iPad Travelling man in France
I didn’t just have my iPad with me, I also had other technology which deserves a good and geeky mention too. Of course I had my iPhone, I had an extra battery and I often use the Ravpower 14,000 mA hour battery for charging my devices. It has two USB 5V outlets, one is 1amp and the other 2 amp. I had my Apple Watch because that’s a personal device which goes everywhere with me. I took with me a small Bluetooth speaker because it is much better to watch a movie with good sound. There’s nothing worse than straining to hear what’s going on, especially when you can’t follow the dialogue in a film. My wife also had an iPad and her iPhone with her so we had to have the cables with the old 30 pin connector.
Lake in the mountains near to Les Angles, French side of the Pyranees. Took this picture with the Sony NEX 6, moved it to the iPad via play Memories app so I could work with it in iColorama.
Maps in Cars – Or Not??
Then there was also the technology in my car which deserves a mention. It’s a French made car and I only live 100 km away from the border with France, so you can imagine my surprise when we didn’t have the French maps. I wanted to set the navigation to guide us through the roads near Perpignan to make sure we didn’t miss any turns. It wasn’t long before we got a message to say the destination wasn’t included on the system. I’m going to have to go back to the Renault dealer and ask what are the possibilities for getting more mapping data for the car. But, really though, the maps for France should have been there. Looks like I might have to buy updates and I might need a Windows computer to do the upgrade. Poor show to not have a Mac version of the Tool for updating the maps.
Next to no Internet
We were staying at a campsite in the French Pyrenees in a place called Les Angles. We had a lovely little wooden chalet which is at the other end of the campsite from the reception. The only place where I could get Internet connection was within a few paces of the reception. Not a very fast connection either, good enough for a little bit of Facebook, Twitter, collecting email and that was about it. During the vacation I did have a podcast downloaded onto my iPhone. I’m not sure if that downloaded while I was checking my email at the campsite or if it arrived on the phone while near to Spanish mobile connection for one afternoon. I spent an afternoon in hot thermal swimming baths soaking away any aches and cares, very relaxing. I was quite surprised to see I had 3G Internet connection while I was there.
Synchronisation of data across devices
Sometimes I was using the iPad and other times I was using my iPhone. With not having much Internet I didn’t always have synchronisation between data on devices. This included my Day One journal posts and also photos taken with the iPhone. The other synchronisation I wanted to do was bringing in photos from the camera onto the iPad. I wanted to use the photos for Day One journal posts and also to have photos to work with in iColorama. While my wife was watching French TV (I don’t have much interest in that) I amused myself using iColorama and another application called Glitché. I couldn’t send photos from one device to the other using the Internet, so I had to work out other ways of doing this. The solution for connecting between iOS devices to move photos was to use AirDrop. I haven’t had much success with that before but while I was in France I tried it and it worked very well indeed. All you have to do is to select the photo or photos you want to share and just underneath the photo choosing section is the area for Airdrop. The other device has to be switched on and active and it will appear as a place you can send the images to. It worked very well from iOS device to iOS device and I’m trying it at home and it’s not letting me share from my iPhone to the iMac. I feel sure it should do that. I will look in to that and see if I can sort it out.
iPad Art Book For Free
I am in the process of writing a book about how to do various creative things on the iPad using the photo filters, effects and iPad art applications. In the meantime here is a book with information of some of the iOS art applications I have been looking at. Get the book.
Get this Book for Free to Read on Your iPad
Sony mirrorless camera to iOS device
My camera is a Sony NEX6 and it has Wi-Fi. It’s quite simple to connect the camera to either the iPhone or the iPad using the application PlayMemories Mobile. This is a Sony application to control the camera from the iOS device and also to send images already taken to the device running the app. It is very quick to send a couple of images from the camera and it is not difficult to set up either. There were a couple of images I was pleased to get into the iPad so I could work on them in iColorama. The rest can be moved and synchronised when I am back on stable Wifi.
Charging Devices
With many so mobile devices I didn’t want to have to carry three or four plug-in chargers and to solve that problem I have the six port charger from Anker which has enough output from each of the six ports to charge up iPads, iPhones, the Ravpower 14,000 mA hour battery and the portable Bluetooth speaker. It was possible to charge everything up overnight and the batteries lasted well during the day. So I didn’t have any occasions where I was unable to do something because the battery had completely used up all of its charge during the day.
Didn’t use data roaming
In the past it has been very expensive to use data roaming even with other countries in the EU. That was even the case using the same network in a different country, the greedy devils would want to charge extra. There have been some European Union directives which has brought the price down a lot. I got a message in on the phone to say that 15 MB would cost €3.63 and the rest of the day would be free of charge up to 50 MB. I still find it a little bit scary and I don’t want to run up a big bill unwittingly, so I haven’t given that a try yet. Maybe I will give that try the next time I go travelling. In any case it is a bit different to having 20GB per month while I am in Spain.
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