Runnin’

Last Monday I jogged five kilometers without stopping. It was my first time ever doing that, and I was very pleased. I decided to try to run an actual 5K race that weekend, so I didn’t run again until Thursday. I ran a fair distance, but didn’t push myself; I didn’t want to overdo it before the race on Saturday.

The 5K didn’t go as I’d hoped. Part of the problem was the temperature; it was about 15 degrees warmer than I normally like it to be when I run, with no shade for the first 2/3 of the course and barely even a breeze. The terrain was also different from what I’m used to; I run on pavement in my neighborhood, and the Swamp Stomp course was dirt, grass, and gravel. Another problem, I think, was that I started out running too quickly. Having a huge mass of people pass you like you’re standing still can do that to you.

Regardless of what caused it, I ended up walking after barely completing the first half kilometer, and never got back into a good running pace. Mari was with me; fortunately she didn’t mind all the walking we ended up doing.

I was feeling a little dejected about the 5K when I went running Tuesday morning, and that may be why I felt so crappy. I may also have still been recovering from the 5K. Regardless, I felt like throwing up and my legs were dead weight–very sore dead weight. I barely managed to run at all.

Yesterday’s run was much better. I decided not to worry about distance, but instead focus on speed. It had occurred to me when checking my running times for the last week that sometimes I actually walk faster than I run. If I ever want to finish a 5K in under half an hour, I’m going to have to increase my speed. So I focused on that–not too crazy, just faster than I normally run–and went until I was out of juice. I felt really good afterwards, like I had accomplished something.

That brings us to this morning. I again worked on speed at first. I’ve also been thinking about my form, and trying to avoid landing on my heels. This emphasis on the balls of my feet has been making my calves feel the way they did when I first started running–like blocks of wood. My calves gave out long before my cardiovascular system did, which made me feel a little better about myself. I’d been starting to worry that I’d lost all the progress I’d made on heart health, especially given the way I was gasping for breath on Tuesday.

In any case, I ran until my calves simply could not go on. I wasn’t even winded and really wanted to continue. So I walked a little to give my legs a rest, and then ran again. I’m pretty pleased that I didn’t give up after the first run.

Going forward I’m going to focus once again on eating more properly. I’ve really let my eating habits slide the past several weeks, and the scale shows it. I’m all the way up to 251, meaning I’ve pretty much negated everything I did in 2008. I think rather than obsess about the weight, though, I’m going to focus on heart health. That’s what worked last time. I want my heart to be healthy so I can accomplish physical feats like running a 5K in under 30 minutes, rock climbing, doing pull-ups, etc. Maybe if I keep thinking about those things instead of the vague “lose weight” goal, I’ll have success again.

Since races give me tangible goals, I’m going to concentrate on speed and distance. With that in mind, I’m going to quit logging my warmups and cooldowns in RunKeeper and just record when I actually run. That will make it easier for me to see at a glance what I’m currently capable of.

I’m also going to start keeping track of how I feel after each run, through the Notes area on RunKeeper. Hopefully remembering the good running feelings will help me get through the bad days.

Rest in peace, Pepaw

Sean’s grandfather, Pepaw Lewis, passed away this morning.

We didn’t spend much time with Pepaw, despite the fact that he lived so close. He was a hard sort of man, a little gruff, but also sweet in that old man way. There was some family history that I never fully grasped. We did see him at Christmastime or Thanksgiving some years.

The last time I saw him was at the hospital, where his son, Sean’s dad Reid, was getting ready to have open heart surgery. I saw him the day Reid was admitted, and then again a couple days later. He grinned at me and said, “I saw you the other day!” Not realizing what he meant, I said, “Really? Where?” And he responded cheerfully, “The hospital!” Maybe I just have a thing for Meadows men; I found this to be absolutely adorable, and I gave him a hug and kiss on the cheek.

Mema, Reid’s mother, says Pepaw had told the family he was ready to go. He would have been 85 next month; he lived a good long life.

I do wish, though, that I’d gotten to spend more time with him.

Fun with phrases

In Japanese, you can string phrase upon phrase upon phrase, and then at the very end have everything you just said modify a noun. For example, here’s a line from Detective Conan:

watashi wa jishu wo susumetai no…goshujin wo kousatsu shita Yuuko-san, anata ni ne

[I] [(topic particle)] [surrender (n.)] [(object-identifying postposition)] [advise*] … [husband] [(object-identifying postposition)] [strangled] [Yuuko] [you] [to]

This has the dramatic effect of hiding the true subject of everything you’re saying until the very last moment. It’s often used in Detective Conan to make the unveiling of the murderer a surprise.

Unfortunately it’s difficult to do this in English. Here’s the most literal translation I could think of:

I’d advise surrender…husband-strangling Yuuko, to you.

Of course, no one talks like that. So maybe:

I’d advise surrender to the one who strangled her husband…you, Yuuko.

* Susumetai has an ending, –tai, that indicates the desire to do something. I could have translated it as “like to advise”, but for the sake of simplicity I did not.

Idea: Weekly roundups for social media autoposting

A lot of location-based/check-in apps have an option to automatically post your latest activity to a social network. This is really fun, but after awhile, especially if you’re using the application a lot, people can get burned out on all the posts. They might, depending on their social networking tool, block those posts, or even block you!

Another problem is that there is no real meaning to this information. Sure, it’s nice to let people know what spots you like, but by posting each individual check-in, you’re putting the onus of aggregating that information to find the meaning on yourself and your friends. Nobody’s going to go back and read all your check-ins to try to come up with a conclusion, and you’re not likely to do it either.

A third problem, which I mentioned in my post about using iPhones as travel tools, is safety and privacy. Simply put, it can be unsafe to constantly broadcast your location or other information to the world.

To deal with these issues, I suggest services offer a “weekly roundup” option. Instead of posting to social networks multiple times a day, services would do one post a week. That post would include a link to a webpage with that user’s activities for the whole week. For example, Gowalla’s weekly roundup on Twitter might look like this:

@cosleia went to Teresa’s Mexican Restaurant and 15 other places this week! Click here for roundup: http://bit.ly/link

Already, by having one post a week, the deluge of information is dammed up and released as a very manageable stream. And roundups would provide much-needed context, as well. For example, there could be various messages for different situations; if a person went to the same place several times, the message could say:

@cosleia went to Teresa’s Mexican Restaurant five times this week! See where else she went: http://bit.ly/link

And then I would know that I need to stop eating out so much ;)

Similarly, with RunKeeper, a weekly roundup could let people know how many times I ran that week, how far I went, how many calories I burned, what my best time was that week, or any number of things. People who saw the post would be able to tell if I’d improved over the course of the week, and if so, how.

We’re emerging into an age where information on almost anything and anyone is constantly available…but once the initial novelty has worn off, what’s the use of all that data? Putting a week’s worth of data together would provide context for both the viewer and the user of the app.

And finally, weekly roundups would eliminate the danger of posting your exact location in real time. You’d still be sharing your favorite places with your friends, but in a less immediate way.

Ultimately, it’s great that we have the ability to store and broadcast so much data. But if we don’t turn that data into something useful, it’s pretty pointless. Weekly roundups would be a great first step towards generating real, meaningful information from all that data.

Perhaps eventually apps could offer a special section on their sites where users could view their activity trends for weeks, months, or years at a time. It would be like Mint.com for activities! In the case of location-based apps, this part would probably need to be private, so it wouldn’t be easy for someone else to track where the user is likely to be at any given time.

Here’s hoping app creators start thinking about how user data can be utilized–not just for advertising revenue, but for the user’s own benefit.

Sidebar fun

I’ve added a few things to my sidebar! Webcomics came first, after obvious things like archives and search. Today I  made a cute Welcome box that explains what I write about and includes a picture of me.

I also added a random assortment of my latest photos from SmugMug and a list of the most recently updated SmugMug galleries. This way, I can avoid blog posts that are nothing but one or two pictures. I always felt that picture posts detracted from my writing, but I was never sure how to solve the problem. With WordPress plugins it was quite simple to place my pictures in the sidebar.

Similarly, there was no easy way to incorporate an RSS feed into my FTP-published Blogger blog. Now all I have to do is drag a box to the right and add a link…so I’ve put a list of my latest blog posts on SparkPeople on the sidebar.

Back in the day I would post whatever came to mind here on pixelscribbles, because I wanted this blog to be wholly representative of who I am. I feel a little like I’m compartmentalizing my thoughts about health and fitness by putting them over on SparkPeople. But I don’t want pixelscribbles to turn into a weight loss blog. I don’t feel that health, fitness, and weight loss are “who I am” in any respect. Yes, I want those things, but I don’t want to become some sort of guru. I don’t want people to know me for those things. I just want to lose weight and feel better so I have the energy to concentrate on the things I truly enjoy–“writing, photography, travel, language, Japan, and the web”, as it says in the Welcome box ;>

Writing about my weight loss “journey” (as they say) has been helping me, though, and I want to keep it up. Plus, I adore feedback. So I’ve decided to actively blog about the process on SparkPeople. Hopefully the sidebar listing here will earn my thoughts some eyeballs and comments.

I may add more items to the sidebar–I haven’t addressed the issue of my blogroll yet, for example. But for now I think it’s shaped up pretty well.

The left lane: Not just for looking at

On my daily I-20 commute, I am constantly flummoxed and frustrated by drivers who appear to not see that there is a third lane to their left. These drivers will tailgate the person in front of them, then zip into a tiny opening between two cars to their right rather than pass in the open left lane.

Are they afraid they’ll get pulled over if they’re in the fast lane? Not sure that reckless driving is going to help. Or is that third lane, opened towards the end of last year and therefore new, invisible to them?

Granted, it is annoying for someone to drive too slowly in the middle lane. Slower traffic should stay to the right. But there are times when it’s good to hit up that middle lane, like when there’s traffic merging onto the interstate.

These left lane avoiders will ignore the merging situation and plow right into whatever’s going on in the right lane, oblivious to the cars trying to join the flow of traffic, rather than oh, say, I don’t know, follow the law and pass to the left!

I really wonder how much of the road people are watching. Do they only pay attention to what’s directly in front of them? How many cars are they watching? You can’t avoid accidents without watching all the cars and paying attention to the speed in every lane.

I treat driving like a game, the goal of which is to avoid accidents and maintain the flow of traffic. I watch far ahead to see what troubles might filter back to me, I pay attention to how each car is moving to see if someone’s telegraphing a turn or lane shift (because people can’t be trusted to put their blinkers on), and, yes, I am considerate. If someone needs to merge into my lane, I let them, and if someone wants to pass me and there is no lane to the left, I get over.

But I am constantly trapped between a tailgating left lane avoider and traffic merging into the right lane. There is no good way to get out of that situation other than moving into the left lane–the fast lane–and letting the tailgater pass to the right. As you can imagine, this utterly offends my OCD.

The left lane is for passing, not for being passed! If you want to pass, for the love of all that is good and pure in this world, use the left lane!

Missing (but not lost completely) comments

Late last night–as I was googling various keywords on my blog, testing the links that came up, and changing the slugs on the ones that didn’t forward properly–I discovered yet another issue: missing comments. Some posts that I knew to have comments on them now have none.

I checked the posts at cosleia.blogspot.com, and the comments weren’t there either…meaning they were not saved in Blogger’s database. I can only guess that something happened when Blogger first changed the way it handled comments on post pages. I’m pretty sure this happened before the October 2008 shift to embeddable comment forms, but I’m not sure exactly when. I wish I could nail down a date, because then I would have an idea of how much work is ahead of me.

You see, the comments aren’t lost. They existed on the static html pages on my server, which I saved. So what I can do is go through and manually copy and paste each group of comments into a new comment at the end of each post. It’s not a perfect solution, but there’s no way I have the time or patience to individually post each comment, and I’d like to retain the original timestamp information, even if it’s not listed correctly in the database.

When Blogger first enabled comments, I had to copy over existing comments from LiveJournal, Xanga, and Blogkomm, so this is nothing new…but I get the feeling the task is going to be monumental this time.

I suppose what I will end up doing is starting at the very beginning of my blog and checking every single post to fix the following errors:

  • Missing comments
  • Slugs that include the words a, an, and the (infuriatingly, sometimes these words are included in Blogger post URLs, so I will have to find a way to continue using Google to check the links)

While I’m at it, I will tag and categorize old posts that never got this treatment in Blogger.

Then I will move forward to posts starting in November of 2009. I’ll save and upload all Blogspot-hosted images to my server, then change all the affected img links.

This is what I get for having a blog with nearly 4,000 posts, I guess.

Update: So far I have found posts as recent as 2007 with no comments on them! Ugh.

Some solutions, more problems

I have solved the problems of redirecting from /journal and removing the .html extension by using 301 RedirectMatch. It was really a matter of trial and error, especially getting the .html extensions to go away without affecting pixelscribbles.com/index.html, but I think I managed it. If you see any weird behaviors or post links that don’t work, let me know. (Of course, I still haven’t solved the problem of Blogger’s post links not including the articles a, an, and the.)

I became aware of two new problems while using Google’s cached search results to test my settings: archive pages and “label” pages. Blogger archive URLs were formatted like /2004_07_01_archive, while WordPress’ are the much nicer /2004/07/. Similarly, Blogger keywords/tags, called labels, had page URLs formatted like /labels/travel, while WordPress’ tag pages are /tag/travel/. I think I can write a couple more RedirectMatch statements to fix these problems.

I do wonder if all the RedirectMatch-ing is going to hose my server. Is there another way I should be doing this? I guess in time search engines will map the new addresses for all the posts, and then I can remove the redirect expressions…right?

So now my issues are:

  • Removing the articles (a, an, the) from WordPress URLs
  • Redirecting old archive page URLs [done]
  • Redirecting old label page URLs to tag URLs [done]
  • New: Replacing spaces with dashes in tag links
  • Changing image links from Blogspot to my server*

* Update: I had thought that the images were all on my server already and I just needed to change the links. It turns out that all images uploaded after November 3, 2009 are saved to Blogspot and do not exist on my server. So I will need to upload those images and then change the links…manually.

The shift has been made…sort of

If you’re reading this, you can perhaps see that I’ve switched my blog to WordPress and also moved it from pixelscribbles.com/journal to plain old pixelscribbles.com. Both of these changes have been long in coming; I’ve thought about doing them both for years but just never had the motivation. Blogger’s ending of FTP support changed all that, and last night I slapped everything together in something of a rush.

This is not the template I’ll be sticking with, though I do like it. I’m hoping to design my own. This, of course, will take time; in the meantime you may see this blog cycle through various looks. My first order of business, though, is to see if I can’t do something about a few lingering problems.

My old post URLs don’t work anymore. This is sad, since many of those URLs had been around for years and years and years. I’d like to fix this problem, but to do so I will have to cope with three things.

  1. I need to redirect links including /journal/ to the root directory. [done]
  2. Blogger removed articles (a, an, the) from post-title URLs; WordPress doesn’t do that.
  3. Blogger permalinks had .html at the end; WordPress permalinks don’t.[fixed with redirect]

I’m thinking I will need to do some sort of mod_rewrite to solve these problems, which is a bit beyond my knowledge at this point.

The next issue is post images. My posts have pictures from three sources: this server, from back when I uploaded and embedded everything manually; SmugMug; and Blogger uploads that were sent via emails from my phone. The first source isn’t a problem; I simply left all the images on the server as they were in /journal/images, even though I don’t use /journal for anything else. Similarly, all the SmugMug images are still where they were before, so no need to change anything there.

But the Blogger uploads are quite the issue. When I was publishing via FTP, all the images saved into a folder on my server called uploaded_images. It would have been ideal had I left things this way, but alas, last night I was in a fit of “good grief I’m tired of looking at Blogger’s ‘We will no longer support FTP’ notice”, and I impulsively moved everything to Blogspot. It was only after that shift was done that I realized I really, really prefer to have my blog on my own server, where I can control things like .htaccess.

Unfortunately, Blogger’s migration tool was quite thorough, and it copied over all the Blogger-uploaded images and changed the URLs in the posts that referenced them. So now I have 1200 posts (apparently) that are pulling images from Blogspot.

I’ve left cosleia.blogspot.com up for now, so I shouldn’t have any broken images for the time being. Comments are disabled over there; that blog is a relic that maybe I’ll delete and maybe I’ll save for fun. Regardless of what I do with it, though, I need to somehow get rid of all the Blogspot images over here. I’m guessing this is going to involve a lot of manual searching and editing, but who knows? Maybe there’s a plugin out there that can help.

So that’s the state of pixelscribbles for now.

Despite all the pressing issues above, I’m thinking my first moves really ought to be to restore my blogroll and webcomics [done!] lists…I miss them!

Edit 3/16/2010: I’ve solved one issue with a redirect. And webcomics are back, baby.

The iPhone as a travel tool

Thanks to its size, GPS, and various applications, the iPhone has become invaluable for self-guided travel. You can save money, space, and time by using your phone rather than taking guided tours, fighting with bulky maps, and wandering around aimlessly. The iPhone can also help you save the memories you make on your trip, through text, images, audio, video, and location tracking.

Getting Around

Maps

The first and most obvious tool in your iPhone’s travel arsenal comes pre-installed. With the Maps application, not only can you find where you are and get directions to where you want to be, but you can search for different businesses and types of businesses around you.

Mobile Streetmaps

If you’re out of service area or roaming and you can’t connect to wifi, the Maps application becomes pretty useless. Sometimes even when you are connected, Maps doesn’t load at the speed you need. Prepare for this scenario with Mobile Streetmaps ($1.99 per map).

These maps are saved to your phone, so they’re viewable even when you’re offline. Purchase a map in advance for the city you’re visiting, and you’ll be able to find your way around no matter what your connection status. You can find these maps in the App Store by searching for the name of the city, or by searching for “Dubbele.com”.

Mobile Streetmaps is a must if you’re connected but roaming and don’t want to deal with massive data charges. Without GPS, all you’ll need to do is run a search for nearby streets to find your location. Since all the information is stored on your phone, there’s no data charge. With GPS, your coordinates will be matched with your location on the map saved to your phone. Since GPS does not use your phone’s data plan, there will again be no data charge.

This excellent user manual walks you through the process of using Mobile Streetmaps, including useful features like searching for amenities and saving locations for later.

Note: The maps in Mobile Streetmaps come from OpenStreetMap, meaning they are community-generated like Wikipedia. This means there may be incomplete areas.

Check out the FAQ for good information on why and how to use Mobile Streetmaps.

Enhancing Your Experience

Audio and video walking tours of some cities are available as iPhone applications. Since these applications are fully installed on your phone, they can give you a location-enhanced experience without using your data plan–like Mobile Streetmaps, all they require is GPS.

Some of the apps have features that do use data; when you’re roaming, watch for links to search results, internet content, or the Maps app to be sure you’re not incurring extra fees. (You can avoid this problem by accessing these features while connected to wifi, or by turning off Data Roaming in Settings > General > Network.)

Right now it seems that various small companies are building tours of their own cities first, then attempting to branch out; I haven’t seen a company with an app for more than one city yet.

These are the cities I’ve found; doubtless there are more out there.

The London Audio Guide ($5.99) will use your current location to pull up audio, text, pictures, and a map of nearby attractions. The app includes over 150 landmarks, and all of this content is downloaded upon install, so you won’t have data charges. For an added bit of fun context, the “More Info” button brings up quick links for Google results, Twitter mentions, Flickr images, and Google News results for the location. These options will, of course, use your data plan (or wifi).

City Slicker: Charleston ($9.99 normally; on sale for $0.99 at time of writing) is a video walking tour. Each stop includes text, images, and a video tour with a qualified guide. This content will not be automatically downloaded when you first install the app; to make sure you have everything pre-loaded, you’ll need to tap the “PREFS” button in the upper right and then tap “Download All Content”.

Tour Buddy’s Savannah Walking Tour ($9.99) is a professionally-recorded audio tour with pictures. You can choose to follow their recommended route, or visit the attractions in your own order. You can navigate through either a menu or a tour map without using your data plan.

The fun thing about these apps is that you can use them anywhere. You can preview the tour from home or from your hotel before you head out. This can help you know what to look for ahead of time. The London Audio Guide is also available for free online, if you’d rather preview that content on your desktop or laptop.

Save and Share Your Experience

Journaling

There are many ways you can chronicle your trip using your iPhone. The native Notes application lets you save text to your phone that can be emailed or copy-and-pasted later. This is a good option if you don’t want to use data while you’re out and about. You can also simply save memos to be expanded into a full blog post or private journal entry later.

You can also send brief updates to the world using Twitter or Facebook, either through those services’ free iPhone apps or via text messaging. When I visited England last year I updated Twitter via text message. I was hit with roaming fees and text message fees, but I didn’t incur data fees. You have to make a judgment call based on the charges for each service which one you want to use, or whether you want to use them at all.

If you like the immediacy of Twitter, but don’t want to incur data or text message fees, try Birdhouse ($1.99). This app will let you save drafts of tweets to be published later. The pros of using this rather than simply saving your thoughts in Notes are the robust sorting system, the countdown that lets you know how many characters you have left, and the fact that you can easily publish right from the application. One possible con is that your tweets won’t indicate the time you first wrote them, but the time you eventually publish them…so if you want to give your followers some context, you may need to include the time of writing in the tweet.

You can also blog from your iPhone–again, this will use data. Most blog systems have a post-by-email feature, which you can use without having to install an app–simply email from Notes or from Mail itself. However, this may result in some formatting oddities such as line breaks, and if you want to add photos, you can only do five at a time.

BlogPress ($2.99) is a robust third-party blogging tool that supports Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type/TypePad, LiveJournal, and others. This app will auto-save your posts as you write them. It has functionality for embedding photos and videos and adding tags and categories. You can tell the app to add location information to your post, and you can also have it send notices to your Twitter and/or Facebook when your posts are published.

WordPress also has its own iPhone application, which is free. This application not only supports posting, but also editing posts and pages and moderating comments.

Photos

Your iPhone comes equipped with a great way to save and share your trip: the Camera/Photos app. You can take pictures all day–or as long as your battery holds out–and then upload them to your favorite photo site from home or your hotel later. If you’re on wifi, not roaming, or willing to incur data charges, you can even update on the go.

As mentioned above, most blogging systems have post-by-email options, so a low-tech solution for getting your pictures online would be simply emailing them to your blog. The leading photo hosting sites also have their own mobile pages and applications.

SmugMug, my photo site of choice, has a free app called SmugShot that lets you take photos, caption and tag, and immediately upload in full size. SmugShot also geotags your photos, something the native camera app does not do. By default, SmugShot will upload to a generic gallery that is created automatically. However, you can adjust where photos go in the “Account” area. If you want to change this, be sure to do it before you start taking photos.

The fun thing about automatic geotagging is that you can go back later and see where you were when you took each picture. SmugMug’s “Map This” button on galleries is especially nice for this purpose.

Another fun camera application is shoot it! With this app, you can send a regular mail postcard of one of your photos right when you take it. Snap a shot of yourself in front of Big Ben, then use shoot it! to mail that photo to all your friends with a personalized note. The app itself is free; credits for sending postcards have price breaks if you buy in bulk.

Audio or Video Journaling

If words and pictures aren’t enough and you want to save and share an audiovisual experience, your iPhone can do that too.

The native Voice Memos application lets you record and trim audio, then either email it or send it via MMS. Similarly, with the Video Recording app, you can record and trim video. Within the native app, video can be sent by email, MMS, or directly to YouTube.

You can post video, audio, text, and more to Tumblr using the free Tumblr iPhone application. Posterous is even easier. Just email whatever the content is–text, photo, audio, or video–to post@posterous.com. In this blog post, Steven Sande describes using Posterous to publish an audio podcast.

The BlogPress app mentioned above can put your videos on YouTube and your blog.

Qik ($0.99) is a video blogging app that lets you record and upload video content. You can keep your videos private or share them with the world; you can choose to add your location or not. Qik can be connected to your existing blog and YouTube accounts. It can also send updates via Twitter and Facebook whenever you upload or stream a video. With the Qik Live app (free), you can even live stream video. Here’s more information.

Mapping Your Travels

As I mentioned above, one way to chart where you went on your trip is to take geotagged photos with SmugShot. But if you don’t use SmugMug, or if you’d like your tracking experience to be more interactive, you can use a free location-based social media application like Gowalla or Foursquare to share your location. These apps let people know what you’re doing geographically in a fun way. You can collect prizes, earn titles, and add friends to see what they’re up to.

Gowalla lets you add photos, complete “trips”, bookmark locations, and comment on your friends’ check-ins. Foursquare lets you add reviews, encouraging you to be specific so your friends will know what to do or try at that location.

Yelp (free) lets you find and write location reviews. You can add friends, find nearby businesses and landmarks, search for certain types of location, bookmark locations, and, like Gowalla and Foursquare, check in at a location. Because it’s primarily a review site, Yelp can help you pick what restaurant you want to try or park you want to explore.

Which app you use is really a matter of preference: how do you want to store and share your location? Which interface do you prefer? What features do you want? They’re free, so it’s not a big deal to try them all out and see which you like best.

Bear in mind that all of these apps integrate GPS functionality with online databases, so you will be pulling data.

Battery Life

If you’re using your iPhone intensively on your trip, the battery isn’t going to last the day. As many have unhappily noted, you can’t just carry spare batteries to swap out, either. Fortunately, there are some things you can do.

Whenever you go out, bring along the USB cord and power adapter that came with your phone. This way, if you stop at a place where you can use a power outlet, you can charge your phone. Apple sells a World Travel Adapter Kit that will allow you to plug in in most countries.

You can also carry external backup batteries. Kensington sells a large portable battery/recharger for the iPhone, a mini rechargeable battery with its own USB charging cable, and a dock that can charge both your phone and a mini battery. If you started out each day with a few fully-charged mini batteries, you’d probably be good to go. (Other companies have similar offerings; I linked to Kensington here because I’ve used their products before and have been pleased with them.)

If you’re driving, several third-party companies have iPhone/iPod car chargers. I have a Kensington car charger/audio adapter that is no longer on the market; while mine cradles the iPhone at the power adapter, this current model mounts to the windshield, plugging into the socket via an unobtrusive cord. (To play your iPhone music through your car’s speakers, you would then need a cable like this.)

If you’re biking, Make has a tutorial on how to harness that energy to recharge your phone. It looks like many people have built similar devices independently, but I couldn’t find a consumer product.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a solution for recharging using the energy of walking. Perhaps someday we’ll have kinetic batteries and battery chargers for our phones. In the meantime, you can always use a hand-crank radio/flashlight/USB cell phone charger in a pinch.

Beyond keeping recharging solutions at hand, you can also follow this advice from Apple to maximize your battery life.

Safety and Privacy

Don’t Share Too Much

It can be a lot of fun to post content immediately and check in with a location service everywhere you go, but you should keep in mind that constantly updating your location online can make it simple for strangers to find you. I recommend updating sporadically, and checking in to a location when you’re about to leave rather than when you arrive. It’s also best not to update your social networking status with a note about where you’re headed, unless that particular network is locked so only your friends can see your status.

If you’re exploring the area around where you’re staying, I suggest trying not to post location information that could possibly lead someone there. Instead of checking in along the way, wait until you arrive at an attraction to post. And if you’re alone, try not to make that obvious.

Be careful with photo geotagging. There is no way to turn it off on a per-photo basis in SmugShot. If there’s a location you don’t want to have on a map, like a friend or relative’s house or a place you’ll be for a few hours, take that picture with the basic camera app. You can then upload the photo using SmugShot, and no geotagging will occur.

If you accidentally upload a geotagged photo, you can remove the location information using SmugMug’s full web interface. Go to the photo in your gallery, tap on “Tools”, tap on “More” under “This Photo”, and tap “Edit Geography”. You will then be able to remove the latitude and longitude coordinates.

If you’d rather not deal with geotagging at all, you can turn it off completely in Settings > SmugShot.

Have a Backup

Don’t be utterly dependent on your iPhone. Do research before you go on your trip. Prepare for the possibility of not having the phone at all.

Learn what you need to know to get around and what to look for if you get lost. Try to familiarize yourself with the main streets of the area you’re visiting, including the location of where you parked or where you’re staying relative to everything else. It would also probably be best to have a hard copy map, just in case.

If you’re visiting a country with a different language, learn how to ask for help and how to read and say important words like “police”, “embassy”, “lost”, “sick”, and “hospital”.

When you’re out and about on your trip, pay attention to places where you might go for help if you need it. Also pay attention to where you can get water, food, and money in case of emergencies.

Protect the Information on Your iPhone

Your iPhone has a lot of information about you stored on it. If your phone is lost or stolen, you don’t want to be left open to identity theft.

The first thing you should do is set a code for unlocking your phone. Go into Settings > General and tap “Passcode Lock”. You will be asked to enter a 4-digit code, then enter it again in order to set the code. Once this feature is enabled, no one will be able to unlock your phone without the code.

You can also protect your iPhone with iHound ($2.99). This application lets you use your phone’s GPS to track its location. The best way to use iHound is to turn it on whenever you finish using your phone. Even if you don’t do that, though, once you realize your phone is missing, you can send it an alarm via a push notification from the iHound website. The push notification will turn iHound on automatically if someone tries to open the phone to turn off the alarm.

As you can see, the iPhone is an amazing tool for travelers. There are plenty of other options out there that I couldn’t get to in this post, like language dictionaries, currency converters, and of course the compass that’s available on 3GS iPhones. Do a little digging and you’ll probably find a way to do everything you want to do on your next vacation.

Changes are coming to pixelscribbles

On May 1, Blogger will no longer support publishing to FTP, which is how I currently publish this blog. Sometime before then–hopefully this weekend–I will be migrating either to Blogger’s hosted solution or to WordPress.

I’ve thought about shifting to a different platform for years. The reason I’ve stayed with FTP publishing for so long is that I felt comfortable and safe with two copies of my blog in existence: one in Blogger’s database and one in static html files on my server. With this duplication of my content, essentially an automatic backup, I was confident that I’d never lose my posts. That made me reticent to change blog software.

Now that my hand is being forced, I’m leaning towards self-hosting. Frankly, I trust my webhost, pair, more than I trust Blogger’s servers. This may be a misguided view, but in the eight or so years I’ve used both services, I’ve only ever had problems with Blogger.

The main uncertainty in my mind at this point is WordPress. I’ve seen so many WordPress blogs get hacked and wonderful content get destroyed, notably the several times it happened to Sushicam. If, after losing all my offline writing and photos in the fire, I lost all of this too, I would be completely decimated. I do not want to go through that feeling again. I want to continue to be able to travel back in time through my writing and remember what I used to think about and how I used to feel. This blog is really all I’ve got left of my life before August 2005. I can’t lose it.

Obviously, I’m still thinking about what I want to do. But a decision will come soon, and then my blog will move. When that happens, the design will probably change.

I’ve also made a change to my photo posting recently. For awhile there I was emailing photos from my phone directly to this blog, to quickly and easily share what was going on. However, I was never really a fan of doing things this way. For starters, it saved the photos here on my server instead of on my photo site. For another, having a bunch of posts with nothing but one or two photos in them took up a lot of space and pushed text content–my thoughts, the real purpose of this blog–down the page.

So I’ve started using SmugShot again, the SmugMug application for iPhone. Now I simply send the photos I take directly to the proper album on my photo site. So far I’ve sent photos to February 2010 and March 2010.

When I switch my blog to whatever I switch it to, I plan to pull my latest SmugMug photos into the sidebar, so blog visitors will know I’ve uploaded new photos without having to scroll past them to get to my real content. I’m pretty happy with this solution and look forward to implementing it.

Once all these changes are in place, I plan to really get back into writing here. I miss it.

A little extra work

Two weekends ago I went on one of my photo adventures, hitting various scenic spots around the area and taking pictures. I spent a whole Saturday exploring and snapping, and then on Sunday I began processing the photos.

This time, rather than simply saving off the camera and uploading immediately, I tried editing each photo using some tricks I read about online. I was extremely pleased with the results; I feel like I’ve taken my first step out of casual pointing and shooting and into real photography.

First I evaluated each photo, rotating and cropping where necessary. Then I applied Image > Adjustments > Match Color > Neutralize, which I read about here on Sitepoint.com. I had used the other option mentioned in that article, Auto Color, before, but wasn’t always happy with the results. Match Color > Neutralize really helped make the color of my photos look natural. I was especially happy with the Color Intensity slider, which helped me bring out color without affecting detail.

For most of the daylight photos, Match Color > Neutralize was very beneficial, but it wasn’t necessary on all of them.

After rotating, cropping, and normalizing the colors, I went through a variety of adjustments. My friend Don posted a link on Facebook to this technique used by a photographer to enhance colors on his images. I ended up modifying the technique a bit, depending on the photo I was editing.

To begin with, I didn’t use the High Pass filter at all. Most of my photos were shot in bright daylight, and all that filter did was cause weird halos that didn’t add anything to the scene. However, I made heavy use of Blend Mode. I would duplicate the background layer, then change its blend mode from Normal to Soft Light (or, in a very few cases, Hard Light). Sometimes I’d Desaturate the top layer; other times I’d leave it the way it was.

I also fiddled with the opacity on the top layer to get the exact contrast and color pop I wanted, and on some photos I played with Curves and Levels to get richer contrast effects.

By the time I got to the last location, Thurmond Dam, the sun was setting. I had never managed to get a really good nighttime shot before, and I’m open to suggestions about shooting at night. For the shots of the dam from the Georgia side of the river, I propped my Nikon D60 against the side of a tree.

The editing methods listed above didn’t work quite as well for the low light shots. High contrast tended to destroy the details and it was hard to pull out color without making the photo look grainy. I’ll be interested to research and try out different techniques for night photography.

Any thoughts on the techniques I used for these photos? Do you know any shooting or editing tricks?

A challenge changes shape

I have always wanted to be a mother. I like to tell people that I’ve thought about having children since I was a child, because it’s true and because it sounds good. I like to read about teaching methods and childhood development and what effects experience can have on personality and learning. I often think about what sort of environment I want to provide for my children, how I want them to feel comfortable and safe and loved, and how I’d like to foster in them a love of exploration and creation and imagination. To this day, when I hear about a fun trip or project, I think about doing it with my kids.

Two things came along in my life to derail my assumptions. Neither of them managed to snuff out my dreams, no matter how hard they tried. But together, it seemed that they would see to it that my dreams never became a reality.

The first thing, of course, was cancer. I was diagnosed with biphenaltypic leukemia in 1997, and the three rounds of chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant I underwent to conquer that disease effectively destroyed my ovaries–or, perhaps, the eggs inside them. I only have regular periods when I’m on hormone replacements, and despite having nothing but unprotected sex throughout my seven-year marriage to Sean, we have never had so much as a miscarriage.

Through my struggles with this reality, Sean always told me to face reality, to try to be happy without my dream. Sean didn’t want children; that was the second thing.

He never wanted kids. Never dreamed about it, never thought about it except when I talked about it. The most he would ever agree was that he’d accept it if I happened to get pregnant; aggressive fertility treatments and adoption simply weren’t things he was interested in. There was a time when I tearfully tried to express just how important having children was to me…he was silent for a time and then said quietly, “I didn’t think it was a deal-breaker.”

It wasn’t, of course. I knew how Sean felt when I married him. I married him because I loved and still love him, not because I expected him to give me everything I wanted. I’ve come to realize that Sean doesn’t fully grasp how much I love him, how leaving him to pursue one of my dreams simply isn’t an option.

And so, over the past ten years as I struggled with the knowledge of my infertility and had doors slammed in my face with every test, I was alone. Sean ached for me, but never with me. He wanted me to be happy. He wanted me to forget about having kids and just enjoy my life with him.

In a way, that made it a little easier. At least that way, if I couldn’t give him children, I wasn’t disappointing him.

But that part of the equation fell away last weekend, when Sean said, as if I’d known it all along, “I still want to have a daughter one day. Just one. Of course, with my luck, we’d end up with a boy. I’d like us to be able to have a kid, but if that’s not possible…I would be okay with adoption.”

We’ve got a lot going on right now. We’re planning to move across town, and Sean’s trying to get a certification and move on with his career. Once that’s settled I will be undergoing elective surgery. We won’t be ready to try expensive fertility treatments for a year after that.

But that’s the plan now. It may be too late…or it may never have been possible. But we’ll try.

And if that fails, it looks like we’ll be adopting.

I honestly don’t know how to feel. This isn’t a too-good-to-be-true situation, but it’s still so much more than I was led to expect these past ten years.

My world view, which for so long has felt so narrow, seems suddenly to have expanded. If I just turn my head, I feel like I could see it all.

But I can’t bring myself to go all-in just yet. Not with all the disappointments I’ve already gone through.

At this point I will clamp down and allow myself only the tiniest cautious flicker of hope.

Dinner

Fish sandwiches and salads a la Sean.

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Categorized as Diary, Food Pr0n