Traditionally when we go on holidays, we used to go to a travel agency where they could either help us build a trip with their limited options, or sell us a package (something still interesting).
Now the biggest travel agency is Internet. We we create our custom trip, filter options like dates, type of travel and get listings of suitable options.
At the same time we can check for reviews of either the website we are using, the hotels they suggest or even the destinations.
The idea of the is post is to give you some of the tools I use and stress the idea that we don’t need to book expensive hotels anymore, that a new bree of websites where you can rent apartments wherever you are planning to, could threaten hotels in the future.
Flights
Kayak will let you search for the cheapest dates to go to your desired destination or suggest you cheap destinations for your selected dates. Kayak has an incredible iPhone app and a pretty good iPad app.
Kayak will give suggest you hotels, and it uses the most notable hotel booking sites such as expedia, booking.com, etc…
If you want Cheap Hostels and Bed and Breakfasts, the we use: HostelWorld, it is great for that.
A cool resource for knowing if the hotel you are about to book is OK with tons of reviews, is: tripadvisor (also for iPhone and iPad).
Another cool tool for hotels (specially for the US) is room77 a website where they show you the best rooms for a specific hotel, with the views and so.
but… who want hotels?
Who wants to book a hotel when you can find a great located and flat or a room shared at an incredible spot…
We went to Paris booking an apartment with hometown, luxury apartments for a fraction of what you pay for a hotel, located at the heart of Paris (highly recommended). I also used Isabel’s apartments in a couple of occasions, also great apartments, even if the website is not that nice.
Here is where I want to go: big websites covering apartments all around the globe.
The most notable:
Airbnb (my favorite): this one is the more professional website, the one with more investment in it. It is incredible the choice you can find there, apartments, rooms, everywhere!
Homelidays: this one is strong in Europe. You can find a nice house in the beach, with swiming pool for a fraction of what you would pay for a hotel…
Now if you want to sleep for free, then you have to use couchsurfing: a huge network of people all around the globe that will let you use their couch to sleep for free.
If you want the hands-down, easiest way to embed practically anything on your blog or website, have we got a tool for you!
The nature of the web is such that sharing and republishing content is common — and often even encouraged. The problem is, we increasingly store bits of our data on various services scattered across the web. Aggregating that content into one centralized personal hub can be time consuming — requiring user to manually copy text and links or upload files and photos — or fiddling with RSS feeds trying to make content automagically appear.
Twitter released a very cool tool to allow publishers to embed tweets in their blog posts, but the process is overly complex for most users, with plugins needed to streamline the process. Why can’t you just paste a link to a Twitter status in a blog post or webpage? It turns out, you can.
A Quick Introduction to oEmbed
A technology called oEmbed, in existence for a number of years, was built to solve the embeddable content problem. oEmbed is an open format, designed to let web publishers easily embed content such as photos, video, rich content — and automatically display other content by typing in a URL. Providers like YouTube, Hulu, Flickr and Vimeo all support oEmbed, meaning that pasting a URL for one of those services into a system with oEmbed support should allow users to quickly embed rich media.
WordPress, the world’s most popular CMS, has had basic oEmbed support since WordPress 2.9. Plugins for most other popular platforms exist, too. The problem is, keeping an updated list of the providers that support oEmbed and keeping libraries up to date isn’t a streamlined process.
Embedly: Secret Sauce to Web Embed Fun
In March, we wrote about the startup Embedly, which has developed a platform for converting URLs into embeddable content. Embedly is already in use by companies such as Storify, bit.ly and TweetDeck.
Embedly uses the oEmbed spec to add embed functionality to a growing list of services — 218 at the time of this writing — by interfacing just with the Embedly API.
When we first wrote about Embedly, our post focused on how third parties can use Embedly to provide rich-media previews in their own apps or to create their own embed targets. Embedly Pro also lets its users bring rich embeds to mobile users.
Still, the basic free Embedly service is extremely powerful. In fact, when paired with a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, it makes embedding rich content a snap.
How to Use Embedly
Embedly has libraries available for a host of different client and server-side web languages, including jQuery, Python, Ruby and PHP. For users who don’t want to mess with writing their own tool, Embedly has built its own JavaScript tag and WordPress plugin. Community-developed plugins for Drupal and Joomla also exist.
Since the WordPress plugin was developed by Embedly itself (and we use WordPress at Mashable), here’s a brief overview of how easy it is to use Embedly to bring rich content to your website.
Install the Embedly Plugin
The first step is to download and install the Embedly plugin. Activate the plugin and you can select what services you want to enable from the Embedly menu in the WordPress dashboard.
Embedly frequently updates its service list, and you can run an “update services” command to get access to more libraries.
Paste URLs Into Your Posts
The next step is to simply enter a URL on its own line into your posts or web pages. Each service has slightly different parameters for how URLs should be entered, but in general, the base URL is all that is needed.
To embed a Twitter status update, for instance, you just need to enter in the URL to that update. The Embedly API page has the parameters for each service supported by Embedly.
Enjoy Rich Media Embeds
That’s it. You can now enjoy and share media from 200+ web services across your site.
The Tumblr support is one of my favorite features — simply entering the URL for a post will embed the content of that post. If it’s a photo, the photo is displayed; if it’s a video, you’ll see the video in its player, and so on.
On the Twitter end, Embedly’s Blackbird Pie implementation is a lot easier than any other method we have seen. The company even has basic support for Twitter Photos.
280daily is quite possibly the future of consistent journaling and the easiest way to create a searchable archive of your life.
Secure, completely private, encrypted and safe.
How could you put 280daily to use? Below are 7 possibilities.
Journal. Realistically keep a journal, 280 characters only takes 2 minutes!
Travelling. You’re too busy having fun to write down every detail!
Business. Keep track of your business life.
Sport. Running a marathon? Track your progress.
Food Diary. Losing weight or getting fit?
Target Progress. Record progress of a large task.
Backwards To-Do List. What did you get done today?
This website offers you a very cool service (in the US so far).
Room 77 is a site (and iPhone app) that helps you choose the right room in a hotel.
Normally you go online and book a room, and in the same hotel you could have very different room, one facing the sea, one with a building on the site. The idea is to have a database of the best rooms for each hotel… cool isn’t it?
Lanyrd, via Twitter, track event sessions and keep up with favorite speakers — at all stages in the conference lifecycle.
Some newlywed couples work to produce an offspring on their honeymoon. Most don’t labor towards birthing a startup. But that’s exactly what British entrepreneurs Natalie Downe and Simon Willison did on their post-nuptial adventure. After traveling in Europe and Africa, the couple caught ill in Casablanca and extended their stay and booked an apartment to recover.
The pair have a shared love for building projects in their spare time — which is why, with all that extra time in a bedroom, they managed to create and release an early build of Lanyrd. Within two hours of its launch, Downe and Willison saw the site generate more than 14,000 visits.
After finding immediate success with social media denizens, the couple applied to Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Lanyrd was accepted and has since relocated to Mountain View, California to complete it. The site remains a largely bootstrapped effort, though the couple did accept the $150,000 in convertible debt offered up by Start Fund.
Willison calls Lanyrd “the IMDb of conferences” — except that its content is crowdsourced. The site asks its users to do the heavy lifting for them by filling in the blanks on each conference: sessions, speakers and content. The incentive? The same as at any conference: self-aggrandizement. Organizers will go to any lengths to promote their events. Speakers want to flesh out their profiles by adding past, present and future engagements. And everyone wants to see useful conference content.
“Conferences are traditionally insufficient for transferring knowledge,” says Willinson. “Longer term, this is about capturing the value of what’s shared.”
Lanyrd’s tie-in with Twitter is ingenious — and almost spooky. Sign in with your Twitter handle, and you’ll automatically be greeted with a smorgasbord of contacts and upcoming conferences, drawn from your Twitter relationships. You may see that Lanyrd knows you spoke at a trade show last month, or that you’re on a panel this fall. The site already lists 6,000 crowdsourced conferences and 30,000 user profiles.
Downe and Willison opted to use Twitter’s social graph — rather than Facebook’s, say — because they believe the “follow” has more aspirational value than the “friend.” You likely already follow the people you’d like to know, the speakers you’d like to see talk. According to Lanyrd, you’ve already composed a list of the thought leaders you’d like to bump into at an upcoming conference. So Lanyard is well positioned to find the sessions of social relevance to you.
Since users are encouraged to add speakers and their Twitter names to sessions, the speaker need not be a Lanyrd user to have a Lanyrd presence. On signing up, you may notice your conference history has already been charted for you by your Twitter followers, organizers or fellow attendees.
Next up, Lanyrd has its sights set on South by Southwest, held in Austin next month. The startup launched its unofficial guide to the show Tuesday to help users find which sessions their Twitter friends are attending, and stay current on slides, videos and notes.
The SXSW tool marks Lanyrd’s first real test at a major conference. At worst, the event will provide a trove of data and real-world experiences that Downe and Willison can use to better determine how to serve users while they’re attending conferences.
Downe and Willison describe the chain of events following their June 2010 nuptials to their present day found status as an unexpected, whirlwind affair. Their story, and their startup, are still in their nascent stages. The couple will graduate from the Y Combinator program in March, and may be forced to return to the UK when their visas expire. But location may matter little to a startup that has successfully leveraged the power of an international hit like Twitter.
If you have made the switch to Google Chrome, as I did long time ago, then this tips are is going to save you some time:
Did you close by mistake a tab? Click Command+Shift +T and there you have it again. (Control+Shift+T for Windows)
Going to the search bar?
Click Command+L and the cursor moves to the search bar selecting everything so you can just start typing
Synchronising Extensions, bookmark on all your computers using Chrome?
Go to Preferences, Personal Stuff and log in with your Google apps or Gmail account. You can sync bookmarks, extensions, forms, etc… across all your computers using Chrome. Neat.
You normally search using Google, but if you often search in other search engines, such as wikipedia, amazon, bing, etc… you can create easy shortcuts without having to go to their websites.
If you right click on the search bar, you have the option of edit search engines. There you can say for instance that the shortcut for wikipedia is wiki, so whenever you start a natural search with wiki in the bar it will fix wikipedia and search the next words in wikipedia. See the screenshots:
Since I have my iPhone 4 I have noticed that iPhoto sometimes imports things twice from my iPhone, so I end up with some duplicates.
I don’t know if this is due to the fact that I have tons of photos in the iPhone and in the iPhoto, or that this is the 4th iPhone synchronizing with iPhoto or that we are synchronizing 2 iPhones…
What I know is that I have duplicates and I could not find an easy way to get rid of them…
I use iPhoto on my macbook to sync my iPhones photos. The iPhone camera has become my main camera.
My nikon d300 I sync with a PC (multimedia) running windows 7 and picasa (more than 250Gb of photos).
Basically what it does is to identify the duplicate photos and add a comment saying that it is a duplicate. They you can search them and bin them. Pretty straight forward. It has many options but the default worked fine for me.
The problem is that the thumbnails can be duplicated too, and even if they have another program for that, if you start iPhoto holding Command Key+Option, then you have the option of rebuilding thumbnails.
The features of the Duplicate Annihilator are:
Easily find and annihilate duplicates created internally by iPhoto or during import.
Compare images using different algorithms to detect and understand differences.
Detect duplicates using effective algorithms using electronic checksums like MD5 and CRC32.
Detect duplicates by using file specific meta data such as filename, dimensions, filesize, Exif creation date or date of creation.
Delete duplicates upon detection or mark them with a keyword to make them easily found using iPhoto features like search or smart folders.
Makes your iPhoto slimmer and faster.
Only uses standard Apple features and API’s. No hacking nor tampering with iPhoto system files.
Most of the domain names are already taken. For the .com .net and .org, the first ones to appear, any combination of 6 or less characters is nearly gone… so you either buy in the resell market or you use one of the latest released such as .cc or .co or country base such .ly , .es etc…
A great tool to add creativity to your domains is domai.nr
Do you have snow where you live? Would you like to use your bicycle but it is too slippery?
Well, here you have a DIY tip:
SNOWPOCALYPSE!
No matter how much we swear we’ve learned our lessons, Seattle always seems to get caught by surprise by the snow. There we were, minding our own business with our feet all toasty in our sandals and socks, when the temperature plummeted and it turned into Juneau in January. While this year the City did a much better job than last year at preventing widespread carnage and destruction, we at Dutch Bike Seattle still didn’t bring in studded tires because it never snows in Seattle. Even if we had stocked them, I’m not sure they’d sell because it never snows in Seattle, right?
We found something else, though. Something else entirely.
You’re not going to believe it at first.
It’s quick, it’s cheap, and yes, it looks completely ludicrous.
BUT. It works. It works beautifully.
I can accelerate, brake, and corner with aplomb, even on the vile snowpack/sheet ice mix the plows leave in the bike lanes. The zip ties dig nicely into the hardest packed surfaces, but they’re thin enough not to bounce the bike around at low speed or on short pavement sections.
I’ve cunningly positioned the tie heads to dig in as soon as the bike goes into a corner while staying up and off the ground in a straight line. This is the place that the ties are most likely to interfere with the fenders, so if you’re installing these yourself be careful to make sure you have or can create the clearance.
It is at this point that I must admit that I didn’t dream up this amazing technique. It pains me to admit this not because my ego suffers, but because the zip-tie-DIY-bicycle-snow-chains idea appears to have originated with my favorite bicycle industry whipping boy: fixed gear hipster culture. Several years ago, I’m sure, some bright child with extremely tight pants and an asymmetrical haircut had a genius-caliber idea, and I hate that it wasn’t me. So here it is: Fixed gear street bike hipster guys, I’m sorry for the things I’ve said over the years. It’s not true that the only drink you like is 4Loko. It’s also not true that you’re not allowed to wear shoes that don’t match your bikes. You can wear whatever you want. And finally, you have come up with a good idea besides brightly colored deep-section rims.
BARGAIN hunters will need to be craftier when booking a trip if they want to get the best prices this year. It’s no secret that airfares are up and added fees for everything from checked bags to exit-row seats are pushing the cost of flying higher. On top of that, hotel bargains are expected to be harder to come by as business travelers begin to return, diminishing the need for hotels to discount rooms in major cities.
But that doesn’t mean a year in front of your television. There are still plenty of ways to cut costs. Here are 11 strategies — and some useful Web sites — to help you save on travel this year.
1. SHOP “PRIVATE SALES” A growing number of Web sites, including SniqueAway.com, TabletHotels.comand Jetsetter.com have flash sales of 20 to 60 percent off hotel packages to travelers on an invitation-only basis. Jetsetter, for example, recently offered a Friday night in January at the Angler’s, a boutique hotel in Miami, for $255 a night, down from the $359 offered at the hotel’s site. Another site, TripAlertz.com, works like Groupon for travel, meaning that the more people who book a deal, the lower the rate. For example, a four-night, all-inclusive stay at the Hilton Papagayo Costa Rica Resort & Spa was initially offered to members for $1,496, or 15 percent off, last month. After 55 bookings, the price dropped to $1,220. At TripAlertz and LivingSocial.com, which offers last-minute getaways, all you have to do is create an account to access the deals. A Google search for “Snique Away invite” turned up a registration form for SniqueAway.com that got me in.
2. BUY ON TUESDAY Most airlines begin sales on Monday evenings, and by the following day other airlines have usually matched the lowered fares on the same routes, said Anne McDermott, editor at Farecompare.com, which tracks price trends. Last month, for example, Virgin America had a sale on Dec. 13, with one-way fares as low as $79 on some routes, according to Farecompare. The next day, there were sales from AirTran, Southwest and American, with one-way fares from $59. Because sales are hard to predict, travelers looking for the best deal should start their searches three to four months in advance, when airlines begin to look closely at which routes may need a sale to fill seats.
3. SEARCH FOR COUPON CODES Practically every travel site includes a box at checkout for a promotional discount code. Sites like PromotionalCodes.com orCouponWinner.com organize such codes into categories so that you can search specifically for airline, car rental or hotel deals. A recent search turned up codes for deals like $94 flights between New York and New Orleans, 15 percent discounts on Avis weekly car rentals and $75 off of three-night Westin Hotels packages.
4. ASK FOR A REFUND Many airlines will refund the difference in price if the fare drops after you purchase a ticket (minus a change fee). Yapta.com helps get you that refund by tracking the price of your ticket and sending you an e-mail or Tweet when the price drops so that you can call the airline to claim the credit. A new site, Autoslash.com, offers a similar service for car rentals.
5. AVOID ROAMING CHARGESSkype and Truphone offer free apps for making cheap international calls using Wi-Fi, with rates that start at pennies per minute. You can pay as you go or sign up for monthly plans to make unlimited calls in certain countries for a flat fee: $13.99 a month for Skype calls to land lines and mobile phones in more than 40 countries, or $12.95 a month for Tru calls in 38 countries with TruUnlimited. Another option: the Vonage Mobile app for Facebook allows travelers to make free international calls over Wi-Fi to Facebook friends who also download the app.
6. CHANGE YOUR CREDIT CARD Most American banks charge currency conversion fees, typically up to 3 percent when you use your credit or debit card outside the United States. But there are some exceptions. Capital One does not charge foreign transaction fees, and Chase recently began waiving the fees on its British Airways Visa Signature Card, its Hyatt Card and the Priority Club Select Visa.
7. SAVE ON PARKING YOUR CARBestparking.com steers drivers toward the cheapest parking at off-airport lots near 79 North American airports. Rates are updated frequently, and sold-out lots are highlighted. A recent search for parking near Newark Liberty International Airport offered a snapshot of rates and locations on a map. The Renaissance Hotel lot was among the cheapest at $12 for 24 hours. There is also a free app for iPhone, Android or BlackBerry users.
8. WAIT A WEEK Avoid the crowds and save by traveling the week after a major holiday. A five-night ski vacation in Breckenridge, Colo., during the last week of December was priced at $1,988 a person, including airfare from Chicago, at Orbitz.com. For the following week, the same trip was listed at $1,037 a person. Similarly, a vacation including airfare from New York and five nights at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort dropped from $821 to $580.
9. NEGOTIATE Though many hotels say that they offer their best rates online, it pays to ask the front desk for a lower rate. My colleague Seth Kugel regularly uses this tactic, as he pointed out in a column last summer: “I arrive with a solid reservation but then check out five or six other hotels and go back and forth between them in an attempt to set off a price war.” The strategy saved him $20 a night in León, Nicaragua. I have had similar successover the phone with reservation agents at New York hotels like the Ritz-Carlton New York and 60 Thompson.
10. TRAVEL LIKE A STUDENT Student travel agencies like STA Travel, StudentCity and StudentUniverse have begun to extend their low prices to nonstudents and older travelers. While some of the deepest discounts are offered only to travelers enrolled in an academic program, recent college graduates can often save 10 to 25 percent with “youth fares.” For example, a recent search for flights in March on STATravel.com, which limits certain deals to nonstudents under the age of 26, turned up seats for $926 round trip on V Australia Airlines. The best rates for the same dates on Kayak.com were $1,187. Though it is not common for older travelers to use student travel agencies, it is possible to do so. There were no age restrictions for a discounted four-day Inca Trail trek with STA Travel for $674 a person, down from $899.
11. DON’T PAY TO CHECK A BAG Checking bags can quickly add up, with airlines charging between $15 and $35 a bag. Delta’s SkyMiles-branded American Express card allows you and up to eight others on the same reservation to each check a bag at no cost. And American Express introduced a travel-rewards card — the Blue Sky Preferred Credit Card — that offers travelers an annual $100 allowance to cover checked baggage, in-flight meals, entertainment or Wi-Fi purchases, and other fees, on any airline.
Those of you who know me, know that I love traveling and that I am a technofreak.
I would like to share with you some tips in order to have a great trip diary, using the latest techonologies.
Checklist
Option A
When I travel I pack my nikon d300 with a 10-20mm and a 18-200 lenses. My nikon has a 16Gb memory card. Unfortunately most DSLR do not have GPS unlike the iPhone or other smart phones, but there is a work around. Keep reading.
I also pack my GPS (Garmin Oregon 300), rechargeable batteries and the charger sure. If you don’t have a GPS you should consider getting one, and they are now very cheap. You don’t need a fancy GPS, you just need a GPS logger. No bluetooth even. No screen, just a GPS logger, that when you switch it on it starts recording your trail, and once back home or with your laptop, you just plug it in and extract the .gpx file. I will explain what to do with it. You can but very cheap GPS at Dealextreme a Hong Kong based online shop full of gadgets at ridiculous prices… and shipping anywhere int the world is free. You can have a GPS for $35.
Now if you travel to remote places you can consider a good GPS with SOS function such as the SPOT.
Also if you don’t want to take the gpx file from the gps and use one of the ways I described further down there is a GPS logger (ATP Photo finder) that you sync the time with your camera, insert the SD card, and it tags them automatically. Not for Compact Flash and not for RAW images though…
If it is going to be a long trip, and I plan to blog properly, then I take my old sony vaio t series (10 inch screen) and an external 2.5inches Hard Disk.
Option B
Just your iPhone 3gs or 4. (Has a decent camera and GPS).
Option C
Both. Option A for more elaborated blogging, Option B for quick on the spot.
In addition to have a 5Mpx camera and shoot HD videos, the new smart phones have GPS so videos and photos are geotagged, and programs such as picasa (for Mac, PC and Linux) or iPhoto (for Mac) plot all your photos in a map which is great.
If you really like photography then you choose to take your DSLR with you, so then you have to take a laptop (and an external HD if it is an old laptop like mine) so you can take the photos out of the camera and put the in your blog, site or community. Or just to empty your camera.
I take both.
iPhone apps and Everytrail
When I first bought my first GPS (Garmin Vista) it was quite a job to be able to do something with the tracks you save. You needed a windows computer, nothing for mac, and the software that came with it was pretty bad.
Then Google Earth would allow you to import the tracks (.gpx files). It was great. It is still great!
Everytrail
Now there is a website that I love and I use as a main stop for GPS logging: Everytrail.
Everytrail is free. You can upload your .gpx file even directly from your gps, and there you can have all your tracks store, that you can tag, put some text, add waypoints with explanations, and edit them!! yes. You can make them public or private. Very very powerful tool.
Everytrail also gives you an embed code that you can put in your blog, where you see the trail you have uploaded, the waypoints you have inserted, stats of time, altitude, speed… and more.
Geotag your photos with Everytrail
Once I have written about my photography workflow. Now when I upload them to flickr, make sure you create a set for those photos in the same GPS track. So if you go out switch on your GPS logger, then all the fotos you take until you switch it off should be in the same set.
With Everytrail, you can select the flickr (or picasa, or uploading manually) set and it will import it. As the camera has a clock it will know when they were take it, and plotted into your trail map. Great.
Now you have to fine tune that. There might be a bit of missmatch between the time in the GPS, the timezone and the camera clock. You take one photo you know exactly where it was taken, drag it to the right place and , then click on “update offset based on this picture” and the rest will follow. Magical!!
Now you have your trail uploaded into Everytrail, you have corrected it, you have added notes as waypoints, and you have uploaded the fotos from flicker that have been geo tagged in Everytrail.
With Everytrail alone you have already a good blog for your trip, because you have a space to write, to give tips and to have the track an dall the photos along it.
In addition to this you can have the embed code and put it into you blog.
Everytrail in your iPhone
Everytrail is available for the iPhone. They have two apps, a free one and a paid one. They are not very good. There is a free app, though, that uses Everytrail as a back end which is absolutly great!
Trailhead iPhone app (from the north face)
Last August the north face released an iphone app (free) that uses everytrail track. This app is just awesome. When you start it you have two main options, start tracking (and it is reasonable on what you use of battery) or see nearby trails. You can track even if you don’t have GPRS or 3G. In this case you don’t see the maps (in the pro app for everytrail you can download offline maps).
Then when tracking, at any given point you can add a photo or a note (not a video yet).
So in summary, with the iphone alone you do what I explained before without the need of a camara, a gps, a computer and a website.
Blogging tools
When traveling often you don’t have internet. Blogging everyday is therefore difficult.
For that reason you should use an offline blogging tool. The best one out there is Windows Live Writer. For the mac you have Ecto or MarsEdit, but Live Writer is much better.
The advantage of using one of this offline tools is that you can write every day, add your photos and so, and when you have internet, then you upload everything.
If you are planning to use GPS info with everytrail, you should do it online though.
This offline tools are good for blogs such as wordpress, blogger etc…
I use wordpress and there is a great plugin called mappress for having a google map where you can easily add a waypoint with html code in it if you wish. It is handy if you want to show your readers where you are sleeping, or what to visit for instance.
Alternatively you can simply go to google maps, log in and under my maps, create a map. It is very easy. Then you can copy the embed code and past it into your blog.
Blogging sites
If you don’t have a blog, and you don’t blog regularly, they you can use one of the dedicated free blogs for travelers. My favorites are:
Travelpod is a great place full of good tips and travelers. You have maps, you can upload photos, … it is a tailored blog for travelers.
Mapvivo is more of a travel diary. It is based on having a map and putting what you do in it.
Geotagging your photos at home
To geo tag the photos using everytrail is OK, but you will probably would love to have your photos in your PC/Mac geotagged as well.
Well there is a way to do it too, even if you camera has no GPS. As I mentioned with a GPS logger, and a normal camera you can.
Select the photos you took within the period of geotagging. Then use one of these programs:
The best one is GeoSetter (just for PC unfortunately)
GeoSetter (free) allows you to take your photos, the log file of the GPS and geo tag the photos automatically. You can easily take one that you know exactly where it was taken, position it and the rest will follow. GeoSetter will write in the EXIF header of the file, so if you now import them to Picasa, iPhoto, Flickr, etc… they will have GPS information.
For Mac there is a paid program which does pretty much the same: Geophoto. It is even nicer, but not as complete as the Geosetter.
Also GPS photo linker. (tags Raw and it is free). Take a look at the demo, for me is the winner.
With this I modify my photography workflow. The first thing to do is to geotagg the raw photos, then apply DxO for corrections and to create JPEGs.
Here an example of the embed code from a trip with photos in everytrail in Puerto Rico. If you mouse over the bottom you can see a link to the stats and to the slideshow. Also mousing over the spots of the photos. San Juan de Puerto Rico
While mobile phones have become a lot more capable in the past few years, the connection between the printer and your phone is still very weak.
For instance, if you are using a BlackBerry or an iPhone, how do you print any of the presentations or spreadsheets that you have as email attachments? Or if you are viewing driving directions on Google Maps using an iPad, how do you send that map to the printer?
Your phone’s app store will have a few printing apps to let you wirelessly print files but if you want to save a few bucks, you can simply use Dropbox to print documents from your phone to any printer without requiring any additional software.
Some upcoming printers will have built-in support for mobile printing via email but with Dropbox, you get the same feature without requiring any new hardware.
Before we get into the details, watch the video above as it shows how printing from a mobile phone actually works through Dropbox (apologies for the bad audio quality).
Print Files from any Mobile Phone through Dropbox
The workflow is like this. You download a small utility on your computer that runs in the background and constantly monitors one of your Dropbox folders for any new printing jobs.
You can send files for printing from your mobile phone through email or using any of the Dropbox mobile apps. As soon as Dropbox downloads the file locally, the utility will send it to the default printer. Once the file is printed, it gets archived to the logs folder.
To get this thing running on your computer, please follow these easy steps:
Step 1: Make sure that you have Dropbox on the computer that is connected to the printer.
Step 2: To send print jobs from your mobile device to the printer, you have two options.
Alternatively, you can send files from your mobile phone to Dropbox using email. Just connect your Dropbox account with Habilis and they’ll give you a unique email address – any files or attachments sent to this address will automatically appear in your Dropbox folder.
Step 3: Download this zip file* and double-click the eprint.vbs file (see the source code). The script will create a sub-folder inside your main Dropbox folder called PrintQueue where all the mobile print jobs will queue up and another sub-folder called logs where all the completed jobs will be archived.
[*] VBS scripts are Windows-only but there are workarounds for Mac OS X and Linux as well.
Step 4: You are now all set to print files from our mobile phone. Just send a test file from your mobile phone to that secret email address, or upload it through the Dropbox mobile app, and your printer will turn it into a hard copy almost instantly.
The utility can also handle multiple files in one go and it should print almost all file formats for which you have an associated application on the computer. If you would like to shut down the eprint utility, launch Windows task manager and end the “wscript.exe” process from the list.
If you have trouble running the above script on your computer, there’s a chance that you may have associated the file with Notepad or some other text editor. Press shift and right click the file in Windows Explore and choose “Windows Based Script Host” under Open With. Alternatively, open the command prompt, type “cscript eprint.vbs” and hit enter.
This is a tip by Aaron Ladage on how to do it in a Mac:
There’s a simple method for Mac that doesn’t require the VBS script:
1. Create a folder in Dropbox (mine’s called “Printing”), and within that folder make two more folders: “todo” and “completed.”
2. Fire up Automator. In 10.6, a box pops up asking you what type of template you want to use for your workflow. Choose “Folder Actions.”
3. At the top, where it says “Folder Action receives files and folders added to…” choose the “todo” folder from Step 1.
4. In Automator’s search box, type “print” and you’ll see an item called “Print Finder Items.” Drag that into your workflow and select your printer (I left mine default).
5. In Automator’s search box, type “move” and you’ll see an item called “Move Finder items.” Add it to your workflow and choose the “completed” folder you created in step 1.
6. Choose “Save as…” and give your workflow a name.
That’s it! Anything you drop in the “todo” folder will now automatically open its respective app, print it and file it for you.
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