Travelteq pencil holder
There’s a tactile pleasure in using a notebook or journal to record your travels. And if you’re lucky enough to be able to sketch or draw in it, too, it captures the mood in a way that a snatched photo never can. Travelteq can enhance that experience with its leather pencil holder.
It's just the sort of thing a da Vinci might have stuffed into his bags en route to Rome. It holds 19 pencils or pens and comes stocked with a coloured set from Bruynzeel-Sakura.€65 from travelteq.com; out of stock, but back soon
Kodak Playfull waterproof camera
Just about the size of a credit card, the Playfull is neat enough to stick in your swimming togs, if you absolutely must. It’s a tough little number: waterproof to 3m and able to take a decent drop unscathed. It captures 720p HD video, which it stores to an SD card, and comes with a limited, although probably entirely practical, set of presets and modes.
Nice touches include the Flip-esque built-in USB arm that lets you dump your clips on to a computer without any cables – and the share button, which will post them to any of the popular social media sites with a click or two. €100 from dabs.ie
AMOD data logger
Or the AGL3080, as we like to call it. This is about as simple a GPS tracker as you can find. It’s not for navigation, but rather would be used either to geotag your photos after a trip or to log an unfamiliar route you’ve taken, say when cycling, hiking or skiing.
One button gets it going and you can set what frequencies, upwards of every second, of data recording you want from a location. In theory, that'd almost track you step by step. Set it to record one data point every six seconds and you can store 10 days worth of tracks. Afterwards you can upload your data to a computer and map it against popular systems such as Google Maps. Geotagging is pretty straightforward on PCs, but, although it will talk to a Mac, that functionality is more convoluted. About £70 from amazon.co.uk