And since my Apple iPad arrived I’ve only taken the bag out once.

The big padded bag has been dumped for a small and light rucksack. The iPad itself has a case to protect the screen, and there’s still plenty of room in my lightweight rucksack for the tiny power adapter. That’s if I need it: the iPad will last all day, two days even.

Now, my setup is unique to me so I’m not advocating everyone simply drop their laptop and get an iPad, but for what I do it’s perfect. My mobile needs are fairly basic. I have to get email, be able to browse the web, write and fill in the odd spreadsheet. The iPad can do all this and be a games console, book, magazine and newspaper.

Luckily I don’t have to commute to work anymore, but I’m often on the train to exotic locations such as Leeds, York or Halifax. For shorter journeys I rarely bothered getting the laptop out as it was a bit of a pain. With the iPad you whip it out and it’s on.

That might sound simplistic, but really, the fact it’s on instantaneously makes an enormous difference. I know that Office barely takes any time to launch, but the word processor on my iPad is open as soon as I tap its icon. The on-screen keyboard isn’t perfect, but it’s by no means bad – certain no worse than the physical one on the netbook I currently own but no longer use. Where it’s standing room only you can still use the iPad too.

On my longer journeys I’ve been catching up on TV and movies and not had to worry about battery life. Again, it’s a tiny thing, but it really makes the iPad a better solution than a laptop. In fact, since I started using my iPad I’ve barely had the need to open the laptop – the iPad can perform around 90% of the tasks I used the laptop for. The other 10% can usually wait.

When Steve Jobs, with his famously unassuming and respectful manner, dismissed netbooks as useless I was a bit skeptical. However, I have a netbook and it’s gathering dust, the iPad has become part of my leaving the house ritual: keys, wallet, phone, iPad.

I’m sure some of you reading this will need access to bespoke applications and work-related security regimes that rule out anything but the ultra-secure Windows XP, and for this the iPad is irrelevant. However, for anyone whose mobile working needs are basic I’d seriously suggest you put an iPad to the test. Your shoulders will thank you.

It’s through this that I happen to know about an excellent site called walkit.com, which describes itself as an urban route planner. The key difference, as it ever-so-subtly hints with its name, is that all its routes are for people who want to walk rather than drive or take public transport.

Back in 2007 when we were all sitting in a room judging who should win the various awards, walkit.com only covered a couple of major cities, but it’s now expanded to include Aberdeen, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Derby, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester, Newcastle & Gateshead, Norwich, Sheffield and Wigan Borough.

And if you live or work in any of those cities, I strongly recommend you take a look. Rather than jump in a cab or suffer the trauma that is public transport, walkit.com will offer you either direct or less busy routes to take you to your destination.

For instance, the picture above shows a suggested route from the PC Pro offices to a press conference I’m going to in a couple of weeks. I could travel by some convoluted route via tube or bus, but I’ll probably get there quicker if I walk – walkit.com estimates 38 minutes, but I reckon that by barging fellow pedestrians out of the way in my usual polite manner I can get that down to half an hour.

And, more importantly for my 36-year-old waistline, following the advice will help me burn a few calories while doing some exercise (handily, walkit.com estimates how many calories you’ll use). Yet another benefit is that a little less CO2 will be generated as a result; walkit.com again estimates how much.

Naturally, you can also print out the turn-by-turn directions, if your conscience will allow you to put up with the carbon footprint this entails.

I’d be interested to hear what other people think about this site. Have you even heard about it before? Would you ever use it? Have you used it? And if so, has it changed the way you travel around the city?

Stross is definitely Our Kind Of Author, though I find he has that breathless Linux-Nerd way about his writing which immediately puts my teeth on edge (but doesn’t stop me reading). He clearly has some technology scars about his person and has done at least one book (Halting State) which suggests a high degree of familiarity with the online world and software development.

Anyway, at one point in “the Jennifer Morgue”, Stross stymies his heroes by having their transport crash – in software, not by running into something solid. As he no doubt intends, I had a nerdy chuckle at that while the Airbus 319 speared through the crystal-clear air across a Europe whiter then even the dreams of the BNP could make it.

Then I got in my hire car.

Every so often, I do these trips: fly or drive to Munich and then drive to St Moritz. It’s that last leg that turns the trip from a boring air-miles collection exercise, into one of Europe’s greatest drives. It’s also far better to drive it than to attempt a flight or other public transport. So, I’m in the habit of hiring a car at Munich Airport. Rather than learning the satnav (in German) in any one of 20 models suitable for winter driving, I take my all-Europe satnav with me. This saves a few quid by allowing me to pick non-satnav cars, and I can invest my brainpower in getting round the annoyances of just one device, instead of having to second-guess several devices (the Renault Scenic satnav, for instance, hadn’t achieved signal lock in the entire trip from Airport to Hotel – about 30 minutes worth).

This time I had my Garmin Nuvi 770 in my bag. it had been in a drawer for a bit, because my UK car has its own satnav, so when I fired it up in the renter I expected to have to wait for a while for signal acquisition and so forth.

What I didn’t expect was a message saying “The following maps are out of date: City Navigator North America[Capital G with a caret above it]CityMap” and an OK button bottom-right on the touchscreen. And that was it. The button did nothing: I could turn the unit off, and when it came back on it would industriously reload all its maps – and show the same un-dismissable alert.

Now, I didn’t buy or load the North America map set on my device: it seems it was there already. I’ve never used it in North America, so I’d rather remove that map than have to take care of updating it, but even when I follow the instructions on the error message and link the gadget to the net with the updating applet the message doesn’t go away.

As I was trudging down to the rental car desk in -18 Celsius to swap to a car with satnav, I suddenly remembered that implausible plot device in “The Jennifer Morgue”. Maybe Stross isn’t as far out as I first thought. Which, if he’s right about the other things in the book, should keep you awake at night!

As always, the Swiss border guards are like someone from Friends Reunited: cautious, a bit shy, and then the minute you are nice to them you are their best friend ever. Jon was expecting to be taken away and have his fillings sent for assay, but I deliberately picked a small crossing on the SP3 from Varese & Malnate, knowing the traffic would be light and the guys would be relaxed – and we wanted to drive over the bizarre ground-loops we found on Google Maps.

This friendly but thorough encounter – and a previous visit, going in through Basel, where the guards spent longer marvelling at the Japanese tax-disc on my personal import Subaru that they did looking at my passport – put me in mind of people’s approach to firewalls.

Working with a home network is not about appointing yourself a nice Swiss border guard (say “Gruezi” to the ones in the eastern half of the country if you want to be well treated, and make sure you roll the R without typical British embarrassment). it’s far more like having a garden wall with five different colour coded Tradesman’s entrances, all with doorknobs wired up to the 3-phase at your nearest substation – and yet so many devices now want unlimited access both to, and from, the web.

This last month I have had more questions about PS3 and XBox cohabitation on home networks, than all the other enquiries put together. It seems like those machines want to stand on the net unprotected and unencumbered: the fact that attack traffic seems to backtrack into all the addresses where games consoles announce themselves, on the principle that people playing games are probably not terribly au fait with protecting their other compute resources, seems to support my suggestion:

Buy yourself a proper, separate, hardware firewall. Not some freebie that hacker dudes can treat like a Swiss border guard.