Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Skype - Call from anywhere to anywhere

This isn't directly related to my trip, but great news none-the-less. Yesterday, Skype announced that all phone calls to landlines and cell-phones within the US and Canada are now free. If you aren't familiar with Skype or haven't tried it yet, now is a good time to download it and give it a shot. All you really need is a microphone for your PC and some speakers/headphones.

Those with a little more tech-savvy might want to check out Portable Skype, which allows you to take Skype with you on a USB drive and use from anywhere. While it's only calls to phones in the US that are currently free, their rates for all international calls are still very cheap when compared to normal phones.

Monday, May 08, 2006

Updated Itinerary

Ok, finally something useful. It seems pretty late in the game at this point, but I'm only now finalizing my itinerary. Nothing much has changed really, it's just been a matter of flight details etc. I'll still have a few details to work out once I'm on the road, but I don't anticipate any major changes. Below is my trip:
  • Boston: June 2 - 5
  • UK (London): June 5 - 15
  • Turkey/Croatia/Greece: June 15 - Sept 14
  • Kenya/Ethiopia/Tanzania: Sept 14 - Dec 16
  • South Africa: Dec 16 - Jan 10
  • India/Nepal: Jan 10 - April 1
  • Thailand/Cambodia/Vietnam: April 1 - July 1


Friday, May 05, 2006

Voice

One of the great features of blogger is the ability to post audio to your blog via AudioBlogger. AudioBlogger allows you to call from any phone and make recordings directly to your blog over the phone. The downside however, is that there is no way to upload audio-files directly to the blog from the web. In comes GabCast: a third-party site that allows you to host audiofiles and embed them in your blog, similar to what YouTube does with video clips.

Now if I only had some audio to post...

I know, I know, I promised no more gear blog entries, but I've got to throw this in there. My final purchase, to facilitate all this audio wizardry, was the Olympus WS-100 Digital Voice Recorder, along with the Griffin Lapel Mic. So keep your eye out for a few audio posts in the future.