Tag: iPhone Posts

One of the downsides to always having the latest and greatest iPhone is that most places outside of North America and Europe seriously lag behind in terms of adoption rates. For places like Brazil and Argentina, that’s even more true because the cost of picking up a new iPhone is nearly twice as much as we would pay in North America. When I went to Argentina in 2012, I couldn’t find a Micro SIM card anywhere, and was forced to buy a normal full-sized SIM card and perform surgery on it to make it fit into a Micro SIM holder. I had to do that twice while travelling around the world with my iPhone 4/4S, and thankfully it worked both times. Not that long ago I picked up an iPhone 5 which uses an even smaller SIM card known as the Nano SIM. I was told that in theory it […]

I was recently generating some new server and email passwords, and realized that while most of the strong password generators available online work great for desktops, they aren’t very user friendly for entering on iOS or mobile devices. Often you can find a few checkboxes and sliders for those tools to make it a bit more iPhone friendly, but they don’t always work. Ideally a password that you frequently use on an iPhone or other iOS device should be “strong” (i.e. have possibly a symbol or two and a mix of upper and lower case characters), but should also be fairly easy to type. So this morning I decided to write a bit of PHP to generate an iOS friendly strong password. Basically the idea is to only use mostly keys that are accessible without having to hit shift or the keyboard button that switches to symbol mode. function generate_password( […]

Anyone who uses an iPhone knows that under normal usage the battery rarely lasts a full day. When I’m at home relaxing, the battery life issue is not really that big a deal since I can simply plug my phone into the USB charger half-way through the day and top the battery up to full, usually in an hour or so. But unfortunately when I’m traveling (which is quite often as most people know), plugging my phone into an outlet isn’t always an option . Sometimes when I’m working from coffee shops it simply isn’t possible to find a plug. Occasionally an airplane will have a USB port in the chair ahead and one in a while an actual plug, but mostly it’s not really possible to charge items on airplanes on trains. Years ago I went looking for an external battery pack for my iPhone and ended up purchasing […]

Inside my suitcase upstairs is a huge manilla envelope that has the majority of receipts in it for my trip to South America. Since some of them represent expenses that I can write-off on the business side, it was important to keep them for Revenue Canada in the odd event of an audit down the road. Unfortunately for me though, it meant that I had to collect all my receipts while traveling around the world. It’s one thing when you have an apartment in Canada and everything can be sorted into file folders once a week or so, but when you’re traveling with a backpack and trying not to accumulate anything else, having to store paper receipts is a pretty big drag. Not only is storing receipts a pain, but often the ink will rub off on the ones that stay in your pocket or your wallet for more than […]

I’m up to a little over 60 kilometres worth of biking on my new bike, and so far I’m really enjoying getting outside again. The first few rides I did were pretty painful, both from a muscle perspective and also from a cardio perspective. But I’m up to about 16 kilometres a ride now, and I can see myself doing a 25 kilometre ride fairly soon as well. I’ve actually been using the RunKeeper application on my iPhone to track my progress. It’s a free application as well as a free service (there’s a paid upgrade option). I don’t think I’ll upgrade, mainly because I don’t think I’d need any of the perks at the higher level. That said, I get enough out of RunKeeper that I would gladly pay for it if some features become available that I think I might use. Part of why I like it is […]

This last week was a weird week. I met up with a few friends and had some great times, but it was also the first real time I’ve been homesick in any capacity. There was nothing really that happened to make me feel that way, I was just sitting around and realized I was a long way from home. So I spent a day or so of being a bit melancholy. Thankfully the feeling has past, and it’s business as usual again. Weekends always get me excited, mostly because I have more opportunities to get out and explore on Saturday and Sunday than during the week. My Mac widget says I have 26 days left in Buenos Aires, so three weeks and a bit. A friend of Rebecca’s, Henry, is flying in from Chile at the end of the month and I’ll do what I can to show him around […]

One of the biggest questions people always ask me about Buenos Aires is whether or not it is a safe city. Buenos Aires has an international reputation (at least lately) of being riddled with petty crime. Prior to coming here, I did quite a few scans on the internet and there is no shortage of sites talking about people’s personal experiences with crime in Buenos Aires. In fact, many of the locals talk about it like getting something stolen is almost a rite of passage in this city. Upon landing in the city for the first time, you’re immediately bombarded with stores covered in iron bars and graffiti as far as the eye can see. On the surface, it definitely looks like a potentially unsafe city, at least compared to cities back home. But what’s the reality of the situation? The Publishing Bias In university research there’s a term called […]

I came to Buenos Aires with an iPad, a Macbook Pro, a Canon DLSR, a 28mm lens, a Kodak Playsport HD camera, and a Canon something or other point and shoot camera – quite the load. Here’s a little update on how it’s going. The Good The iPad is great for reading at home, but it’s not so good for reading out in public in a city with a lot of petty crime. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a single iPad down here since I’ve arrived. As a result, I’m thankful I brought my Kindle with me, since it blends into a coffee shop scene far easier. Right before I left Canada I purchased (or rather, my dad purchased for me), a little blue Kindle cover, so my Kindle looks a lot like a normal book or maybe even a daytimer if you didn’t know what it was […]

So, we’re on day four of seven in the Caribbean, and so far it’s been a lot of fun. Other than one cloudy day, the rest of the vacation so far has been hot and sunny, which is great. As it’s still low season, the resort isn’t as packed as we’re used to, which is fine because we’ve been required to spend a lot of time doing work due to some projects we have going on back home. Unfortunately for me, I dropped my iPhone 4 yesterday and ended up cracking the front-side protective glass. In the iPhone 3G, it would cost about $15 and some sweat and tears to replace the glass. Apparently with the iPhone 4 though it’s not possible to replace the glass by itself, since it’s firmly glued to the LCD. So, you generally have to replace the LCD unit at the same time. I’m going […]

It would be pretty hard to call myself a Migratory Nerd if I wasn’t in fact a pretty big technology nerd. Thankfully, I have enough photography and technological gear around here that it’s pretty easy to describe myself as a nerd. In a perfect world, I’d be able to bring everything along with me. But given that I want to travel with a 40L backpack, I’m not really going to have a ton of room in there. The following is a list of the technology I’ll be bringing along on my little adventure. 13″ Macbook Pro The idea that people used to once travel the world for months at a time without really being able to contact home seems pretty foreign to me in this day and age. Even five years ago when I was on a fairly remote trip to Costa Rica there was always an internet cafe close […]