Lots of great articles on lightening your load on the home page of this site, left hand column.

For travel (we get those questions every now and then), we've generally recommended Lonely Planet. However, they took the site down for several weeks, removed nearly all the archived material (much of which was excellent) and disabled the search function. At least today I noticed they had the "Activities and Gear" section back up, but they appear to have deleted nearly all of the archives. There used to be a lot of good material on travel packs there, but it's gone. I'm not too sure where we'll send travelers at this point!