A recent comment by Nathan Fisher reminded me that we’re overdue for another exciting installment of Travel Tech Talk with Dustin. [Cue theme music intro] So in honor of Valentine’s Day (in the US, at least), please enjoy this very romantic and riveting geek update!
Laptop: So far, our new 13” MacBook Pro has been a fantastic travel laptop. The battery on this thing lasts forever, due in part to the 256GB SSD (solid state drive), which I’m guessing takes less power than a traditional hard drive. Our only challenge so far has been sharing one computer between the two of us. We’ve been surprised by how often we both need (ok, want) to use the computer, even when we don’t have internet. Between writing blog posts, downloading and culling through our latest photos, responding to emails, and general travel planning, there’s a lot to do on the ol’ ‘puter. If anyone knows of a really lightweight, compact Bluetooth keyboard that works with an iPhone, we’d love to hear about it. It could really come in handy.
Internet: Not to sound too much like my Dad (sorry, Dad), but internet in New Zealand is not cheap! Nor is it fast, or common, or plentiful, and did I mention how expensive it is? We regularly see places charging NZ$20-25 (minimum) for 24 hours of internet access, and the rate per-hour goes way up if you don’t opt for the full day option. The connections are mostly slow broadband speeds (usually shared by numerous other backpackers, too), and they usually have serious limits on the number of megabytes you can use, often barely enough to grab email, browse Facebook, and let the latest incremental backup run to completion. What’s that Mark Benioff, “cloud computing” is the solution to all our problems? Not traveling in New Zealand, baby.
Backups: Speaking of backups, what a Charlie Foxtrot Mozy for Mac has turned out to be. My sincere apologies to all the people I’ve recommended this turd to (it worked great for me for the last few years on Windows and reasonably well on Mac until recently). I ran into a glaring bug which required me to completely uninstall the software, then reinstall it and set up my entire configuration again. Major downside: now my 100+GB of data that was already backed up needs to be uploaded to their servers again (smart). Uh, not going to happen from here, folks. In the meantime, I’ve opted to only backup our shared documents (photos, videos, blog posts, travel docs, etc.) and leave Laura’s and my personal docs at risk. I’ve also been researching other options; Carbonite looks pretty good, and today I discovered CrashPlan, which looks very promising (it lets you backup to multiple places at once, including external drives, other friends’ computer(s) [over the internet], and their own online storage).
Photos: We (meaning I) have had some interesting challenges getting our plentiful, hi-res photos processed and uploaded to Squarespace. First issue: it turns out Squarespace doesn’t pay attention to EXIF tags within JPEG images, so all of our vertical photos were uploading sideways. I tried a number of stop-gap solutions, including opening each photo manually in Photoshop (and eventually Preview on the Mac) and saving it rotated correctly without the EXIF tag. Too much work, and technically rotating the images this way loses some quality in the JPEG image. Finally, I found a great little cross-platform utility called ‘jhead’ (hold your jokes, please) which can be run over a whole set of images – landscape and portrait – to rotate the vertical ones and clear the EXIF tag. Score! (I know you’re all as excited as I am.) Next up: saving bandwidth. I was looking for a simple utility to resize entire batches of photos down to a reasonable size for uploading and viewing on the web. In the end, I went for the oh-so-nerdy ImageMagick, which is a collection of command line image processing tools I’ve used before. It’s all good now… adding captions is now the most time consuming part of the process of adding a new gallery.
Kindles: Home run on the two international Kindles we brought! I’ve already read three books since we left (the Books page on our website is coming soon), and these things last for days when you leave the wireless modem turned off (which is most of the time). The only gotcha we ran into is that there’s a $1.99 surcharge for international book delivery, which wasn’t made especially clear when we bought them. You can, however, download the e-books to your computer and transfer them to the Kindle via USB for free. Did I mention, though, how expensive internet is here?
Cameras: We love our Canon S90… super easy to use, photos look great, and I’ve even managed to do a few manual shots for some nice effects (slower shutter speeds to get the blurred moving water, depth of field fun, etc.). Sadly, we’ve barely used the other Canon digital camera we brought (G11), and we’ve also had more than a few instances where we wished we had a true dSLR for things like wide angle shots and telephoto. The Canon 5D I left at home is *way* too heavy and bulky for this long trip, but we’re considering sending the G11 home or selling it and picking up a cheaper, lightweight dSLR and one or two lightweight lenses. This would also require a new daypack strategy, though. We’ll see…
iPhones: We brought two iPhones with us on our trip. So far, the best thing I can say about them is that they make great alarm clocks! And iPods… we didn’t end up getting SIM cards for them in New Zealand to make domestic calls, since we figured Stray would be handling a lot of the booking of accommodations and activities for us on the road. We probably should have picked one up, though, given how often we’ve called ahead to book our own rooms (to make sure we get private double rooms, being newlyweds and all). Having two with us seems just silly now, so one of them may end up in the next care package home.
Video: Laura is having fun with the Flip video camera we brought, now I just need to figure out the best way to share the videos online (hopefully via the blog). Squarespace doesn’t make that super easy, so I’ve got some work to do to get them up there. There’s some pretty funny stuff, so hopefully we’ll have a few of the best ones up there soon.
Class dismissed! To keep Nathan coming back to the blog, I’ll try to give frequent, detailed updates on our various technology triumphs and travails, so don’t worry, you won’t have to wait long for the next Travel Tech Talk! Until next time… [Cue outro]
Sent from my iPhone