The Technology

Apart from the blog, other technology has changed since 1975.  My digital SLR Canon 350D seems dated after only 5 years, but still takes great photos.  Unfortunately, the 50 mm lens does not fit it!  Apart from the camera, however, I have been spectacularly unsuccessful in mastering technology on the road, with several huge bills from Telstra to prove it. So I have given up and decided to copy people who do it better than I have done.

The first step is staying connected. While there is Wi-Fi at every airport and rail station and also in many hotels, I never seem to be able to connect to it. I have noticed that the more expensive the hotel the more expensive the Wi-Fi – so that it is generally free in a hostel, and up to $10 per megabyte in a 4 or 5 star establishment.  In any event, I need some connectivity when out and about – and data roaming is out of the question.  So I stole an idea from “Around the World” and purchased a Netcom MyZone wi-fi modem – about the size of a credit card.  I have combined this modem with a sim card from iPhone Trip.  The MyZone card provides wi fi across 3G which can be shared across several devices using normal wireless connection, while the iPhone Trip sim provides unlimited 3G data downloads almost anywhere in the world.  Unfortunately, Isle de Réunion, did not show up on the list, so I chose my activation date as the start of the French leg of the journey.  As it turns out, politically and administratively, Réunion is part of France, so the card would work here as well.  Remember that for next time!

I have installed the Truphone app on my iPhone which will allow me to make calls over wi-fi for 2 c per minute, so that will reduce the cost of the global roaming.  I also downloaded “700 City Maps” app to provide mapping without continuous downloading ( makes no sense with unlimited data!) along with a map of Réunion to stop me from being lost.  Not such a great solution for a number of reasons. The first is that the iPhone is too small to be a useful map except in emergencies. Secondly, the iPhone GPS is very poor, with an accuracy of anywhere between 150m and 1 km.  When I tried it today it put me in a park next to the beach.  Trouble was, I was in the hotel three streets away! And finally, the map does not expand to a useful scale and show all the street names. Maybe it will in the big cities.

My computing needs are still served by a Dell Inspiron 700m, six years old, speakers not working (headphones ok) one usb plug not functional and the hard disc filling up too often.  However, it is robust and reliable, so it is having one more holiday.

Then there is the Kindle.  I bought the Kindle DX (larger format version) so that I could read pdf files at a reasonable magnification, and it has proved a great success for 90 page board papers. So I brought it along to try to reduce the weight in my hand luggage.  Last year we spent 4 weeks in France and Korea starting late January, and I had finished the three (heavy) books which I did not want to throw away within the first week.  I read them twice, but still had a few gaps.  So I have loaded up the Kindle with some reading relevant to the trip, and some board papers! We will see how that goes.

I was very excited a few years ago to come up with the idea of resealable plastic bags to carry my cables plugs and chargers, but the bags always lost interest in resealing before the end of the trip.  So now I have decided to steal Vanessa’s idea of a click seal lunch box. A bit of a tight squeeze but the converter plug, the camera cable to connect to the laptop for downloading photos, the iPhone charger, the kindle charger and the charger for the MyZone all fit in.  I have seen some ads for consolidated USB chargers, bud did not find a suitable one to take this time.  Bringing all the chargers into one device is on the top of my technology wish list.

On with the trip.