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.

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.

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.