Carrying All That Gear

I carry a lot of gadgets when I'm traveling, and it's always a pain trying to keep track of everything. That's true in general, but it's particularly true when I'm frequently in and out of the car, or even just walking through town or a campground. But I've found a couple of solutions that make life a little easier.

More importantly, the clothing from Scottevest let me carry a variety of items without looking like a geek... or worse, looking like a tourist. I have both the TEC Shirt and the Essential Jacket. The Essential Jacket converts from a jacket to a vest by unzipping the sleeves. But both, in fact all of the Scottevest products, incorporate the same kind of 'hidden pocket' function that I love.

The TEC Shirt is made of microfiber, and is predictably comfortable, not to mention warm. It looks like any comparable, stylish shirt, but has several pockets, accessible from both outside and inside the shirt. Here's the web site where you can get a better look, but here's a video I made of the shirt in action.

Charge it! All!

Our TT has what I would call a 'normal' number of AC outlets. Unfortunately, what's normal for most, is insufficient for a family with what many might consider to be an exorbitant number of things to plug in. Even with a bunch of outlet strips, the wall-warts take up a lot of room. Fortunately I found the Callpod Chargepod.

With the Chargepod I use a single AC outlet connected to the circular 'pod'. From there, I connect as many as 6 devices, each to its own connector. I like the convenience of the single adapter, plus it eliminates the tangle and confusion of all the chargers and wires I've had to unravel every time I needed to charge something. My wife likes that it keeps everything in one place, since I'm always trying to remember where I plugged in my (fill in the blank) when it's time to head out the door.

Video From Wherever

All my life, I've been a still image kind of guy. And even on digital cams that have the ability to shoot video clips, I've never taken advantage of them. Video has always seemed inconvenient to me. The thought of editing clips, doing background sound, and burning CD/DVD copies seemed somehow to be way too much work, particularly when cruising around in the camper. But I'm becoming a convert to video, now that several tools are in place that make it so much easier to manage the process.

In particular, I like Creative's new VADO video camera. It's a successor to the first of it's kind, the Flip, that was developed specifically to take video clips destined for youtube.com and other online presentation/storage facilities.

The VADO is eminently pocketable, and easy to use with one hand. I've become used to carrying it around in my pocket and pushing the on button whenever something looks to be interesting. I have it set to "HQ", or high quality video, which will let me record up to 1 hour of video. The lower quality setting allows 2 hours, but there is a definite difference in the quality, and 2 hours just seems like a lot of video to me.

There is a 2x digital zoom on the unit, which I've used a couple of times. Digital zoom on a video cam is more useful than for still images, because I assume that I'll eventually edit / crop a still, but not a video. I've also been happy with the sound recording of the VADO. Not that it's particularly great, but it's adequate, and I think that's really the point of the whole thing.

But the payoff for these kinds of videos is in the ease of publishing them. The process is dead simple:

Pull the USB connector from its slot in the bottom of the VADO and insert it into an open USB port on your PC.
Allow the VADO application to launch.
Select the video clip you want to publish.
Click either Youtube or Photobucket as your publishing destination.
Enter a title and some descriptive text.
Click the Upload button.

And your video is published.

The quality is more than adequate, and for $99 (either in pink or in silver), the VADO is great fun for catching those fun, awkward, embarassing, unusual, etc... moments, and sharing them with the world.

Starbucks free (?) wifi needs shot of caffine

When the big gorilla of coffee shop chains rolled out its "free wifi" offer, it appears that many thought the idea was grounds for the perfect arrangement. All that the company requires for two free hours of wifi access every day is to sign up for a $5 rewards card, or register an existing Starbucks gift card. Then, as long as you buy something with the card at least once a month, the two free wifi access hours remain.

So many have signed onto the idea, that many others are finding they can't get in on the deal. On trying to access the Starbucks' Card Rewards web site, some are being turned away by an error message, told to come back later. Starbucks says the problem is not that of AT&T, the wifi provider, but that of their own servers. They say they problem will be fixed soon, and that joe-imbibers will be able to get their daily fix of the internet, too.