you've got some hifalutin software that downloads and posts your pictures off of your camera, most interfaces work by plugging in a supplied USB cable to your computer where you can open a folder and copy over your images. If you've got a fairly large memory card, you should also have a fair amount of space left over on the rest of the chip. This space can be used like a USB flash drive where you can copy trip essentials over like MP3s or a resume or even pictures from another person's camera. You'll just have to plug the camera back in when you get to your laptop or home computer to copy the files off.

"I am in traffic hell," I said to my friend over my cell phone Friday right before the I-64 split off I-75 a few miles before Lexington, Kentucky,

I didn't expect this traffic. It was 3:45. What was everyone doing off work already?

The miles of orange barrels cutting off the left lane, merging traffic from the right, another highway merging in from the left, plus every tractor trailer truck available to humankind had created five-miles-an-hour to no-miles-an-hour speed. Walking would have been faster.