I write in two very different places: my desk in Palo Alto, California, is piled high with myriad jumbled books and papers whose stratigraphy is a challenge. Summers in Bozeman, Montana, I write in a spare space, surrounded by interesting rocks and fossils instead of books, on an old oak table with nothing but my laptop.
I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.
It doesn't matter if you record with a microphone on a laptop or at a friend's house. Now it's more of a danger of things sounding too high-fi than sounding too low-fi.
Mesh networking is an old idea. Oddly enough, the low-cost XO Laptop built by the 'One Laptop Per Child' organization - the so-called $100 laptop - was designed with built-in mesh networking. The idea with the XO machine was that many kids using those laptops would be out in rural areas without reliable Internet access.
When I write a script, I have all the old versions of the script on my laptop. They're saved as backups in case something goes horribly wrong.