Brazil 29 days to go: Disaster Planning

As one lies awake at the early hours of the morning having been woken up by some horrible dream of failure of gear/positioning/brain during the World Cup Final, one gets to thinking about how to reduce the consequences of kit failure as much as possible.There are obvious things to consider such as spare camera bodies, memory cards, cables and so on. Then there's the equally obvious but often overlooked issue of the failure of my laptop. This would be cataclysmic. Very few people that I've seen have a spare laptop on them when going to shoot a game. I'm sure some of the big agencies will have spares coming out of their ears thanks to some nice sponsorship deal, but otherwise I've never really seen people carrying spares. My budget certainly doesn't stretch to having a spare with me, and I'm sure my baggage allowance doesn't either.So, how to solve this little problem. I happen to have a nice little 8" tablet - the snappily named "ASUS Vivotab Note 8". This is a full Windows 8.1 device which can, if you want, run Lightroom and Photoshop. It also has a proper WACOM digitiser so you can write on it with a proper stylus rather than one of those silly blob-ended horrors that iPad users have to put up with. This will be my constant companion on the trip to Brazil - small enough to tuck away in a little bag or a jacket pocket yet powerful enough to do everything I'll need. I plan to have it on the plane for music, movies, games and books, and to use it during the trip for all sorts of other connected stuff like Skype, email etc.There's no way I'm going to be trying to edit and caption pictures using it live from pitchside - that would just be silly. However, thanks to Focus Images new remote editing suite I won't be doing that with my laptop either - I'll just be sending selected pictures live through to the editing team back in London who will edit, caption and send them out. But if my laptop expires, I've worked out a way to use the ASUS tablet instead.As it runs full Windows 8.1, I can put the same auto copying and FTP syncing programs on it that I have on my laptop. This means the latest version of AutoCopy goes on there for pulling locked images off the memory cards, and WinSCP then handles the automatic sync of ingested imaged with the picture desk's FTP server.To make this work I'm using a USB On-The-Go (OTG) cable which allows the tablet to act as a USB host and thus be able to drive a card reader properly. Normally tablets don't do this, so if you just plugged the card reader in nothing would happen, which is why the OTG cable is needed. The workflow will just the same as when using my laptop - fire up the software, ensure the tablet is connected to wifi, then just insert the cards into the reader during the game. The tablet will suck the pics off the card using AutoCopy and WinSCP will fire them across the Atlantic.In fact, this solution may be even easier to use than using a laptop. The tablet batteries last a lot longer than my laptop, it's smaller so can be tucked away anywhere, and may be much more convenient when pitchside space is likely to be so tight that there won't be anywhere to balance a laptop next to me. I'll be able to pop the tablet in a jacket pocket and wander around shooting and sending without needing to return to my position to get to my laptop. OK - a pair of Canon wireless file transmitters could do the same job but at £600 apiece I think I'll be happy enough pulling a card and sticking it in a reader thanks. So I'll have what is effectively a spare laptop in a tiny package that won't get in the way, and may actually work better in the tight confines of a packed pitchside.The last thing to consider is getting my own wifi hotspot setup working. The stadiums "should" all have wifi and wired LAN for all pitchside positions but experience dictates that the wifi may be patchy so it's best going for the wired LAN. However, being cabled up can cause issues with entanglement, people tripping over the cable and wrenching your computer off your knee to smash on the floor, ripping out the RJ45 port etc etc. To that end, I'll be using a small battery powered wifi router to plug into the wired LAN and create my own hotspot. I can tuck that away somewhere safe and let it do it's thing without getting in the way, and have my own exclusive hotspot with the benefits of wired LAN speed rather than battling for bandwidth on a congested shared wifi link. Better that than having cables getting tangled up with monopods etc. I'll also be able to use this with a 3G/4G modem as well if the stadium network isn't up to the job.Testing of the tablet/OTG/hotspot combo will take place this weekend at Wembley where I'm shooting the Championship Playoff Final - fingers crossed.