Travel Gadget mistakes

Background
When traveling, I usually bring a laptop, iPod, digital camera, and digital camcorder. For each of these, there are a variety of accessories for power, cables, and memory. On a recent trip to Ireland, I decided to bring a GPS unit for car navigation. After a long search, three options emerged;
a. Garmin 670 with Europe & US maps
b. Nokia N800 Internet tablet with Wayfinder maps and bluetooth GPS
c. Macbook with Parallels, Windows Vista, a USB GPS, and Microsoft Autoroute for Europe

I ended up going with option b. thinking I would have the best of a. & c. with less travel bulk.

Results
The Nokia N800 is a fun little gadget and a close replacement to a Garmin unit. The interface is a little worse but it does allow you to do surf the web in a coffee shop then continue walking using the GPS. My wife thought having the GPS reduced the stress of car travel in a foreign country as she does most of the navigating. The N800 is less of a laptop replacement due to it's awkward keyboard (external bluetooth could be used) and inability to connect directly to ethernet provided in most hotels.

Learnings - Connectivity
Free Wifi can be difficult to impossible to find outside major cities. The N800 came with a 30 day trial of Boingo Mobile (subsequent months are $8). Boingo allows you to use pay hot-spots around the globe like those at Starbucks or British telecom. It can be difficult to find the hotspots as Boingo only lists them online (which kinda defeats the purpose). Furthermore, this service is $40 a month if you use a laptop. Most mid-level hotels seem to supply only ethernet in rooms. A laptop or hub is needed.

Learnings - Backup
I typically try to backup digital photos on the road. Without a laptop, I couldn't use a service like Jungledisk or even the laptop. If I stay with this non-laptop configuration, I could get a large SD card and copy pictures between the 2 SD slots in the Nokia N800.

While trying to backup, I mistakenly deleted all the files on a 2GB SD card. I did find a free utility that would recover the pictures but I required you to be logged in with Admin priveleges in Windows. Most hotels/internet cafe's do not allow you to have admin priveledges so I sweated it out until I returned home. Undelete for an SD Card (or any disk) - free from Roadkil.net


Easiest would be to bring a laptop. Many of our frustrations could have been reduced if we brought a Macbook. Also, pictures and video could have been processed on the plane.

Here are all the Ireland expenses.

Wireless Network Camera

Panasonic Wireless 802.11 b/g Network Camera and Pet Cam (BL-C30A)

from Amazon user
1) Plug-in camera to AC and hold down the "reset" pin with a pen. My computer would not recognize the camera until I physically reset it.
2) Make sure camera switch is set to "wired".
3) Connect the camera via Ethernet cable to you Mac.
4) Temporarily give your Mac the manual IP address 192.168.0.5 and subnet 255.255.255.0 in the Network Prefs.
5) Connect to the camera using Safari at address 192.168.0.253 - you should be able to see the settings page now.
6) Click through the setup but say "No" when it asks if you want to "go on the internet". This will make it try to find your router (which is not on the network) so don't do it.
7) Enter 192.168.0.253 in Safari once again and it should take you to the Network Camera page. You should have access to the camera controls after you click the "Single" tab at the top of the page. But we're not done yet.
8) Click the Setup tab on right side of the tabbed toobar.
9) Click Static IP to load the static ip address page for the camera
10) Uncheck the "Enable" checkbox at the top. This is for Windows setup.
11) Enter an IP address in your wireless network. My network is 192.168.2.x so I gave my camera 192.168.2.253.
12) Enter your router's address in the Default Gateway field. Example: 192.168.2.1. If you don't do this, your camera will not be accessible from outside your wireless network!
13) Click the Wireless tab on the left navigation bar of the camera page.
14) For SSID enter the exact name of your network. This is the name you gave your wireless router when you set it up. It appears under the Airport signal strength menu with a checkbox next to it.
15) If you have security (and you should!), enter you WEP Key. Be sure to make the right selection for your wep key (ASCII, HEX, etc).
16) Click Save.
17) Edit other settings such as Date and Time
18) Disconnect the ethernet cable from the camera.
19) Flip the camera switch from Wired to Wireless
20) Unplug the camera power, replug camera power (to restart it)
21) The camera should now go through it's blinking light procedure and if all is well you'll get a solid green light.
22) Go to your Network Prefs and set your computer back to using your wireless router.
23) You should now be able to access your camera at the address 192.168.2.253 wirelessly now.
24) Your router blocks traffic from the internet to your camera so you cannot view the camera from outside your network. To access your camera from the internet you'll neet to open a port on your router that maps to your camera. This can be done by setting up a "Virtual Server" (aka port forwarding) on the router. See your router's instructions for mapping a virtual server to your camera's IP and port.

GPS for European road trip

Options
1. Buy a GPS with a European Map (Garmin Nuvi 270, 370, 670)
2. Buy a GPS with a European and US Maps (Garmin Nuvi 270, 370, 670)
3. Use a Mac or PC with a USB GPS