Geek Gear For A Roadtrip

Well, as most of you know, I'm getting married this week to my fiance Andrea and we are taking a road trip / honeymoon to Washington DC and Philly. So I wanted to share with you guys some essential gadgets and geek gear that I will be taking along with me to stay connected during the trip. Most of these involve my laptops and staying connected to the Internet and Wi-Fi while we're on the road. So essential #1 is:

The Laptop

This is probably the most obvious essential for any trip. A wi-fi enabled laptop can be used at a hotel, coffee shop, and even in the car on the freeway (more on this in a minute). Most hotels offer free wi-fi on the property with a log in password that they give you when you check in. Also while you're out and about, most coffee shops, airports and some restaurants now even offer free wi-fi to their patrons. Some great businesses offering free wi-fi nation wide are:

• Panera Bread Company
  
• McDonalds (not all locations)
  
• Starbucks (must have an AT&T account)
• Buffalo Wild Wings Grill and Bar
• Hooters
• Whole Foods Markets
• Krystal Restaurants has free Wi-Fi in 253 locations.
• Speedway Gas Stations
• McAlister's Deli has many locations nationwide with Free WiFi, use their location finder to check for access.

Power Inverter

This is an essential survival tool for any geek on the road. A power inverter converts your DC power coming out of your car's battery and electrical system to AC power so you can plug in household devices. Some of the things it allows you to do on the road:

• use your laptop for an unlimited time
• recharge your batteries
• power a small TV and DVD player or gaming system on the go
  
• power a small refrigeration device for cold drinks and food on the go
• plug in lighting for camping or emergencies

Smart Phone

To me this is an essential for the road warrior. The new iPhone 3Gs would be the ideal, but any phone with unlimited Internet access will work. You want to have a backup to get your email or access any emergency contact information that you might need over the net. I personally use the Blackberry Curve 8330. Some essential aps that a road warrior should look into:

• Google Mobile Ap - available for almost any brand of smart phone out right now. Check all of your Google "stuff" from the road!
  
• Viggo - available for Blackberry and HTC. Best RSS and news reader for mobile.
  
• Pandora (Mobile) - Pandora is exploding right now. A virtual streaming jukebox for Blackberry, iPhone, PalmPre and WinMo (be sure you have unlimited minutes!)
  
• Google Sync - sync your Google calendar and Gmail address book with your phone. Work in the cloud!
• Facebook Ap - receive and update your status and upload mobile pics from the road... uh yes! essential!
• Twitterberry (or other Twitter ap) - I would consider this an essential (even though my fiance wouldn't) - tweet from the road, plus upload pics and other Twitter essentials.
  

Flip Video Camera
(or other sub-compact HD video camera)

This is another essential for on the go video of your trip that can be easily uploaded to YouTube, your blog or web page so you can easily share your trip with family and friends during and after the trip. See my blog GetAFlip for more info.

A Good Book

After being geeky non-stop, take a second to just chill out with a good book, turn a page, stop worrying about where you can connect and just disconnect. Leave the laptop in the hotel room and turn the smart phone off (but keep it in your pocket for emergencies right?)

Spend time with your family / fiance

Especially if its your honeymoon... nuff said ;-)

I'll see you guys after I get back! Thanks for reading.

Photo by Major Clanger / Flickr

Riding The Next Google Wave

Last week Google previewed the next step in interactive social media communication called Google Wave. Wave will be a combination of:

• - cloud document and media sharing
• - email / threaded email (like Gmail)
  
• - instant messaging

But what Wave will add to the mix will be features like:

• Twitter / social media site search and posting collaboration
• real time media insertion into blogs and web pages
• real time typing for all those on a Wave
• "playback" feature to rewind or forward to see what changes or comments were added in the past.
• live collaboration wiki style
• drag and drop files and media into a wave
• open source API
• Wave applications like Twave (for integration with Twitter) and other apps being developed later
• real time spell and grammar checker using the context of the sentence
  

This could be the first step from just the information age to the interactive information age. It really looks like Google has combined the quasi-real time features of Twitter and Friendfeed with cloud collaboration and added the real time interactivity into it. With many individuals and even families now choosing to leave the "land line" behind and rely on cell phones and their computers for all communication, tools like Wave will become more and more useful and important as we leave old technologies behind.

Old technologies that required us to use multiple steps and to switch between a myriad of different programs are being combined into one with new platforms like Wave. For example:

The old way:

1. You want to share a picture with your friends
2. you email you picture as an attachment to your friend
3. they decide to post the picture on Facebook
4. your friend Tweets about the picture
   
5. another friend emails you asking if they can post the picture to their blog
6. you email them back telling them its fine...
7. the picture has to be manually uploaded to the blog and formatted
8. someone wants to comment on the blog picture but isn't registered with the blog
9. that someone flame spams your comments because he is the ex-boyfriend of the girl in the picture
10. etc...

The new way:

1. You decide to share a picture with your friends
2. You start a Wave with any friend that has a Google account and post the picture for everyone's approval
   
3. You add Twave, Facebook app, and the Bloggy apps to the wave.
4. people on the Wave comment, delete, or add information in real time
   
5. you post the Wave to the Internet (which gets posted to Twitter, FB and your Blog all at the same time in real time.
6. The other people on the wave can keep the wave moving on by adding more people to the Wave and encouraging more interactivity.
   

Where we had to use 4 or 5 different tools before (email client, twitter client, FB, FTP or uploader) we now just use Wave to share and collaborate with anyone on the Wave.

The only problem I see with it is that Wave will make the tsunami (pun intended) of information overload that RSS and Twitter have brought to us look a ripple in the pond. Get your surf board waxed up, its gonna be a gnarly ride dude!

The Hunt For Gollum debuts online today!

If you haven't heard about the new Lord of the Rings "fan fic" film, The Hunt For Gollum, then you've been out of the loop. This was me Sunday when my sister-in law Hannah told me about it. (Thanks Hannah!) I felt kind of out of the geek loop. But I'm back!

Apparently it has been in production for almost 2 years and was created on a budget of $3000 by writer-director Chris Bouchard with all crew and cast working for free! The film is 40 minutes long and made its debut at SCI-FI-LONDON film festival this past Saturday. As of today the owners have released the film to the public on Dailymotion.com as a free view in HD! I haven't had a chance to watch it all the way through but the trailers are VERY well done, and rival anything that Peter Jackson has done in my opinion. The story from the official website is:

The script is adapted from elements of the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. The story follows the Heir of Isildur; the "greatest huntsman and traveller in Middle Earth" as he sets out to find the creature Gollum. The creature must be found to discover the truth about the Ring, and to protect the future Ringbearer.

The official website has all the great interactive content that a big name film would have plus "making of" and deleted scenes, downloads, stills, banners, etc.

Go right now and watch it! Leave me a comment or review here so everyone can see how awesome it is.

Here's the link to the Dailymotion The Hunt For Gollum channel

Full review of the film coming soon from The Horse (after I get a chance to watch it!)...

Google Apps and Working in the Cloud (Part 2)

As some of you may know, I got my new Dell Mini 9 Netbook a few weeks ago from Dell. My new project is to move as much of my work and productivity schedule to an online format (cloud), not on my computer. The reason for this is that I have a super small solid state hard drive (8 Gig), so I can't store music, photos or much else on my hard drive, but I can store, use and point to these items in "the cloud". The new terminology for this is "working in the cloud". The cloud refers to applications that run on the Internet such as Google Calendar and Google Docs. Google actually has a whole host of cloud applications that you can use to "mobilize" your life. These applications can then be accessed by you or anyone that you share them with.

Here are some places you can go to for cloud usage and storage:

• Photo Sharing and editing - Flickr, Google's Picasa, Picnik, Adobe Photoshop Express
  
• Documents / Word Processing - Google Docs, Scribd
  
• Planning: Google Calendar
• Web Based Operating Systems - top 10 list here
• Presentations / slide shows - Sliderocket, 280 Slides
  
• Drawing and 3d graphics: Google SketchUp, The Scribbler, Imagination Cubed
• Storage - ZumoDrive, Box.net (up to 1 Gig for free!)

All of the above are completely free cloud sharing and storage utilities that are sponsored by ads (so free for you!). Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular as smaller devices like netbooks, smartphones and other small smart devices are introduced.

With the above positive benefits of cloud computing comes a warning. Many if not most of the cloud applications in use now are not 100% secure. So, use with caution. Don't leave sensitive financial (credit, bank, investment accounts) or private information (where you live, phone #s, addresses) in the cloud. These sites can be hacked just as easy as an email account or website. There hasn't been any major problems or leaks so far, but just use these sites with caution. Always have a backup somewhere and keep financial and personal information locked and encrypted on a physical drive. Other than that, enjoy the cloud!

(photo by mansikka on Flickr)

The Power Of The Domain Name

I bought my first domain name ... ever the other day. I know, its kind of sad, I've been a geek this long and have never bought a domain name. I've always used my ISP's free FTP space to store my personal web page and shared files. So, I had the annoyingly long URLs like:

http://bellsouthpwp.net/x/a/xabbu/joshweddingportfolio.html or

http://www.themostspectacularlylargebusinessname.com/thissubdirectorythattheyhavewhereistoremystuff/joshuaself/mypersonalfiles/index.html~314159265

Yea, that's easy for a potentially paying client to remember you by... Maybe they'll just visit the guy with the website URL that they can remember: joesmithphotography.com. (photo by droїd on Flickr)

So, I finally bought joshuaselfphotography.com, suctionhorse.com, and theweddingphotogblog.com for my photography (mostly wedding) business website and my wedding photography blog. I bought it through GoDaddy and it was probably the easiest thing I've ever done. Now I need to get a nice website built and throw it up on joshuaselfphotography.com.

So, I thought I'd share some tips on finding a good / useful domain name tips and secrets that I have found out recently. First, domain name trivia!:

What is the Domain Name System?

The Domain Name System (DNS) helps users to find their way around the Internet. Every computer on the Internet has a unique address – just like a telephone number – which is a rather complicated string of numbers. It is called its "IP address" (IP stands for "Internet Protocol").

But it is hard to remember everyone's IP address. The DNS makes it easier by allowing a familiar string of letters (the "domain name") to be used instead of the arcane IP address. So instead of typing 192.0.34.65, you can type www.icann.org. It is a "mnemonic" device that makes addresses easier to remember. (photo by Collin Anderson on Flickr)

Translating the name into the IP address is called "resolving the domain name." The goal of the DNS is for any Internet user any place in the world to reach a specific website IP address by entering its domain name. Domain names are also used for reaching e-mail addresses and for other Internet applications.

fromthe InterNIC website

• Technicians at the University of Wisconsin developed the first 'name server' in 1984. With the new name server, users were no longer required to know the exact path to other systems (using long IP addresses). And thus the birth of the current addressing system in use today. A year later the Domain Name System was implemented and the initial top-level domain names, including .com, .net, and .org, were introduced. Suddenly 121.245.078.2 became 'company.com'.

• Today there is an estimated 19 million domain names registered, with forty thousand more registered every day. The Internet continues its unprecedented growth into the stratosphere and there is really no end in sight.

• Where it used to cost $100 / year it now costs only $7.00 or less to register a domain name and some companies provide discounts for purchasing their other products (web hosting, spam blocker, email, etc...)
• Squatting and reselling of domain names has become BIG business recently. I know some people who do this exclusively for their job and make GOOD money!

So, here are some steps for finding the best domain name for you or your business:

1. research, research, research your domain name. Does anyone else have something close? Keep brainstorming until something original and catchy comes out!
   
2. Think about SEO and how being descriptive with your name will help increase traffic to your site. Use at least one descriptive word in your domain name. (ie. Net"Flix".com, photographyblog.com, bigcupcoffee.com, Lloydsrestaurant.com)
   
3. pick the least amount of words possible to make your domain. The smaller the name, the easier it is to remember! (de.licio.us, ebay.com, YouTube.com)
   
4. try pick a catchy / rhyming / cleaver name but keep it simple. Stay away from complicated / alternate spellings, try not to use dashes "-" or other special characters.
5. ".com" is the MOST popular and quickest remembered by the public, followed by ".net" and ".org". The average person will confuse or forget domain extensions like ".info", ".biz", ".me" and ".mobi" but, if you do buy the ".com", go ahead and buy the rest of them. This keeps your personal brand and name safe so no one can steal it in the future and blackmail you trying to sell it back to you. Then have the rest of them 301 redirected back to your ".com"

Just remember, your domain name is your image, brand, business, and personality all in a little nutshell. It will determine if someone will be interested enough to click on a link to your site or pass it by. Follow Step 1 until you get it perfect!

I hope these have helped you guys out in your domain name hunt. Do you have a tip that would help our readers out in finding a good domain name? Please leave a comment and help out the community!
(photo by twinsparc)