Falling a bit behind...

Thanks to the complete and utter uselessness of some of the 'essential' gadgets I took away with me to Glastonbury this year, the blogging has fallen somewhat short! I shall endeavour to catch up forthwith...

Glastonbury from the ground

In the meantime - if gadgets are your thing - take a look at this post that I wrote for SMS Text News last Wednesday, (in the car, en route to the festival - in fact I believe it was somewhere between this video and this picture to be precise), outlining just a few(!) of the technological wonders that I was packing in my rucksack...

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Evening readers, Whatley here, writing this on my laptop en route to Pilton for the festival that is known as Glastonbury.

As you know from my last post, the multitude of tools available to the modern day, festival going mobile geek really is quite something... So here, for your pleasure, is a quick rundown of what I am taking with me, starting with the hardware...

Handsets:

I’ve packed my N95, my N95 8GB and my E61i. The E61i is perfect as an ‘emergency’ as the battery on that baby is HUGE and it lasts FOREVER, (well – about 5 days). So if it all goes pear-shaped I can resort to using that. The N95s I’m going to tag-team throughout the day/festival. One to carry with me and one to charge. Speaking of chargers...

Power:

When it comes to keeping the batteries fully topped up, I’ve covered all bases with this one. I’ve got a Nokia DC-8 battery charger, bought this today, £25. Steep, but I’m a sucker for the branded stuff. :-) It’s worked ok so far.

I’ve also got a Free Loader Solar Charger – this thing gets kudos just for the fact that out of all of the chargers, this was the only one that came with a Nintendo DS adaptor. Which made my girlfriend very happy indeed; Mario Kart for her while I type this passing Stonehenge, (fact).

Finally I have a ‘GoHello’ wind-up charger and, as Ben Smith so rightly said in the last podcast, "they ain’t called 'wind-ups' for nothing" ...seriously, I’ve got nothing out of this thing yet. Nothing. Boo.

On top of all that lot, I’ve got four N95 batteries. All (currently) fully charged. So we shall see how long they last!

Software:

Well, stuff like Qik, Google Maps, VOX, SpinVox, Moblog etc... I kinda covered this last time round. I want to talk about the new stuff. Since writing that original piece I’ve acquired two pieces of software; both of which have – so far – impressed me much.

First up is ‘ViewRanger’. I downloaded this in the week and first take I thought ‘What a load of rubbish’. However... THEN I downloaded the Glastonbury specific maps – aka ‘Worthy Farm’ – and WOW, was I impressed! Check out this screenshot:

You can see that they’ve pre-loaded the app with the relative ‘points of interest’ – heh – and if I hit ‘GPS’ it’ll tell me where I am. Rock on. Can’t wait to use this properly.

The other piece of software is from Orange. It’s called ‘GlastoNav’ and at first I really couldn’t get this to work..

..however, once they ironed out the gremlins etc this little app has turned out to be very handy indeed. Not only can I look at the (much richer interpretation) of the map, but also I can plan my schedule for the event... and THEN I can share that schedule with my fellow festival-goers!

That – so far – has again, really impressed me.  :-)

For actual ‘mobile’ stuff, that’s all. But, I have also been given some other cool pieces of gadgetry to use/play with. One is the Flip, which I think Ewan has spoken about a fair amount – my only problem with this is that once my hour of recording is up, I can’t upload it until I get to a USB connection. Bah! We’ll see how I get on with that one... The other piece of REALLY COOL stuff I’ve been given is the Loc8tor which, hand on heart, is the best thing yet (in theory anyway).

I attach the small part to something I might lose (i.e. the other half) and then, if I do lose her, I switch the big part on and it beeps to tell me how close I am etc... I had a play before I left the house and it rocked my socks. So... again, we’ll see how we get on.

That’s it from me, I’m nearly at Glastonbury and my laptop is about to die. Thanks to Ben Smith for editing this for me and putting the media in etc... You can keep up with my exploits at http://www.glastonblog.co.uk.

See you soon!

J.