Mobile Tools for Tracking your Travel

In my last post, I quickly mentioned some of the tools I was using to track my journey across the country. A somewhat self-serving quick-and-dirty post I could give to friends and family that were interested in where I was at the time and what I had been doing. The cross-country journey was not just for travel; I was on my way to a new job. I already knew a couple people at the new company and sent them links to the live tracking before I left. In meetings, they showed other colleagues who were quite impressed by the mobile tech employed in my travels. This article aims to let you know exactly the tools used, why I chose them, and how I used them to fully document my travels, much in the way the Guru listed his travel tools. Tools

• Nokia N82 Smartphone (Unlocked)
• Nokia Maps (voice-guided navigation)
• SportsTracker (automatically creates a log of my route)
• Shozu (automatic uploading of photos)
• Jaiku (social networking)
• Nokia Email (beta)
• Sunpak VersiPod Tripod
• Ovi (online photo hosting)
• iGo Auto charger (to keep everything running)
• Yelp (for finding interesting places to eat)

Description of Tools used Nokia N82: I think the Nokia N82 is the ultimate device for what I call lifetracking. That is, creating an interesting and usable log of anything from a specific activity to a daily account of your life. It is not inexpensive, and if you want something with similar features but a very reasonable price, look at the Nokia N78 with 3.2 MP Camera. This affordable handset will knock your socks off, with a very stylish and minimalistic exterior, but a massive number of features, including one the N82 does not have: an FM transmitter to listen to all your music and podcasts in the car, sans wires!

Nokia Sportstracker: At the heart of my technological journey across the United States lay the Sportstracker on my mobile phone. Utilizing both GPS and mapping technology, this would tell me my actual speed (As a resuly, I no longer trust my spedometer), the exact route taken, and where I took a given picture.

Check out my personal Sportstracker page. You can click on a given leg of the journey, seeing the highest altitude for the day, the spot I drove the slowest, and clicking on one of the little camera icons will bring up the picture took in that exact location.

Nokia Maps: Unless you know exactly where you are headed or have a talented navigator in the passenger seat, some sort of GPS-based guide is invaluable. NokiaMaps -brought to you by the mapsters, one of whom is featured in many of my pictures- was and has been an invaluable tool for my trip.

Combined with looking up eateries in Yelp (see below) I was able to navigate directly to so many places I would never have found. And all that without stopping. In fact, my only real out-of-the-way turn (through the Mojave desert) occured because I did not have Nokia Maps running. But it is good to sometimes let yourself get lost, and you can feel safe knowing that the Mapsters will get you back on track when you are ready to continue along your journey.

My parents even told me not to use the GPS to get to their place. all their friends with Garmin or Tom-Toms get lost as they near the house. Nokia Maps guided me directly to their alley. And, when I left, both Google and Yahoo! Maps gave me different paths to get back to Interstate 10. My parents did not like either and gave me a backwoods route that would avoid lights and cut cross-country. This was the path Nokia Maps decided to take.

Yelp: Yelp.com is a combination social media and restaurant review site. The primary purpose is to give you, the user a venue in which to comment on and rate your best, worst, and everything-in-between dining and service experiences. The secondary service is a social networking one in which you connect with other Yelpers, read their reviews, and get an idea of what's good and what isn't. Their motto is "real people, real reviews", and (full disclosure) I am a Yelp elite member which means I have written a number of reviews and used yelp for various purposes in the past.

Recent reviews by Kevin N.

What's this?

One of my favourite features of Yelp and one that is especially pertinent here is the ability to create lists of reviews. So, for this project, I created the DestinationCA list. As I wrote reviews, I added them to the list and the little Yelp application you see on the right gets automatically updated with the new reviews. So, while I was able to knock out a few in the evening before I went to bed, I have been able to add a lot more since arriving in San Jose, and once I add them to the list, the pages on which they appear are automatically updated with no extra work from me.

Shozu: Personally, there are two major obstacles for me to take pictures: 1) having the camera with me when I want to take a pic, and 2) getting the pictures to a place where others can see them. The incredible 5megapixel camera on the N82 is not the only reason I use it to take pictures. The other reason that powered with Shozu, the pictures I take can be automatically uploaded to my web photo album, without any further intervention. Point, click, and you are done! That's convenience, and convenience is the name of the game on a 3,000 mile roadtrip.

In addition to the configured auto-upload channel. Shozu can do all sorts of things for you, like peruse your friends' facebook uploads, or blog photos and text to your configured blog. Very versatile, very convenient, a must-have!

Jaiku: There are many different ways to keep up with one's friends and contacts while on six day trek across the country. My preferred application is Jaiku. This is a social networking, microblog type site with threaded conversations and location, so people could follow my movements, and I could easily check up on whatever they were talking about. Other options might be to check the m.facebook or twitter pages. I do not find these as easy to use because their mobile sites are not clean and easy to use, but to each his own is the beauty of the Internet.

Nokia Email: And, of course, my second favourite way to keep track of my email is via the new Nokia Email application. No big deal about this one, except that it pushes my mail to me like a blackberry service, at no extra charge. I could catch up while pumping gas, having lunch, or (shhhh) even while driving.

Sunpak Tripod: The downside of my N82 as camera is that it has no screw hole for a tripod (like many small digital cameras). But fear not, sturdy mobile traveler! Check out the Sunpak Versipod tripod. The Guru turned me on to this one, and the clamp can be unscrewed and then placed on any standard tripod out there, is worth the $12 price of admission.

iGo Universal Auto Charger: The MVP of my trip. Without the iGo Auto charger, everything above would have been for naught. If you want to run multiple GPS-enabled applications, talk on the phone, use the phone for music, and send/receive text messages and email, you are going to kill your battery. A charger in the car is essential to your success. One that can charge virtually any device you have just by changing a tip is even better. Get one of these, you won't regret it.

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Destination California

As many of you know, I have a new job in California at Juniper Networks and am in the process of traveling from Boca Raton, FL to San Jose, CA. I saw this as a perfect opportunity to really give my N82 a workout and put some of the apps I have been playing with through their paces. First and foremost is Nokia's Sportstracker. I use this each day to track my progress across the country.

Day 1 from Boca to Pensacola.
Day 2 from Pensacola to Austin.

Day 3 tooling around my parents' neighborhood

Day 4 from Austin to Las Cruces

Day 5 from Las Cruces to Palm Springs

Day 6 from Palm Springs to San Jose, my new home.

All new ones will be linked from my Sportstracker profile, so click on that to view remaining journey from Austin to California.

In addition to the Sportstracker, I am making heavy use of Shozu to tag and automatically upload my pictures to my destinationCA Ovi channel. But you don't even have to click on those, just check out the live ticker:



Sportstracker as originally conceived is for tracking your running, walking, cycling, etc. type activities so it has an athletic slant to it, rather than a cross-the-country-in-your-car type focus. Nokia is in the process of replacing it with a product they call NokiaVine, but since it is not ready for general use just yet, I am using SportsTracker which works just fine. (nokiaVine went live about two days after I arrived in California, MobileDan has a great writeup about it and if you are interested, I highly recommend you check out his post and all the pictures/screenshots he has taken).



The original plan:


View Larger Map


My actual route, according to SportsTracker:

(This post edited on November 30, 2008 to include all the legs of the journey and to move some technical description to a "how I made this" post)

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An Office in Your Hand: using your phone for FAX, scan, and copy

Are you a mobile warrior that considers that Fed/Ex Kinko's card and a list of their locations to be one of your most important assets? Well, I am here to free you from tracking them down, driving to their store, and spending large amounts of money to copy and FAX that latest business agreement or contract draft. I have been using scanR quite a bit lately to FAX some documents across the country, and there are two other services that look good as well that I will mention. What this boils down to are fewer expense reports and time saved, which translates directly into more time at the bar, and who couldn't use a bit extra of that after a long work day?

The Problem: I had a lengthy application that needed to get from Florida to Ohio in a timely manner, but no FAX machine and at approximately $2 per page, using FedEX/Kinko's was cost-prohibitive. I knew about eFax and have used them to receive facsimiles, but I had no way to scan the paper into a format they could read, and it was a semi-useful service with a pretty steep monthly fee.

The Solution: I own a Nokia N82 which has a high-resolution camera on it, so I knew there had to be a better way. After a quick bit of searching, I found scanR, a service that had a monthly, quarterly, and yearly payment plans. I ended up going for the quarterly for $9.95, which was basically getting a month free over and above the monthly plan. Point the phone over at m.scanR.com and they do a great job of walking you through the service. It will download an app to your phone, start the app, and run you through the tutorial. From the time I hit the web page with my phone, I had a scan up on their site and fax'd to my parents' fax machine within five minutes. Also, once you take the scan, make sure to use the "view scan" option in the app. This login procedure is what connects the device to your online scanR account.
Another great feature of scanR is that it does Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with the scans. This is a process by which it goes through and converts the letters and words in the image to actual, editable text for easy copy and paste. The better the quality, the more accurate the text will be.

Testing: To give this a good test, I used ScanR to scan the same document with my E71, N82, and N75. The E71 is a powerful business phone with a 3.2 megapixel camera with LED flash. The N82 is quite possibly the best camera phone currently available with a 5 megapixel camera and Xenon flash, and the N75 has a somewhat standard 2 megapixel LED flash camera. ScanR "scores" each image on a scale that goes to 120. In my experience, anything over 80 is still better than what you would get from sending through a regular fax machine and is perfectly usable. I have sent documents in the 50s that have worked out, as well, but I prefer higher quality scans if I can get them. In testing, I used a Nokia Warranty Repair instructions sheet I received from them and printed. The N82 was actually done with a recreation because I lost the original, but it is practically the same and was taken in the same location of the house, under the same conditions, as the other images.

The N75 scored a 52 with this document. It is passable, but just barely. If it were a signed contract, it would be okay because it would be identifiable, but as detailed instructions, it takes a bit of work to read them. Small print or handwriting would never work at that low a score. The character recognition was abyssmal with a score this low, and you can only use the image/pdf version of this document.

The E71 scored a 93 with its scan of the document. This is a great image and was taken in good lighting. I doubt it will be a common occurence where you would need to take pictures of documents in low light settings, but if you do, I worry a bit about the E71's flash being up to the challenge. For everyday office-environment scans, however, the image quality plus the business styling of the phone is a winning combination. Also, the text-recognition is very good, with all the text and just a couple strange characters that popped up. You would be well-served using this as an OCR tool.

The N82 scored a 100 with its scan. This is near-perfect and I have taken low-light scans with this camera phone that came out almost as good, due to its superior flash. The text recognition was without errors or strange characters. One downside of scanR is the online interface. It is more than adequate for viewing and sending a particular document. However, there is no management for multiple documents. You cannot delete multiple docs if you would like to clean it up, nor is there any sort of tagging or categorization available, other than the type of image: document, whiteboard, or business card. It is also slow if you are trying to quickly look at documents to determine which one you want to send.

Alternatives: As much as I like it, scanR is not the only game in town. Doing a search recently, I discovered Qipit and Snapter. Qipit appears to be nearly the same as scanR. They offer the ability to scan, convert to pdf and fax documents. They lack the OCR (convert to text) option and the business card scanning, and appear to be a bit more sharing-oriented. To sum them up quickly, I would say that scanR is the better business person's solution, and Qipit is slightly more geared toward students for note-taking and sharing. Qipit is also free for the first 100 documents. Either would work well in each situation, however. Snapter is more of a desktop solution, geared toward cameras, rather than camera phones. Not that it couldn't be used by the latter. It has more of an aim at OCR (converting the images to text) than to the office replacement that scanR and Qipit can be. ...Read more

The pointless use of DRM in the Amazon Kindle

Digital Rights Management ("DRM" or "Digital Restrictions Management") is used in a number of products you likely use everyday: music, ebooks, DVDs, and computer software are just a few of the places you will find DRM. The Kindle Blog has a nice review of the Kindle and why you may or may not want to buy one, giving a nice breakdown for some definite yes and definite no for certain types of people. The fact that the Kindle utilizes DRM makes it into a definite no for those people staunchly opposed to such a system. This is true, however, I think the blog glosses over what DRM is and what it does for Amazon, even citing Radiohead giving away its album on a donation basis.


Firstly, while Radiohead might be an outside example, it is a perfect reason why DRM is not a necessary evil. Even with many people not spending a penny for the album, Radiohead made a TON of money with their 'experiment'. Also, many authors make a lot of money even though they release their work without a copyright. Jonathan Zittrain and Cory Doctorow come to mind, but there are many others.

Furthermore, DRM is little more than a nuisance. Like television and movies, most books can be found for free on the Internet by someone looking just a bit harder than a single Google search. It is not difficult, and many times a book is available online before it is in the store.

While the existence of DRM on the device might not preclude me from buying one, the cited reasons for its existence do not persuade me. In fact, the only thing DRM on your purchased books does is force you to stick with the Amazon Kindle line when something better eventually comes along. Which it will, because that is the nature of technology, and then you have to make the decision to stick with an inferior device or to maintain two different eBook readers.
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