2010 › May

Roadside geology books – Road trip tip

by Gadling Staff on

Ever ponder the origins of that distant mesa? Curious about those snowy mountains, those flinty hills, the flatness of Central Indiana? Perhaps you’re bored to death by the lack of scenery?

Consider taking a roadside geology book on your next trip. These books contain an array of maps, easy to follow mileage logs, basic geologic primers, and photographs that can bring a landscape — even a “boring” one — to life: cornfields become shark infested seas, lifeless brown deserts become breezy tropical islands, and dinosaurs roam in the next road cut.

Austin & Piñatas: Why it Pays to Wander

by Mike Barish on

The Gadling team was in Austin, TX last weekend for our annual meet-up. I was the first to arrive in town and decided to take a walk to a taquería that a friend had recommended. It was located in East Austin, a predominantly Mexican neighborhood tucked away on the other side of I-35 from 6th Street and the clubs and restaurants that keep Austin hopping into the morning hours. East Austin is a sleepier part of town filled with one-story houses on small plots of land and authentic Mexican restaurants and cantinas. It’s the part of town where you don’t encounter as many people walking along the streets, but the ones that you do nod, say hello and make you feel welcome in the neighborhood. It’s also home to a Ruth’s Piñata Land, a store that ended up being the highlight of my Austin weekend.

%Gallery-92280%Why, in a weekend filled with amazing Mexican food, mouthwatering barbecue and a street fair bigger than some carnivals, would I remember a piñata more than anything else? Well, it’s not the piñata in and of itself. It’s what it represents. It was happenstance that I found that shop. It was because I was acting on a recommendation from a friend, chose to walk rather than take a cab on a hot Spring day and meandered down that street because of the timing of the street lights. It was an unplanned trip to a business that most tourists and travelers would walk by without much of a thought. For me, it became a story and a running joke over the weekend.

I stopped into Ruth’s Piñata Land purely for giggles but left with so much more. I had hysterical photos (see gallery), a good story and, yes, a piñata (of the Hello Kitty variety).

As the rest of the Gadling crew arrived in Austin, we began to engage in more traditional activities in the busier parts of Austin. We dined on 6th Street, shopped in SoCo and checked out the Capitol Building. But something kept drawing me to East Austin. Some of us took a field trip back there for another fantastic breakfast at Joe’s Bakery (which we highly recommend) and a quick shopping experience at Mustang Jewelry & Pawn. Not your typical tourist fare, but an experience that we all enjoyed thoroughly.

So, is my point that you should all go to piñata stores and pawn shops? Not exactly. All I’m saying is that you should keep your eyes and minds open. If you see something quirky, interesting or just plain weird, take a closer look. You never know what you’ll find if you wander around with no agenda, no schedule and no preconceived notions. We should all find our own piñata shop in whatever form it takes.

Note: Sadly, I left the Hello Kitty piñata in the back Andrew Evans’ rental car…which was towed…and never recovered due to time restraints. We hope that she found a good home in the impound lot.

HP Notebook Projection Companion review

by Scott Carmichael on

The HP Notebook Projection Companion is designed to be the portable projector your travel with when you need more than a pico projector, but without the weight of a large and bulky projector. The innards of the Projector Companion offer enough brightness and resolution for a successful presentation in a medium size conference room. As I showed last week, the combination of this projector and a small HP Netbook computer can make for a really small “mobile office“.

So – lets take a brief look at its video performance, and see whether it really can become the newest part of your road warrior lineup.

The projector itself comes in a nice leather carrying case, with room for the video cable. As you can see, if you carry it in a laptop bag, there will be plenty of space for your other gear. The projector uses the same power adapter found on most HP notebook and netbook machines, so if you have enough battery life in your computer, you’ll be able to run a presentation with just one power supply.

The menu system of the Notebook Projection Companion is easy to use – thanks to the large D-Pad control on top of the unit. Setting are impressive – and include professional things like Keystone, a first (for me) on any portable projector. Other settings allow for color adjustments.

Once you make the image really large, you obviously lose some of the brightness and contrast – in my test, I used an 800×600 input signal and was able to get the image up to about 90 inches (diagonal) before it became too dim. This test was in a partially dimmed room. In a bright room, images stay excellent up to about 50″.

Of course, the projector is just at home showing video as it is with PC signals – which means you can do video demonstrations, or project a movie on your hotel room wall at the end of a long day. Thanks to its composite input, you can also hook up an iPod, iPhone or other video capable device – though you will need your own speaker as the Projection Companion lacks its own audio output.

Specifications / performance

The HP Notebook Projection Companion is powered by a Texas Instruments DLP projection chip – capable of projecting at 858×600 pixels. Its brightness is an impressive 100 lumens. At a mere 0.9 lbs, it weighs very little – especially when compared to a larger projector. In the image above, the screen is about 70 inches diagonal. Not only is weight kept to a minimum, but sound (from the fan) and heat at not really an issue at all. After an hour of usage, the projector was warm, but only needed 5 minutes to completely cool down.

Target audience

Portable projectors in this price range are finally all grown up – they are now at the point where you can carry one of these instead of a bulkier unit. The HP Notebook Projection Companion is obviously perfect for anyone who does a lot of work on the road. If your work involves presentations all around the world, the Notebook Projection Companion will shave a lot of weight off your baggage (plus it’ll make you look pretty slick).

Final thoughts

The HP Notebook Projection Companion lacks a lot of features found on some current portable projectors – during a conversation with the product manager, I learned that the “companion” part of the product description is more than just a snazzy name. The Notebook Projection Companion is designed to be a true companion for your computer – and you can only get one when your order it with an HP Notebook.

This obviously explains the lack of a battery for the projector, and why it does not come with a remote control. Personally I would have liked to see things like an HDMI input, speaker, USB media player, remote control and battery option – but I can’t blame HP for not including these when they really only focused on designing a projector to sit next to a laptop to help with a presentation.

At the end of the day, all you really need from a projector is perfect image quality – and HP delivered above and beyond. The picture quality on the Notebook Projection Companion is excellent and the entire package shows that the design is “business class”. The projector feels very well built, and is fully enclosed in an aluminum case.

Inside the box is the projector, VGA/Composite video cable, power adapter, mini tripod and a user guide. The HP Notebook Projection Companion costs $499 and is available from HP – but only as an accessory when ordered along with a variety of HP Business Notebook computers.

Rick Steves’ New Travel Mag

by Andrew Evans on

Just in time for you to change your summer travel plans, the Smithsonian and Rick Steves just launched their special summer edition magazine, Smithsonian Presents “TRAVELS with Rick Steves”. (In case you forgot, a magazine is a bundle of glossy paper printed with pretty colored pictures and some words, then bound with staples and placed within arm’s reach of the toilet in case you lose your iPad and need something to read.)

Just like Rick Steves the person, Rick Steves the magazine is dedicated to traveling in Europe. The 104-page Eurofest breaks down into 24 articles that describe Europe’s “Top 20 Destinations” which mixes up the obvious (Florence, Prague, Rome, Paris, and Venice) with the obscure (Denmark’s Aero Island, Bosnia’s Mostar, and the tiny Austrian village of Hallstatt). As an unapologetic advertorial, the magazines flips between a few scant full-page ads for Smithsonian Journeys and Rick Steves Tours. For a mere five bucks, you can buy a still-warm copy from the 100,000-strong print run at a newsstand near you.

Now honestly, I know nothing about Rick Steves other than he’s quite famous for helping regular Americans take tours of Europe. Also, many travelers who I respect swear by his travel guides, and once upon a time, a bunch of his fans mistook me for his assistant at a book signing. After reading his entire magazine cover to cover, I made the amazing discovery that the masthead lists only one writer. Yes, Rick Steves wrote the entire magazine all by himself, so… respect. The guy works hard and is way gutsy… gutsy enough to publish a print travel magazine in 2010.Love him or hate him, Rick Steves is a brand that’s infected America in much the same way as Target, Wranglers, and hip hop music sung by Caucasians. He’s everywhere and we all end up liking him, just like a lot of Americans enjoyed the movie “Chocolat” and a lot of Americans dream of carrying a baguette under one arm in France or clinking beer steins in Germany or sipping ouzo shots in Greece. This magazine is for them. For us pickier travel snobs, the gorgeous photo spreads and classy Smithsonian layout gives Rick the royal treatment and makes us all want to book a trip to Europe with our new best friend Rick.

Nevertheless, for someone whose entire identity involves leading America by the hand through Europe’s backdoor, it’s hard not to ignore Rick’s hearty embrace of cliché. His magazine’s titles highlight “Storybook” England, “Sound of Music” Austria, and “Heidi’s Switzerland” before trailing off into a slew of earth-shattering travel tips such as “David is a must-see visit in Florence”.

Now, if I wrote travel copy like that, my editors would shove it through a shredder. Twice. All you would have is a bunch of little squares of paper-like confetti thrown at a quaint Italian wedding that I just happened to run into as I was strolling down a cobblestone street under a buttery Tuscan sunset.

I much preferred Rick’s more honest and authentic articles like the “Best Little Street in Paris”–a candid Polaroid narrative about Rue Cler in the 7th Arrondissement–and his heartfelt discovery of Danish island life. I was also happy to see some of the Rick Steve love shine down on Blackpool–a northern British seaside resort that very few Americans ever visit.

If Rick Steves and Smithsonian want to feed our dreams of Europe, then mission accomplished. I want to go to all the places listed and now that I’ve read this sunny version of their Top 20 list, I’m so there. My only conjecture is that the “quaint folksiness” Rick so adamantly warns travelers against might also be the very product that he’s selling.

The Whale Hunter’s Hunter, an Interview with Captain Paul Watson

by Jon Bowermaster on

No one ocean person is more ready to fight on its behalf than Paul Watson. Each season for the past several he has sailed his ship the Steve Irwin to the icy waters off Antarctica to harass Japanese whalers, who insist on continuing their hunt despite international protest and pressure, using “science” as their lone defense. The popular Animal Planet series “Whale Wars,” filmed aboard the ship during its offenses, has brought Watson and his Sea Shepherds’ to an international audience. The season down south is just finished and Watson and the Tokyo fleet of whale hunters have announced their take was down by half, thanks to Sea Shepherd’s harassment.

Jon Bowermaster: Has your current campaign in the Southern Ocean been successful?

Captain Paul Watson: I believe it has been successful. Our strategy is an economic one. I don’t believe the Japanese whalers will back off on moral, ethical or scientific grounds but they will quit if they lose the one thing that is of most value to them – their profits. Our objective is to sink the Japanese whaling fleet – economically, to bankrupt them and we are doing that.

We have slashed their kill quotas in half over the last three years and negated their profits. They are tens of millions of dollars in debt on their repayment schedule for Japanese government subsidies. The newly elected Japanese government has pledged to cut their subsidies.

I am actually confident that we can shut them down this year. They are on the ropes financially.
JB: How do you measure success? Fewer whales taken by Japanese? Other signs??

CPW: Of their quota of 935 Minke whales last year they fell short by 304. Of their quota of 50 Fin whales, they took only one. The year before they only took half their quota and in the last three years did not kill enough whales to break even so have been operating at a loss. We have also exposed their illegal whaling activities to the world and initiated a controversy and a discussion on whaling in the Japanese media.

JB: How do the Japanese continue to get away with the whale hunt when so many things say they shouldn’t, i.e. the Antarctica Treaty forbidding commerce below sixty degrees south latitude and the International Whaling Comission’s ban on all whaling?

CPW: There is a lack of economic and political motivation on the part of governments to enforce international conservation law. The Japanese whalers are targeting endangered and protected whales inside the boundaries of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on commercial whaling, in violation of the Antarctic Treaty that prohibits commercial activity south of sixty degrees and they are in contempt of the Australian Federal Court for continuing to kill whales in the Australian Antarctic Economic Exclusion Zone. There is no difference between Japanese whale poachers in Antarctica and elephant poachers in East Africa except that the Africans are black and impoverished.

JB: Do you know what the reaction among Japanese people – not scientists, not government – is towards the continued whale hunts?

CPW: I’m not actually concerned. I’m Canadian and the majority of Canadians are opposed to the commercial slaughter of seals but the Canadian government subsidizes it nonetheless. I believe it is a myth that once the people of a nation oppose something that things will change. First, most people are apathetic and could not care one way or another. Secondly, the pro-whalers have an economic motivation to lobby for continued whaling and thirdly in Japan it is considered inappropriate to oppose government or corporate policy. I’ve always felt that educating the Japanese public was a waste of time and smacks of cultural chauvinism. The fact is that whaling is illegal and we intervene for that reason and the key to ending it is the negation of profits.

JB: They are showing The Cove in Japan now, and most Japanese interviewed said they had no idea these dolphin hunts were happening. Are the Japanese aware of “Whale Wars”?

CPW: I am not sure nor do I care. I know that the Japanese government and the whalers are aware of it. I know that the people of Taiji are aware of the dolphin slaughters. I think that the controversy over the film is allowing many Japanese people to become aware of it, despite that the killing of dolphins continues. The Cove has been most valuable in raising awareness outside of Japan, which motivates outside pressure on Japan.

JB: How are whale populations doing around the world? Growing? Shrinking?

CPW: The oceans are dying. Every single commercial fishery is in a state of economic collapse. We have destroyed some ninety percent of the population of the large fishes. All life in the ocean is threatened. And if the oceans die, we die. This is a simple fact that humans choose to ignore. If you eat a fish you are part of the problem. If you eat pork or chicken raised on fishmeal, you are part of the problem. If you throw plastic garbage into the ocean you are part of the problem. All whales are endangered although some populations are slowly recovering, but this may not save them from an overall marine ecological collapse.