Geotagging Photos

Being the super-nerd that I am, after Flickr came out with their new photo map, I caved to an idea my friend Clint had suggested at the beginning of my trip and bought a small GPS unit to use in geotagging my photos, so that they will now automatically show up on the map at the exact spot that I snapped them. For anyone else interested in doing this, here is a good primer on geocoding using the same GPS receiver I picked up; for the technically inclined.

My camera caused a bit of trouble with the 'Time Zone', so if anyone does actually decide to give this a try and runs into any issues feel free to shoot me an email and I can let you know what I had to do to finally get it going.

Flickr Photo Map

I know that I have espoused the kewlness of flickr.com to many of you in the past and have even been successfuly in getting a few of you to sign up and load your pictures up there. Well for a few more of you hold-outs (especially fellow travelers), now there is yet another reason to sign up: the flickr photo map. Essentially, this is a fairly easy and intuitive way to represent the location your photos were taken on a map. There is a blog entry with details on how to get started and how it works. I've gone ahead and slapped all of my trip photos onto a rough map for anyone interested.

If anyone has any trouble getting this going, feel free to shoot me an email and I'll be happy to help you out.

Map link

The map link that I posted earlier was a javascript popup that worked for me in Firefox, but doesn't seem to be working in IE. Here is the direct link. I will setup a permanent popup link soon. Hope this one works for everyone: Map.

Where in the world is Seth?

For a while I have been wanting to have some sort of map depicting where I have been and where I am. After a helpful nudge from my buddy Jeff I finally got motivated to put it together. Here is a map that pinpoints my current and past locations with links to corresponding blog entries: Map.

This is just version 1 and I will probably make a few minor adjustments/refinements. If you have any suggestions please let me know.

CouchSurfing

In the course of my travels I've received and passed on a lot of helpful tips to other travelers. One of the sites that has been mentioned to me several times is the CouchSurfing Project, a website for helping people offer and find couches to sleep on all over the world. I decided to sign up a couple days ago and test it out. It sounds great in theory, certainly as a way to meet some great people and save a few bucks here and there, but has the potential to be a bit sketchy. Luckily they do have some safe guards such as user and address verification, references, etc. I'm anxious to try it out a few times and will report my findings. Another similar resource is Global Free Loaders.

Cheap Flights

Finding cheap flights has become a pretty important part of getting around between all of these different countries/cities. There are a lot of flight finding websites out there, but a few of the ones that I have found to be the best are: skyscanner, Kayak, Flights.com, and EasyJet (europe only).

Photo Recovery

Every now and then something happens to your memory card, you pull it out too early, static charge maybe, who know, but all of a sudden all of those photos that you've taken over several weeks are gone. Luckily this hasn't happend to me yet, but it has happened to several people I know. For those of you that may run into this problem I wanted to let you know about a great photo recovery tool, that my buddy Tien found: Photorec. Photorec does an amazing job of doing a low level scan of your memory card to search for photos. Unfortunately, the interface is DOS based, but it is pretty straight forward and easy to figure out. Hopefully this will save a few of you in the future.

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.

Global Climate

As I've begun to finalize my itinerary (which I should have finalized and posted next week) and lock in time frames for each destination, I've been researching the climate in all of these places to make sure that it will indeed be warm the entire time I'm gone. I thought this info would be readily available and relatively easy to find, possibly in some central location. Alas, no such luck, as far as I've been able to find. I did find one site, Responsible Travel - Weather to Go, which lacks temp details but gives you a red/yellow/green assessment of each month for many countries. Some additional details can be found here. I will also continue to fill in the list below as I find sites for each individual country:

• Turkey
• Greece
• Croatia
• Kenya
• Ethiopia
• Tanzania
• South Africa
• India
• Nepal
• Thailand
• Vietnam
• Cambodia

Visas and Vaccinations

I spent a fair amount of time over the last few days figuring out what I needed to do regarding visas for all my destinations as well as what vaccinations I needed to get. I used the CDC Travelers' Health site to get a rough idea of what I might need. After contacting the local Colorado Springs Health Department, it looks like I'm going to need the full gamut of shots: polio, MMR, tetanus, typhoid, meningitis, hep A/B, yellow fever.

As for visas, the US State Department site does a good job of providing the entry requirements for most if not all countries. I was anticipating lots of visa related headaches, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case. For a few destinations (greece, croatia, south africa, thailand), no visa is needed for stops less than 90 days; for a few others (bali, kenya, turkey, nepal), I can pick up a visa upon arrival; and for the remainder (india, vietnam, cambodia), I'll have to pickup visas at their respective embassy's somewhere along the way.

Travel Resources

I thought it would be a good idea to compile some of the travel resources that I've used, and offer some info. A lot of these are under the 'Links' section, but this will be easier to update as I come across new resources.

Travel Independent - www.travelindependent.info

This is by far the single best, ultra-light/backpacking travel resource that I have come across and several of the resources below came from this site. This is a site that is, as far as I can tell, put together by a single person in the UK. It hosts roughly 200+ pages of info on what to do before you go, what to pack, where to go (including coutry/region summaries), what to do when you're on the road and a host of other valuable resources.

OneBag - www.onebag.com

This is another great 'traveling light' resource. The main thing I used from this site is the convenient PDF packing checklist.

The Travel Insider - www.thetravelinsider.info

A good resource for traveling in general. I haven't used this too much, primarily because the sites above were so comprehensive. This site does however include info that the others are lacking, including: how to book and buy tickets, airline reviews, info on security, and some gear info. Additionally this seems to be updated more frequently, as it has several article series about traveling.

REI - www.rei.com

This has certainly been my primary source for gear, mainly because they provide great info on all gear, can't seem to be beat on price, and have an amazing return policy that I can't find anywhere else.

The Mountain Chalet - www.mtnchalet.com

This is my other gear resource, which carries more specialized/high-end stuff that couldn't be found else where. This store is local to CO Springs, and I would highly recommend it to anyone local: the staff are incredibly knowledgable and friendly, and you can always find someone that has used the specific product(s) that you are looking at and will give you and unbiased opinion.

Mountain Hardwear - www.mountainhardwear.com

A great maker of high end outdoor/camping/etc gear: packs, tents, clothes. I will be taking a couple of their windstopper products.

Osprey Packs - www.ospreypacks.com

Great backpacks.

The North Face - www.thenorthface.com

More good gear, some what overpriced at times, but generally pretty good.

Patagonia - www.patagonia.com

More clothing gear, a bit on the pricey side but very nice.

Arc'Teryx - www.arcteryx.com

Another high end gear, pricey gear maker. Taking their shirt.

AirTreks - www.airtreks.com

A great site for finding complicated, multi-stop, international airline fares. They have a nice, intuitive tool that allows you to create your route by clicking on cities and when you're done it will find the best ticket options for you.

TravelTree - www.traveltree.co.uk

A great place to find adventure trips all over the world. The site is primarily gear towards European and Australian students taking a 'gap year', but its a good general resource for hunting down obscure trips to anywhere you'd want to go, ranging from straight adventure travel to overseas volunteer opportunities.

Guerba Adventure Holidays - www.guerba.com

A site for booking pre-packaged adventure holiday trips. Makes things nice and simple, if that's what you're going for, but also a great place to see what type of routes/trips you might want to do and then plan it yourself.

World Nomads - www.worldnomads.com

The best place I've found for international travel insurance, came recommended by both the Travel Independent site as well as personal friends.

Intro to RSS

For those not familiar with RSS, I thought I would give a brief overview and point out some tools that can help get you started. RSS stands for 'Real Simple Syndication', the basic idea is that RSS allows you to subscribe to some content that gets updated regularly, such as a blog or list of news headlines. You would use a tool, ie. RSS reader, to subscribe to the RSS Feed of that content and that tool would then automatically check for updates on a regular basis, such as every hour, and anytime the content is updated it will pull down the latest updates. Whats great about this is that it removes the need to manually check for updates. This may not sound like a big deal to some of you, but it's certainly saved me a lot of time. Now lets take a look at a few RSS tools/readers.

Online Readers

There are many, many online RSS readers out there most of which are terrible. It seems that everyone is now coupling an RSS reader with their online email clients, and you can find RSS readers in Gmail and the new Yahoo Mail. Based on my research the best online RSS reader is NewsGator. The advantage of using an online reader is that you can access your RSS feeds from anywhere which is quite handy. One of the major advantages of NewsGator is that in addition to being an online reader, if you want to pay a one time fee of $30 you can get their desktop client which will sync up with your online RSS feeds. Desktop RSS readers have their own advantages which we'll talk about next but I'd say that having an online reader and desktop client that work in tandem is definately the best option, but you have to be a pretty hardcore RSS fan to plunk down $30. The one disadvantage of online readers is that they don't notify you when one of your feeds is updated, you still have to login to check. This isn't too bad, especially when compared to checking many, many pages for updates withour RSS.

Desktop RSS Readers

As with online RSS readers, there are many, many desktop RSS readers most of which suck. There are some great ones out there that have a lot of powerful features, but you usually have to pay for these. Based on some trial and error my favorite desktop RSS reader is SharpReader. It is a very straight forward and intuitive feature that gets the job done, unlike most which are overly confusing for such a simple tool. The main advantage of desktop RSS readers is that they will notify you, via a small pop-up in the bottom right of the screen, when one of your feeds is updated, which takes all the work out of checking. The problem however is that if you have several desktop clients subscribed to the same RSS feeds on different computers the readers will not be in sync, meaning that after reading articles on one computer if you then go to the next computer those same articles will still show as 'new' which can be confusing. As a result, I think its pretty apparent why its best to have the online + desktop client option, but for those that are fiscally minded I would go with the desktop reader if you only use one computer primarily or the online reader if you want to have your feeds accessible anywhere.

Email RSS

A recent discovery has been Email RSS subscription. There are a couple of services out there that I have come across, R|Mail and FeedBlitz, that will actually allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed with your email address. The way this works is that everytime a feed is updated, rather than a reader pulling down the new content, that new content is emailed to you. If you really don't care about readers and you're only subscribing to one or two RSS feeds I think this is the best option, but be careful, if the feeds are updated many times a day you could end up with a lot of mail to sift through. I have R|Mail setup on the left side bar of the main page for my blog feed so feel free to use it to subscribe.

**Please note that when you sign up for R|Mail, you will get an email with a link asking you to confirm your subscription. Once you click on this link you will be redirected to their site with a notice stating stating that your 'Subscription has been activated'.**

Well I think that about does it for RSS. If anyone is interested in a more indepth look at what RSS is, check out this article. If there are any questions/confusions/comments please let me know. FYI...my RSS feed URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/awayaround.

Under the Hood

For any and all interested, I thought I would give a brief overview of all the great and free technology and services that go into making this blog the amazingly interactive, well oiled machine that it is.

Blogger

Obviously without Blogger there wouldn't really be a blog here. While that is fairly apparent, I've discovered that there is more to Blogger than meets the eye. In addition to being able to edit/post blog entries directly from the Blogger website, it also allows you to post via email or text message, as well as use the Audioblogger to post audio directly to your blog from any phone. For those who don't know, Blogger is owned by Google so you don't have to worry about your blog suddenly disappearing due to the company going under as with some other fly-by-night free blog sites. Based on my research I'd say that Blogger is the best option out there as far as free blogs go. For those interested in hosting their own blog, WordPress seems to be a better, more powerful alternative.

Flickr

For those not familiar, Flickr has become the definitive free online photo storage service. Several features that make Flickr so unique are its incredibly intuitive interface, ability to 'tag' photos for easier organization and searching, and unbelievable amount of storage: a free account allows you to upload upto 200MB of photos per month, with fully unlimited storage. Those with even greater needs can pay the $25 a year for a Pro account which allows upto 2GB of photo uploads a month and unlimited storage. Finally, Flickr is owned by Yahoo! so once again you don't have to worry about your photos disappearing suddenly.

YouTube

While I don't have any yet, I plan on adding some video to the blog in the near future and making it a regular feature while I'm out and about. When I do get around to adding some video, YouTube will be the one hosting all of it for me. Another great free service, YouTube allows you to store an unlimited number of videos (in various formats: avi, mov, mpg) for free, with the only limitation being that each video must be under 100MB. As if that weren't sweet enough, YouTube enables you to embed your videos into any webpage you like.

FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a service that allows you to syndicate your blog and supports all versions of RSS as well as ATOM feeds. For those not familiar with RSS (Real Simple Synciation), please see my RSS Primer.

R|Mail

Another nice RSS related tool is R|Mail which allows you to subscribe to any RSS feed with just an email address, so that everytime there is a new post you will get an email of that post.