Sky's Blog

Digital nomads, you can finally and really be the system administrator for your cloud (and other) servers from your iPad. Since December, each time I’ve left town, I have intentionally left my MacBook Pro at home in favor of my iPad. I found that just having a few specific apps allowed me to fully administer my cloud servers from the pad. Please note that a bluetooth (or other) keyboard is required for some of these apps to function fully. But generally I can do everything I need to when I’m on the road. (continue reading…)

When I got my iPad and started carting it around everywhere with me, it first went into the big backpack along with my MacBook Pro (15”), and since I’m used to carrying 20+ pounds in the pack, adding the iPad didn’t bother me at all. It’s a good workout. And when I’m flying internationally, I take one wheeled bag and the backpack, so it’s standard-issue for me.

However, as I started relying more on the iPad for my mobile life, I realized that I could go without the full backpack¹. So I checked at REI and found two items I couldn’t live without². (continue reading…)

I cleaned out my news reader subscriptions this morning¹ and found that of about 30 blogs I dropped, most of them hadn’t been updated in over a year, or even since 2006 in a couple of cases. Are people getting tired of blogging? (For that matter, are people getting tired of tweeting? I hardly ever do it any more…) To lay a motivational foundation, I was cleaning out my subscriptions because I now read them on an iPad and it has been taking me nearly a couple of hours a day to read them, so I needed to cut a lot of duplicates—seeing the same information several places, in blogs that are just “repeaters.”

Ten reasons my buddies might have quit blogging (remember, I call blog posts “articles”):

• Too much time goes into writing a single article
• email inbox is over 1,000 and need to catch up
• too busy reading other blogs
• watching video more than ever – still haven’t seen all the TED videos
• iPad doesn’t provide an easy way to write for the blog (get a keyboard!)
• 400 podcasts stacked up and no longer commute to work so I can’t get through the backlog
• don’t have anything original to say and got tired of repeating what others were saying
• started tweeting and then I didn’t even have enough time for tweeting
• quit blogging for {pick one} summer/trip/vacation/religiousholiday and just never got the energy to start again
• got a real job. (Whatever that is…)

Hmmm…the balance to be struck is between consuming and producing, I think. And consuming is far easier than producing.

This may be just an artifact of my personal experience, but I think I’m finding that the hotels offering “free Internet” are more often the low-priced hotels than the more expensive ones. At least in Paris and London.

It’s not uncommon to find a hotel over 250€ per night that has a 15€ or higher charge for Internet access. But in the hotels I frequent—I’m fine with just a bed with barely enough space to move around the edges, a shower, and Internet connection, for just over 100€ a night—it seems to be more common to have a free Internet connection included.

Perhaps this is a reflection of younger travelers looking for less-expensive hotels and being attracted like flies (there is one buzzing around my head at this instant here in Paris’ 5^eme where I am connected while sitting in the hotel lobby preparing to take the metro to a meeting) to hotels that provide connectivity.

And the true boon is that Skype on my iPhone can connect to the free wi-fi Internet and I can make Skype calls without having to purchase those “overseas” (and overpriced) mobile phone minutes! Quite a difference to spend USD$0.02 per minute rather than $1.29.

{Part of Sky’s series on using tech when traveling}