As I Xi It v2.3

Having returned from my travels around Sweden and with many other trips in the pipeline for the rest of 2010, I thought it’d be appropriate to review my top three travel apps for the iPhone. A must have feature in travel apps is the ability to have them run offline without having to use data roaming which can be pretty costly (at the time of writing, O2 charge £3/MB for data roaming in Europe and £6/MB for the rest of the world).

When planning a trip, it’s always handy to have all your flight details and confirmations at hand. To keep organised, I recommend WorldMate. It’s free and the cool thing is that you can just forward your confirmations and booking details to either your unique WorldMate email address or the generic WorldMate email address (having linked your email address with it) and it’ll pretty much set up your trip itinerary for you. You can also manually tweak your itineraries for things like meetings or visits to museums and whatnot.

If you really want to travel light (no such thing for photographers hauling kgs of kit), you could leave your Lonely Planet and Rough Guide at home and replace it with TripWolf. Just select the city or country that you’ll be travelling to and download the guide before departure. Since TripWolf is based on integration of info from the Marco Polo guides and user generated info, it’s pretty much a constant work in progress so you should have the latest info everytime you update it. Most of the guides are free to download within the TripWolf app, but there are some places for which you can download a premium guide for a price, I think it’s something like £4/5. I assume it has more detailed info than the basic guide.

There’s nothing quite like immersing yourself in the local culture by learning the local lingo. To save on having to bring a separate phrasebook, I recommend Lingopal. Unlike the traditional paperbacked phrasebooks, it speaks to you! You can download individual language apps, a few are free and most are paid (only 59p each), there’s also a dedicated app to help you flirt in all their different languages as well as the complete bumper pack of all the phrases (travel, essentials, flirts, insults etc) in 44 languages. It has some pretty humerous phrases including Sophie’s favorite “Oj! Jag tappade glassen… Kan du slicka upp den?” and some of their insults are quite priceless like, my favourite, “Om jag skulle vilja höra från ett ashål hade jag släppt mig”.

I’ve installed the WPTouch plugin for this blog and it works pretty well. It greatly simplifies the interface of the site when viewed on an iPhone or any other mobile device.

Simple, elegant, fast. What more could I ask for?

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I’ve just been testing the voice search on the Google app for my iPhone and I can’t say that it’s as good as I’d expected. When I asked it to ‘search Xiyu’, it returned with ‘sexy z’. I also tried ‘Xiyu online’, but got nowhere close. Now, granted that those aren’t very standard things to search, so next I tried ‘Applied Environmental Microbiology’ and it returned with ‘applying for men to microbiology’. Now, while it’s fairly close phonetically, it’s not really close enough to be of much use. Nice try Google, but I think I’ll stick to good old typing for the time being.

One more thing before I go – I’m actually posting from my iPhone using the WordPress app. It’s fairly capable for blogging on the go. I think other blogging platforms have their own apps too. I love my iPhone.

Now I thought seamless integration of my iPhone with my computer as a remote was cool, then I came across Apple’s own app which lets me control my iTunes via wifi! Works mighty well too, I’m almost tempted to get a Macbook Pro now.

See here for more info.

Today I came across the coolest app ever for my iPhone, it works pretty darn well and best of all, its FREE!! It’s the Logitech Touch app which allows you to control your computer like a touch pad over wifi. All you need is the software for the computer you want to controll here and install the Touch Mouse app onto your iPhone. If you search for “Touch Mouse”, it should be the first app that comes up.

It was surprisingly easy to set up, all I did was install the software on my computer and then opened up the app on my iPhone, selected my computer which it automatically detected and voila, all done. So now I can use my computer with ease while I’m on the exercise bike! How’s that for multitasking?

Since my mobile (cellphone or handphone for non-Brits) contract has terminated, I upgraded to the very shiny black 16GB iPhone 3Gs. I’ve got to admit that when thinking about which phone to upgrade to, I was a little apprehensive about picking the iPhone since it’s just so common. But having delved closer, I can see why it’s so popular. It looks good and is fairly easy to use. I like that it uses iTunes so I’ve only got one piece of software to deal with my iPod and iPhone. No need to have multiple software to clutter up the computer.

There are some way cool apps you can download for it. My favourite so far is probably Urbanspoon with its scope feature giving that augmented reality feel to it. There’s also What Knot to Do by Columbia, the outdoors clothing people with a guide on knots! Language Translator is pretty good too and the auto detect language tool works fairly well when I tested it with what few languages I know.

I do miss real buttons though. The on screen keyboard is fine, but takes a little getting used to it. Not sure how well it’d work for those with fat fingers.

I never thought I’d be so thrilled with the purchase of a new battery for my netbook! The original 3 celled battery that came with my Aspire One initially gave me some 2 – 2:30 hours for Wifi and web surfing. About six months later, it dropped to around 1:20 hours. Pitiful for a mobile device.

So, the other day I decided to get an extended battery, one of those 9 celled ones and it might be about three times the size of the original battery, but it gives me about 6 – 7 hours of continuous use! Due to its size and design, it sticks out the rear and increases the hight at the back. Normally when I’m typing on a desktop keyboard, I like to have it flat, but with the netbook raised at the back, I actually find it more comfortable when typing reclining, on my knee or on a table. There is one issue though, with the back raised, it could slide around if you used it on a desk, so to solve that, I stuck on some rubber tape to the bottom of the battery.

It’s well worth the £55 or so I paid for it. Made by some third-party, Camera Sino it says. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s also made in China.

Original 3 cell on the left, brand spanking new 9 cell on the right.

Well, with the last few days of 2008 left, I thought it’d be appropriate to write a retrospective blog post. I don’t particularly like writing these things since they make me feel a little sad having to think about the good times and bad over the last twelve months.

Like most years, this has been a rather interesting year. This was the year that Xiao and I managed to finally visit Anja and her cows!! It was a great weekend spent in Cologne/Bonn where were did some of the touristy things and met Anja’s cows. It wasn’t all plain sailing travel-wise since when Jac, Kamil, Vincent and I travelled all the way to Wales in search of puffins were only turned away because the sea was too choppy. I guess there’s always next year.

Another interesting thing of note this year was the arrival of Cici, my black and white tuxedo patterned male cat with a girly name! He settled in fairly quickly and really has become of the family. In his spare time he enjoys catching birds, sleeping, eating, watching bad Chinese soaps with my parents in the evenings and attention seeking, especially when I’m on the computer and am actually doing something constructive!!

In terms of blogging, I’ve switched from a photoblog to a more conventional blog. I prefer the current style since I reckon it’s more visually interesting. I’ve also become more willing to experiment with the various bits of WordPress and have found some very useful plug-ins which I wished I’d found sooner!

This year I also became reacquainted with customizing the themes/visual styles for my computer(s). The last time I did anything of the sort was briefly back in 1999 when I was using Windows ’98 SE. Now all my computers have desktops to match their purpose.  Also this year, I added a netbook to my family of computers. Not really a necessity, but I like its portability and its a surprisingly capable machine despite its miniaturisation.

Work-wise it has been fairly sedate. Research and writing a series of reports. Then there was a bit of a lull period and then I found out I’d been booted off!! Economic recession and jobless. Great. It didn’t last long though, I managed to find a PhD which should engage me intellectually for the next couple of years. That has lead to the greatest change for me this year – leaving leafy South Kensington where I’ve become so familiar with for the past four years for the hustle and bustle of Bloomsbury for the next three years. A part of me doesn’t really want to go, I was quite comfortable where I was. I suppose change is good once in a while.

As an individual, I’m not entirely sure if I’ve grown. I might have, but its been so subtle that I haven’t realised. It’s often difficult to be objective about one self.

Photography-wise I haven’t shot as much as I had in previous years, but I belive that I’ve got some pretty good images. It might finally be time for me to select my panel of photos for my LRPS. Gosh, I’ve been saying that for the past two/three years, I might finally get round to it in 2009! With that note, I’ll leave you with a series of 12 photos from the last 12 months.

Today I’ve been testing out Google Chrome and it’s pretty quick. Way quicker than Firefox. Nice and lightweight, perfect for my netbook. 

It’s neat, simple and does the business. 

There’s not much else to say really.