We went down to Poipu because the next few days are going to be cloudier. Later in the week, when we’re on the north shore it should be sunny. Make sense? We can go to the botanical gardens down south on the rainy/cloudy days (better photography). Poipu was crowded and sunny, but with a 15mph trade wind,so it was pleasant.

We finally re-found Costco and stocked up on a few food items and a huge bunch of macadamia cans. 

Turns out we still had our phone number associated with a Foodland card from our 2007 visit to kauai. Got a few things there, too, at the prices that are reserved for regulars. Walmart is competitive with local prices which are HIGH. Costco has the best deals but you can’t get small quantities.

Navigation with the bluetooth hands-free gadget worked for finding Spouting horn from Poipu. The trick is to have a data signal when you ask it to calculate the route. It can give you turn-by-turn instructions even if you lose the data signal mid-route as long as you have the may stored in the phone using the local storage option on later versions of Google Map available on Android (4.1+)  Other times I could not get a signal to begin the navigation. Would have needed to go to McDonalds or Starbucks to calculate the path.

The audio book (Killing Lincoln) was an absolute sucess, by the way. The 6-hour flight would have bee less fun for me.

the ocean is about 100 feet of the lanai. The sound is loud and soothing. It gets down to 70 at night. Very soothing.

Scene from my lanai around 6am.
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This plane has a small screen with credit card slot and a USB slot. Thatmeans I can charge my phone on the 6 hour flight.

I just finished packing the camera bag, with tablet and keyboard and all the chargers and hands-free device and car voltage adapter and small tripod and big 5D Mark2 camera with four lenses and it comes to 15 lbs. That’s well within the 25 lb limit. Things are looking up. Have extra glasses. Need to find earphones for the plane movie and to listen to the audio book. 

Some of you may remember I listened to an audible book on a trans-oceanic flight a handful of years ago. Then I had to rip the 11 CDs to chapter files and give them names, so they would be in order and then use iTunes to put them in my iPod. i was a littlr rigorous but the ipod had a long battery life and might have played the whole 10 hours or so of the book.

This time I decided to try out audible.com and select a popular book and see if the experience works out. One good thing is that the book is downloaded to both my phone and my tablet, increasing my battery life by two. If I try it  on the plane, I’ll let you know.

Sometimes I like to listen to music. Sometimes the drone of the engines is too bothersome for music, but okay for a narrated book. Sometimes a stored movie is good. Sometimes a music-and-picture concert ripped from a DVD is good. I don’t play games, but some like that or Words with Friends (scrabble) is fun. I THINK you can WI-FI link with someone else on the plane, but I’ve never investigated that. Should work with a peer-to-peer link, if I understand the game right.

My point is you don’t know ahead of time what you’ll feel like. Sometimes it’s just catch up on lost sleep. Sometimes it’s drink coffee and talk incessantly (we’ve all had a fellow passenger who had to talk the whole flight!) and sometimes it’s doing crosswords with a pencil.

I COULD have got an audible book to teach me the Hawaiian phrases I could use.

It’s a testimonial to modern travel that most people can read on most flights. Considering the thousands of miles of ocean, that beats puking in some bunk on a 19th century sailboat for a couple weeks. I still get an odd craving for a mug of rum with a lime in it when I cross the ocean…..

Can anyone remember when the “no smoking” lights would go out and the whole cabin would light up? They were watching out for you, though, they only allowed cigarettes and no pipes or cigars. Now days people put on a nicotine patch or chew some nicarette gum.

I’m not TOTALLY off-topic here. These are things people do on longer flights. I’ll just also mention another idea.
You can do nothing.
Or if you have to get into a certain “place” you can listen to mood music, like ocean waves or frogs or rain or thunder or steam trains or jungle sounds or Peruvian flute players or sitar music or babbling brooks or crickets. But sometimes I like to drink water and do nothing (because I “CAN”). To really whoop it up, sometimes I put a little ice in the water.

Although you can just send your smartphone or tablet a copy of all your relevant emails from the airlines and hotels and car rental places, it’s not guaranteed that your GMail will be accessable at all times. Data plans can be a little weak on Kauai. No data means you can’t read your email. One “bonehead simple” backup method is to show each email or its pdf attachment and make a screen capture with the tablet. Now each is stored as a picture in your “gallery”, which is in flash storage and never goes away. Be sure to scroll down on the emails or attachments to get the relevant stuff at the bottom.

I also use the calendar app (which doesn’t forget, but can be updated when connected to wi-fi or a data plan). So my phone has my itinerary and floght names and times an seat numbers.

I like to store the main locations in Google map as “my places”, or some such thing so I have them on a list to just select as a destination for navigation.

I’ll mention again the plan to bring my bluetooth hands-free (clips to car visor) device, so I can use turn-by-turn voice navigation in the rental car. It’s not that I don’t know how to get  to the condo, but rather, to see how well it works, so I can tell you.

You bring up Google Maps and select ‘navigation” and select the destination from the drop-down list. You can put the phone in your pocket. It has gps enabled and bluetooth enabled, of course. You touch the big button on the Jabra hands-free device and the voice says “connected” and you drive off. If you miss a turn it will give new directions with little fuss.

Logitech Bluetooth keyboard for Microsoft tablet Win 8 or RT or Android 3.0 or later. Shown with Samsung Galaxy Tab2 10.1″.

This is a newer device from Logitech. Bluetooth keyboard with a case-stand for Windows 8, Windws RT and Android 3.0+.

I’ts about a foot wide, lightweight, but substantial for a small keyboard, and it fits in my pack, unlike my 102 key keyboard. This is a good compromise between light weight and usefull. I recomment this for tying on the Microsoft tablet, which has two possible keyboards and neither is as good as this.

This allows me to plug something else into the bottom connector on my Galaxy Tab 2 10″ tablet, such as a USB stick or a card reader or the camera itself.

The stand works well and works as a case for the keyboard in travel.

Cost $50 at bestbuy.com (local pickup in Beaverton).
The discussion of Android 3.0 means you probably need Ice Cream sandwich or Jelly Bean for it to work, but it should work with almost any device with these later operating systems. You’re probably out of luck with Ginger Bread or Honeycomb.I’m sure it will work with my smartphone, too.
I think this is a stay-at-home keyboard on the average day, but perfect for taking to a hotel or campout or somewhere where you can plunk it down most of the time. Somehow a picnic table seems perfect. Maybe I’ve finally realized my dream at Yellowstone about a dozen years ago. For those that dream of sitting on the lanai (porch) and watching the sunrise/sunset and writing.
I’ll bring it in for the july meeting.

Just a quick comment; Game of Thrones is over for the third season with HBO. I got HBO almost by accident and now, like keyless entry and air conditioning on the car, I don’t know what I’d do without it. “Thrones” is my favorite series on TV and now I have to wait until next season.

I’ve also taken a liking to Continuum. So far the writers have taken the higher road and kept the plot believable (for a Sci-Fi about time travelers).

I’ve only seen one episode of Defiance but it was okay, considering the obvious that it appeals to people who feel better when in the emotion of antagonism. Maybe that’s “up” for a lot of people. Beats watching WWW Smackdown or something. I’ll try a few more episodes.

We’re finally getting a few of the decent offerings from USA network, like Royal Pains and Burn Notice. I was on the edge of my chair when the final episode of Suits happened a few months ago and can’t wait for the new season whenever that will be. Covert Affairs is a little to sappy for me, though I sometimes catch an episode.

Hawaii Five O is a little dumb, like the original series (when I worked in Honolulu), but I still enjoy spotting the places and streets, just as I did back then. I guess it’s similar to Grimm for that reason, though I have a lot more respect for Grimm, which has a very difficult challenge to not get sappy.

Through the Wormhole is back and is usually interesting to me. I’ve lost  interest in most of the “chewing gum” shows like Pawn Stars and American Pickers and anything to do with hillbilly or swamp or redneck life. The other side of the coin, Kardassians and Jersey or anything to do with the “wives of -” I’ve avoided like the plague (never watched once). I hope I didn’t miss a good episode….

Every now and then I comment on how you have to change your scope (size) in having a media storage plan. I will use myself as a convenient example.

I am going to an island 3000 miles off shore and the fuel costs dictate that I don’t have my usual big hard drive as an emergency backup for my photos. To complicate the matter, I’m using a camera that takes much larger images and takes high quality video to boot. Without  a moment of thought, this could spell disaster for someone trying to master the art of Mai Ti drinking and not noticing until too late that he’s “out of film”.

I’ll go over image storage plans from start to finish so you get the big picture.

I store overall files of pictures and videos in folders of approximately 4 GB. That’s so I can back up the files to a DVD (“DigitalDisk25”, as an example.) I store this DVD backup outside the computer in case the computer “fries” because of an electrical hiccup. Notice that this sort of backup doesn’t work with a cloud backup system because of time and space considerations. I have approximately 100 GB of just photo backups (15X4GB). So the photo backup drive in the computer is a dedicated drive in the 1 or 2 TB range.

My “old” camera took photos with an 8 Mbit sensor and would store an ~8MB raw image and an ~3.5MB jpg (typical compressed) image every time I would push the button. That’s about 12MB per picture, so I’d get by fine with a 16 GB card, giving me, maybe 1000 button pushes per card. 

This could easily fit most people’s vacation, but when I had 2 or 4 or 1GB cards, I needed a laptop to “download” the images every day or two.

Now I have a camera that uses about 30MB for each button push (image in two formats). So  I’ve gone to a 32GB card and will rely on my older 16GB card and other smaller ones as necessary with no plans to bring a laptop. In an emergency I could use the 32GB micro-memory card I have added to my tablet. As I have pointed out in recent posts, I can connect the OTG connector and directly download photos from my new camera, via USB, to the micro drive in my Galaxy Tab 2 tablet. (Didn’t notice that I said that? Well I did. You just slept through it because you hadn’t figured out what “OTG” meant. You should know now from my more recent posts trying to drive home the meaning.)

So much for storage.

The plan is to also make a few movies. Now movies use a lot of memory if they”re HD and relatively uncompressed. Now I’m NOT talking about my smart phone. Those movies are, technically “HD” quality by very compressed and not good enough for the big silver screen and barely good enough for YouTube and viewing on another smart phone. I’m talking about a few top-quality movies, maybe of a hula or a beach with surfers or a turtle or something like that. I’m not bringing a production studio in my backpack, so these will be catch as catch-can (only a few under very favorable circumstances). Because it’s a vacation, I may film zero high quality movies. Maybe just  a few (there’s no word for it) “snapshot” movies while laying in the sand or cooking some shrimp on the condo grill, just to upload to Facebook to piss off a relative or two. Ample payback for having to watch their kids sit on Santa’s lap or having to look at their last batch of cookies.

I DO now have the ability to upload smart phone movies and pictures directly from any location with 3G data service. This kind of coverage is unlikely for anybody (even Veriizon customers) on the North Shore, but should be okay in some of the areas around Poipu and Kapaa. 

If the condos actually have “high speed WI-FII” like they claim, I should be able to upload things to email, Facebook, and this blog.