Lonely Planet North American city guides free till February 4

by Scott Carmichael on

To help stranded travelers navigate their way around a strange city during “snowmageddon 2011”, Lonely Planet has dropped the price on its North American city guides to $0.

The 13 different free guides cover most major cities in the US and Canada and are all available in the iTunes App Store.

You’ve got till February 4 to download and install the apps. As we’ve mentioned in the past, even if you don’t need the apps right away, it makes sense to purchase them now they are free, as you’ll then be able to re-install them any time you need them in the future.

Hotel Tonight lets you stay warm during the Midwest blizzard with iPhone room reservations

by Scott Carmichael on

Last week, we wrote about iPhone hotel app “Hotel Tonight”. When we first mentioned it, hotels could only be booked in New York, San Francisco and Hollywood. Just in time for the big Blizzard of ’11, Hotel Tonight has added Chicago, Boston and Washington DC.

Like the other cities, these new options let you pick a hotel room for tonight, and results display several price categories.

For tonight in Chicago (and our upcoming 22 inches of snow), you can spend the night for as little as $59.

Best of all, sign up and book a room, and you’ll get $25 off your first reservation. Invite friends from within the app, and you can earn an additional $25 each time one of them makes a reservation.

The app is free, and is available in the iTunes App Store.

The age of the affordable jetpack is finally here – with a few limitations.

by Scott Carmichael on

Decades after James Bond got to play with one – we mere mortals can finally order our very own jetpack. Sadly, this is not the jetpack you have in mind, and its limitations mean you can’t strap it on and head to the office “Jetsons style”.

The pack is attached to a water based engine unit, and is tied down by an umbilical cord. Correct – this “jetpack” doesn’t even use jet engines. That said – the jetlev pack does let you fly quite a bit longer than the 20 seconds you get from a rocket powered unit.

The water based “recreational vehicle” delivers 450lbs of downward and directional thrust, which can propel you down a lake or river at 22mph and 30 feet high. The price? $99,500. Expect to see these at popular beach destinations “coming soon”.

Looking at the video does raise a few questions – how much will your feel hurt if you get them in that stream of water, and what happens when you land the “jetpack” on top of someone swimming peacefully at the beach?

Still, I’m sure this will be a huge hit. I give it six months till we start seeing this in Skymall Magazine. If so, we’ll be sure to get our Mike Barish to review it.

GPS tracker recovers lost iPhone from home of Delta Airlines employee

by Scott Carmichael on

When Kris Brown lost her iPhone at Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport, she probably assumed it was gone for good. Thankfully, her son remembered its GPS tracking feature and started locating the phone.

The location returned by the tracking service pointed to the home of Haiphong Le – an employee of Delta Airlines at the airport.

Local police got involved, and found his employee badge and determined that he had been working during the same time Ms. Brown lost her iPhone. He has now been cited for misdemeanor theft.

This is the second time Mr. Le has been involved with the police – in 2008, he was a suspect in a luggage theft, but no charges were filed.

To learn more about protecting your mobile phone and its data, check out these ten tips on mobile phone security.

Geotagging your travels: why you should, and how to do it

by Dana Murph on

Even casual travelers know the wonders of GPS. It’s hard to imagine how we functioned on the road just a few years back without a satnav at our disposal, and now that our smartphones are also well equipped to guide us from point A to point Z (and everywhere in between), having a true sense of direction isn’t quite as necessary as it once was. But GPS satellites are useful for quite a bit more than just routing us. In the photography world, geotagging is becoming an increasingly attractive way to effectively track ones travels in a unique, refreshing visual fashion.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, geotagging refers to embedded GPS data on each image, which can then be read by various photo applications and mapping software. When you take a photo using any existing DSLR, a great deal of “metadata” is embedded onto each image; this data enables individuals to see what aperture, shutter speed, white balance setting and focal length (among other things) were used when a particular shot was composed. These pieces of information are remarkably useful when comparing shots after the fact, and geotagging adds one more vital bit of data to the mix: coordinates. Read on to find out how you can start adding GPS data to your images, and why you should make the effort to do so.

%Gallery-115291%The easiest way to make this happen is to buy a camera with a GPS or Hybrid GPS module built-in. A number of newly introduced compact models include this. Fujifilm’s FinePix XP30 has inbuilt geotagging support (not to mention a rugged, waterproof casing), and Casio’s Exilim EX-H20G is a non-rugged alternative with integrated geotagging. It’s an easy feature to find — either a camera has it built-in or it doesn’t, and manufacturers will generally go out of their way to ensure you know if a particular model does.

If you aren’t in the market for a new point-and-shoot, existing DSLR owners can upgrade their camera to support geotagging. Nikon makes a module of their own that fits certain models (GP-1), and if your camera doesn’t have a first-party add-on, Gisteq offers a (mostly) universal solution that connects via Bluetooth (PhotoTrackr Plus and PhotoTrackr Mini).

Once your camera is equipped to embed geotagging data, all you need is a program that’ll read that data. Apple’s iPhoto (displayed throughout this post) is a great example; any image that you load into iPhoto can be sorted by ‘Places.’ If you have an Internet connection, you’ll see pins populate the map (as shown here) in order to represent all of the locales where photos were taken. Google’s Picasa is another solid option, as is the popular Flickr.

What you’re left with is an incredibly visual way to look at a trip you recently took, all by way of photographs. In a way, these specific location points tell a story in an of themselves. Rather than simply telling friends and family that a certain group of photos were taken in Montana (for example), geotagging allows them to see exactly what routes you took on a road trip and precisely which trails you skied at Whitefish Mountain Resort. If you took multiple images at a certain place, you can easily sort those by selecting a single pin. The images throughout this article show (most) of the photos I took on my Casio Exilim EX-H20G while in northwestern Montana, including a number of shots while on Big Mountain itself.

On a grander scale, geotagging all of your images for the foreseeable future would enable you to create a lifetime travel map that visually shows where you’ve been in the world. It’s certainly a lot easier than trying to remember every off-the-wall stop you made, and it’s most definitely more satisfying than some Bucket List you’ve generated in Microsoft Word. On a smaller scale, sending your child off to camp with a geotagging camera would allow you to see where all the counselors shuttled your young one around — after all, kids have a thing for not keeping a very detailed journal, and this would make their job of explaining what all they did a lot easier.

Interested in getting started with geotagging? Listed below are a few recommended GPS-enabled cameras, geotagging add-on dongles and photo applications that work well with geotagged images.

GPS-enabled point-and-shoot cameras:

Geotagging add-on dongles:

Geotagging applications: