Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: Travel Blogging

Posts on my experiences in travelling

Geoff’s travelling gadget bag!

I spent tonight shortening all my USB cables so that my electronics can pack away neatly.  In the past I have carried a rats nest of cables & Power Supplies with me.

The result of tonight’s endeavours is shown above. It’s now  below 2Kg including the Asus power supply, Garmin GPS, Olympus uTough camera, Eee 4G, rechargeable battery charger & iPhone.

Its always annoyed me that the Olympus cameras come with a separate power supply and cable rather than charging through their USB lead. Tonight, whilst shortening the camera lead I discovered that if I left the green & white wires disconnected then it would charge through the Eee USB port (OK you also need a complete cable to get the pics off).

On the Eee I have a nLite version of XP Pro (About 3GB in size) with GPS Trackmaker for downloading tracks of the Garmin, Picasa for downloading images of the camera and storing locally on a 16GB SD card. GPicSync ties the images to the gpx tracks. I also have MemoryMap with the whole of the UK at 50000:1 plus The Alps and Pyrenees 🙂 I run CCleaner very frequently to get rid of accumulated crap and keep about 600M free space. It also has iTunes so the iphone can charge and unlocked if anything goes wrong.

So the Thames Path will be the testing ground, at least I will be passing a lot ofelectronic stores if anything goes awry.

A day in the woods with Cambridge Rambling club

Today’s Cambridge Rambling Club ‘A’ team ramble was led by Vera. 12 of us set off from Toft (well actually from Gresham Road, Cambridge).

Twas a gorgeous sunny day with lots of blossom on the trees with cowslips and a few bluebells making their 2010 appearance. We wended our way from Toft through Great Eversden, Kingston Wood and then lunch in Bourn churchyard, followed by a drink at the very trendy Willow tree pub where are numbers grew to 13 with the addition of a recent Nobel Prize winner 🙂 then along Bourn brook and onwards to Hardwick wood.

A great day out and many thanks to Vera to organising it.

Toft Circular Walk with Cambridge Rambling Club at EveryTrail

Map your trip with EveryTrail

Bradfield Wood circular walk with Cambridge Rambling Club

Today we were back with the Cambridge Rambling Club A team for a walk led by Debbie. It was a bit of a jaunt to the starting place, 35miles from Cambridge! but 17 of us made it to the start. With me giving my shorts the first airing of the year!.

Twas a glorious spring day with a cold wind, spring is well upon us now in evidence with the lambs & kids in the fields plus all the blossom and the leaves starting to appear,  In fact as the day went on it seemed more blossom was appearing by the minute.

Lunch was at Beyton which interestingly still has a 1950’s kids playground with the original Wicksteed roundabout and swings all of which are distant memories in Cambridge, due to the health & safety gestapo prohibiting them!

An interesting walk especially seeing the coppicing in action at Bradfields Wood, although the products seemed quite expensive to me, Hazel bean poles at £8.75 for 10 and Hazel pea sticks at £4.25 a bunch!

Here is the walk on Everytrail. Poor Debbie was a bit upset that the walked turned out slightly longer than her little map measuring wheel had indicated!

Bradfields Woods circular walk

Map your trip with EveryTrail

Map your trip with EveryTrail

iPhone unlock problems

I recently had O2 unlock my iPhone prior to me transferring my number to T-mobile. I wanted to test T-Mobiles unlimited internet and texts for a tenner a month.

All went well until….
I’ve now discovered that putting the iPhone into flight mode  locks me out of the iPhone totally, insisting that it has to be connected to iTunes to be unlocked as the SIM card has been changed 🙁

To make it worse plugging it into iTunes  says the iPhone is ‘damaged’ and needs to be taken to an Apple store 🙁 🙁

I’ve now discovered a work around. To get access to the iPhone menu’s, Remove the SIM card. You can then access the General menu and take it out of Flight mode. Replace the SIM and unlock with iTunes if you have remembered to bring a laptop with iTunes on it.

Oh, and iTunes is total bloatware – installing it on my little Eee with its 4GB drive consumed 500MB of space. Windows XP pro by comparison fits in 3GB.

Another annoyance is, away from home,  I cannot do a full iPhone sync. As on any other computer I use it will lose all the music, contacts and applications if I sync.

Now if only I could order that Nexus…..