Kindle tips for travelers

by Meg Nesterov on


The iPad may be the current darling of techie travelers but some of us are waiting for the first generation kinks to be worked out and a decrease in price (or a sudden cash windfall) before taking the plunge. While still a “monotasker” compared to a tablet or laptop computer, Amazon’s Kindle is still a great tool to carry books on the road with a lightweight design and almost limitless capacity to store whatever travel guidebooks, beach reads, or other reading materials you desire. Combined with the easy ability to search within a book for a place name or keyword, a much lower profile than carrying a tourist map, and limited but free web browser, Kindle is a good choice for travelers. Here are a few other ideas beyond ebooks for your next trip:

  1. Google Maps are a fantastic resource when traveling, but lose their usefulness once you are without internet access or unwilling to pay for data roaming. Whether you download individual maps of city neighborhoods or get all fancy with creating your own Google Map of destinations and recommendations, having a “hard copy” on your Kindle is handy when you are offline and want to quickly locate that vintage store in Berlin a friend told you about.
  2. Many free PDF travel guides are available online including In Your Pocket and Arrival Guides. While not as extensive as a guidebook, they provide a few suggestions for where to stay, eat, shop, and what to do in many cities and often cover less-traveled destinations such as Eastern Europe. Lonely Planet has also introduced Pick and Mix chapters for purchase, perfect for when you only need a chapter of a guidebook rather than a whole country book.
  3. Create your own travel guide by saving magazine articles, blog posts, and web pages for your destination with content more recent, relevant and varied than any guidebook. Tote along Gadling’s guide to Paris’ Japanese quarter, The New York Times‘ 36 Hours in Copenhagen, or the Wikitravel page for Mumbai.

How to save documents for your Kindle: most Mac browsers have a Print to PDF feature and PDFs are easily read on the Kindle. PC users can download a program such as PDFCreator to save PDFs. If you have another format including HTML or a Word document (good if you are copying and pasting text), you can email to Amazon and they will convert and send back. Then you can add documents via the USB cord to your Kindle, simply drag and drop into the Kindle documents folder. While many files don’t have the same functionality as ebook format, you can zoom in and often search many of the file types.

While many of these documents can simply be printed, printer access is often scarce on the road and this method saves a lot on paper. Any other travel tips for Kindle? Leave ’em in the comments below.

Survival guide app

by Jason Heflin on
No one likes to think of the bad things that could happen on a trip. But what would you do if you survived a plane crash, were caught in a terrorist attack, or encountered a tsunami while on vacation? Well wonder no more iphone users. The SAS Survival Guide has been around in book form for over twenty years but now there’s an app.

John “Lofty” Wiseman spent years as a soldier and instructor for the SAS, an elite British fighting unit. In the app, Lofty guides the reader through a myriad of nightmare scenarios. Stranded atop an icy mountain? Covered. Need to know what local plants are edible? Check. Stuck in a forest fire with no obvious escape? No worries. The guide provides detailed information on all these would-be disasters. The app will cost $6.99 at itunes and is compatible with the ipad and ipod touch as well.

Although the guide is a great read, and the bulit-in survival quiz is fun for parties and around the campfire, the practicality of using it on-demand in some of these situations is questionable. For instance, if your plane were to crash land in the ocean your cell phone would be wet and useless. Then what? You are stranded on a mountaintop in the Himalaya and your phone runs out of battery. Tough luck. To get the most out of the guide read it before the disaster strikes.

The app holds interest by utilizing several interactive features including the survival quiz, an instructional video, and even a morse code feature that will turn your iphone into a beeping/flashing communicator. These make it fun for the user to learn a bit more about surviving if and when disaster strikes. That can’t be a bad thing when the shit hits the fan.

RoboForm Online offers secure access to your passwords – anywhere in the world

by Scott Carmichael on

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been using a beta version of RoboForm Online to manage my passwords. RoboForm has been around for years, and is one of the most reliable Internet password managers around. The Online version of RoboForm syncs all your site logins, and sends them encrypted to the RoboForm servers.

For travelers, this means you can access all your personal accounts, without the need for your computer. Best of all, the account information can be sent directly to a website using a special “bookmarklet” – which means you don’t need to install any additional software. This makes the service ideal for use on public computers. And since the password is not typed, Internet cafes with “keyloggers” won’t be able to intercept it.

Data is protected with several levels of password protection, and the service offers 20MB of storage for passwords, identities and more. I’ve used other account sync applications in the past (including Mozilla Sync), but this is the first one I’ve seen that offers online access to your accounts. In addition to desktop and web access, RoboForm Online also supports the iPhone and Android.

RoboForm Online requires RoboForm to be installed on your computer, and it’ll install the sync component when you activate it. For “on the road” use, I’ve found that the experience is seamless. Especially if you travel with a computer, and use a different PC at home, being able to keep your account information securely in sync is a fantastic timesaver.

Help build the Flight 93 national memorial

by Kraig Becker on

On 9/11, 40 people died on board United Flight 93 when the plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. We don’t know exactly what happened during the plane’s final minutes, but we do know that a number of the passengers worked together to prevent hijackers from taking over the aircraft and crashing it into another building, saving who knows how many lives at the expense of their own.

Now, that National Parks Foundation is working hard to build a memorial for the heroic passengers that were on Flight 93, but like all projects in this struggling economy, it has been difficult to raise the necessary funds. Between now and July 4th, the organization has set a goal of raising $93,000 for the memorial, and thanks to the seemingly ubiquitous Facebook, and a little help from a corporate sponsor, we can all help the cause as well.

Energy company Range Resources has generously pledged to match, dollar-for-dollar, all online donations to the memorial between now and July 4th. They’ve also committed themselves to donating $1 for every new fan of the project on Facebook, up to $46,500. Donations can be made directly to the cause online by clicking here, and remember each of the donations is tax deductible. If you have a Facebook page, you can become a “fan” of the memorial by going here, and pushing the “Like” button located at the top of the page.

It really is that simple to contribute to this very worthy cause.

[Photo Credit: National Park Foundation]

Airbnb founder to eat his own dog food

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Couch surfing – or whatever else you’d call the hitchhiking equivalent to sleeping – might work for a few nights, but can you make a career of it? The founder and CEO of a spare room rental service is about to find out.

Brian Chesky, one of the minds behind Airbnb, which helps people rent out their spare rooms to strangers, is going to spend the rest of this year using Airbnb to find places to lay his weary head. Chesky’s a victim of his own success: the company has effectively taken over his office, according to a post on the company’s blog, leaving him with the choice of getting a new place or proving the Airbnb concept in a most unusual and effective manner.

He explains:

Anyone else would have started the hunt for a new place to live. However, that’s when the idea struck me. Why not just live on Airbnb? Instead of getting a new apartment, I decided that I will live the remainder of 2010 on Airbnb. I will stay 2-3 nights in homes and apartments on our website, across San Francisco. Originally I wanted to stay in every place available in SF on Airbnb. But, with 650 listings, that would take me a couple years. Still, by Christmas, I will likely break a record for living in the most homes in a single city. The benefit is clear; the best way to make a great product is to design something for yourself. By using Airbnb everyday, I will get to know the product and the people like never before.

In all fairness, this is the sort of eviction every entrepreneur hopes for! Aggressive growth and successful execution are the reasons for Chesky’s unique homelessness.

[via VentureBeat, photo via Airbnb blog]