Greener Desktop

I’ve just arrived back from a belated honey moon with my wife. It was like many holidays for Australians in the northern hemisphere, a whirlwind tour of four countries in Europe. As Australians we have to do as much as possible. Since getting there and back takes the best part of three days, unlike our northern hemisphere friends.

Although going overseas for Australians seems like a national past time even with the jet age it still means long travel hours, much cost and a need to make the most of our time when on holidays.

None of what I say is extraordinary on its own but for the fact that this was the first time we did not lug around with us any travel guides – You know those heavy tomes full of coloured tabs and scrawled notes in the margins. These books that are the the mark of a lost tourist. You see them and their owners at the cafes near tourist areas. You see them a mere street away from the major tourist attractions with the owner gesticulating at a page to an obviously confused local.

This time we decided to ditch the guide book. All four we would have needed to make our way through England, France, Portugal and Spain and instead took a single mobile phone. A smart phone.

One cannot discount the need for a guide, of some description or another. However, we found that the benefits a travel guide book bring a traveller can now be wrapped up in a little phone 1/4 the size of your typical guide book and so much lighter. No longer does the weary tourist have to lug around lugage containing more weight in paper than clothes.

This article will cover what our particular device and approach to traveling did for us. Depending on how you like to organise your holidays and which mobile phone you own your mileage (so to speak) will vary.

Planning the trip

We take our trip planning quite seriously when traveling and in fact I do have to admit we found the travel guide books quite handy in choosing which destinations to go to and four how long but there are also a plethora of forums on the internet like the ever popular Trip Advisor that will give you as good advice if not better. An itinery was built up using Excel and plane tickets booked through travel agents and online. This itinery along with all the travel documents and email receipts were stored on the phone as well as printed out.

Day by day guides were built from information on message boards, guide books, Wiki Travel, friends advice and historical research. When matched with a good itinery we had a fairly good idea up front of what do do each day. There are also electronic travel guide books available for most of the major smart phone platforms from the various publishers.

Each hotel that we booked was plotted on Nokia’s Ovi Maps service and synchronised with my Nokia E71’s maps software. This would later prove invaluable in making it from our arrival point into the city to our hotel.

I also visited the Wiki Travel page for each town, city, region and country we were going to visit or were even thinking of visiting and saved the web pages for offline use. While Wiki Travel is no Lonely Planet replacement the information supplied did supplement some of our research in our day by day guides.

Getting Around

Nokia/Ovi maps both on the phone and on the desktop is one of the most amazing and fully featured mapping experiences there is. Nokia should not be shy about maps.ovi.com this site equals if not beats Google maps in every area. On the desktop it’s just neat but on your mobile it is invaluable. To be able to plot all the places you will be going to ahead of time and synchronise them with your mobile then have access to the locations and even 3d models of the major tourist destinations is just something no one else can offer. Offline anyway, and offline is the keyword. Roaming charges are just too prohibitive to depend on mapping applications like Google maps which require a constant connection. Ovi Maps stores everything on your phone.

Keeping a travel diary

Active notes on the Nokia is a great application which allows you to combine text notes with sound recordings, video and photos to create a truly multimedia log of your journey. The only regrets I have about it is that there was no easy way to just publish our day’s exploits to this blog with the press of a button. Which is probably a good thing as writing notes on the go is rather unpolished and I will over the next few weeks take my brief notes and give them some polish. Eventually publishing some travel blog entries.

www.flickr.com

The downsides

Roaming – data charges when overseas are exhorbitantly expensive. You need to make sure you disable any 3G connectivity if you don’t feel like being charged $20 a megabyte. Use Wi-Fi where available. I became an expert at spotting “free wi-fi” signs while on holiday and even two weeks later I’m still spotting them back home.

Positioning -  The built-in GPS receiver on mobile phones is woeful. They all rely in some form or another, on data connections, which cost money. This is called Assisted A-GPS. Without A-GPS you need a good distance between buildings otherwise the phones internal GPS doesn’t get a good enough signal. In these situations knowing how to navigate just using a map and the closest cross street comes in handy. The phone we took with us doesn’t have an internal compass which as all orienteers know would have been very useful when the internal GPS failed us.

Next time we’ll probably invest in an international roaming data package which brings down the cost of data when overseas but at least for Australians can cost as much as a night in a 4 star hotel. The next phone I buy will also need to have a compass just in case GPS fails us.

Summary

We’re never going back to lugging around travel books. They are heavy, smelly and a one thousand page book contains about 990 pages of information you don’t need. The smart phone is quickly becoming a true pocket sized computer.

I wrote an entry a while back about my attempt to get 5000 visitors to my blog in a week (it usually averages about 100). Suffice to say I failed. The reason I failed is that I lost interest. The pattern of write, promote, get a few hundred visitors then rinse and repeat got boring 2 days in. There was nothing in it for me. I didn’t spark any huge debates. I ran out of interesting things to write about so starting on the mundane. I was so over the idea of another storm of digg or reddit users coming past and pooing all over my opinons I just gave up.

So back to what Social Media can do for you. The short answer is not much. The longer answer is that while it provides very good short term traffic and a fair bit of buzz about your site the longer term effects are pretty much zero. After the initial spike there’s usually a couple of days where visitor numbers are still up but that all drops off eventually. The average user doesn’t provide much value either. They don’t stay around and read more stories, they don’t click ads because they’re not after something to buy. In fact you could pretty much say they’re just a waste of bandwidth.

For example in the period of April to May this year visitors to this site from Stumbleupon consumed an average of 1.2 pages. Their average time on site was just 12 seconds. Not even enough time for them to read the first paragraph of most of my articles. In comparison, the average time all visitors to the site spent was 35 seconds. Almost 3 times as long. Compare both these types of visitors those from search engines. They know what they’re after. They consume 1.53 pages a visit and spend a whopping 1:36 on the site.

Since writing about my first dabblings in social media my site on paper looks like a success. Traffic is up almost 120% for the month and something like 400% for the year (I don’t have exact figures for this one). But alas because as soon as I stop posting to digg, reddit, stumbleupon, buzz and all the rest my traffic flops. It goes down to exactly the same number of visitors a day as it was getting months before I started. Why? Because Social Media does nothing for SEO and without people finding you on search engines you’re lost in a sea of websites.

Let me just wrap things up by saying this is just my experience. I believe social media is effective at driving short term traffic and that can be very useful for things like promoting one off events or selling a product. For building long term traffic though, I believe it’s useless.

This week Apple released a teaser list of what new features we’ll see in the iPhone/iPod 3.0 firmware. While the list certainly looks impressive and I’m sure many of them will be invaluable for iPhone users the list is mainly functionality that should have been released in the initial firmware. There are still a lot missing many of them downright obvious (like video recording) others impossible without the release of new phone hardware (video calling, higher resolution camera, replaceable batteries).

So what I’ll present in this article is an abbreviated list of the most important updates along with commentary covering why they’re so crucial to the success of the phone and even questioning why they weren’t present in the the earlier revisions of the phone. I’ll then wrap up the article with some of the commentary I’ve heard  from various users about what’s still needed to bring the phone up to scratch. Only then can you iPhone users look down on us smart phone users.

(more…)

First off – I need to admit I’ve had an on again, off again love and hate affair with Nokia. They’ve sold me many horrible phones over the years but there’s one thing they’ve always managed to get right and that’s user interface (UI). They’re also pretty good on the vast number of features as well. Given that the iphone also has a pretty good UI and may just fix all its feature flaws in the some time to be up and coming third generation this leaves Nokia in between a rock and hard place in terms of compelling things to offer. I also have to admit I hate iphones. I can’t get used to using such a tiny touch screen keyboard and I find the UI a bit like playing with Duplo or Lego.

(more…)

This list is written from the perspective of a Sydney sider visiting Melbourne. Having been there quite a few times you can be assured this point of view is not just “holiday goggles” in action.

1. hospitals sponsored by gambling companies

Where else in Australia or in fact the world can you find hospitals sponsored by the companies that quite possibly landed them there in the first place. Anyone for the Marlboro cancer ward or Heineken detox facility.

(more…)

Malcolm Turnbull MP. You sir, are an idiot.

The country is not falling to pieces and if it was why would you want to block a deficit designed to stimulate the economy.

Imagine this shocking scenario. One day in a neighbour hood not too dissimilar to yours a group of malevolent young troublemakers get hold of a camera, some postage stamps and a copy of Google maps. What do they do next? Read on..

Instead of writing letters to their pen pals about all the great places they’ve been to like kids would have in the good old days they use Google maps streetview to navigate around a city on the other side of the world. A city they have never been to.

They find strange houses like this one, the old and frail, the mentally disabled and the ridiculously wealthy. Large businesses and important places of government. Even the unfortunate are a target. Instead of learning about these places they do something shocking.  They take a photo of their bottom and mail it to those addresses. They keep doing it until they run out of stamps.

How many people did they manage to traumatise? How many people’s sensibilities were shocked and shattered? All with the aid of Google street view. Is street view a valuable online tool or terrorist’ss aid I ask you.

Now for something completely stupid….

I’m not sure if this is classified as animal cruelty or not.

In the first post of this series I briefly explained how to go about preparing yourself for painting. In the rest of the series, however many it takes to describe the whole project, I will document exactly how I go about making the painting.

Preparing the surface

Whether you are using canvas, paper, plastic, glass or even concrete there will inevitably be some prep work involved. This work is done to ensure your paint sticks, and sticks for a long time. With canvas, you’ll find that the cheap frames made in Asia and available in arts and discount stores will claim that they are already prepared. It would be prudent to insure your painting by adding another generous coat. of gesso. The gesso can always be mixed with your base (or background) colour if you’d like to save yourself a bit of time in waiting for the coat to dry.