Tired of straining to view photos on his digital camera's tiny LCD screens and sick of losing spontaneously snapped cell-phone pictures to cell phones gone by, Alex C. Pasquariello examines the wireless ways to upload images to his computer and the Web.

Eye-Fi update!

The Eye-Fi, as you recall, is a SD Card that turns your digital camera into a wireless device, allowing you to upload your photos to a Windows or Mac OSX computer. The Explore model will also put your memories in the cloud, uploading them to whatever photo sharing site you use via pre-configured Wi-Fi or more than 10,000 Wayport hotspots nationwide.

Today the company announced a partnership with SmugMug.com giving members of the photo-sharing site one year of free Wayport hotspot access--even if you're using one of Eye-Fi's old cards or opted for the Home or Share cards that previously didn't have Wayport access.

How could this be? Well, it turns out that all levels of the Eye-Fi SD Cards feature the same technology (small Wi-Fi antennas) and therefore have the same capabilities. The Wayport access and geotagging features are authorized on the backend to those who paid for the Explore card through the Eye-Fi's Web page and its desktop photo manager software that you set up on your computer.

Photo: Amazon.com

by Tom Loftus

I have to admit that praising an e-Book reader in the middle of iPhone Summer seems so 2005, but I'm starting to lust after my wife's Amazon Kindle. She's in the publishing business and someone at her company--bless him or her--decided that money (and trees) could be saved by loading manuscripts onto the Amazon Kindle. Adios clutter.

On a lark I took a look at the screen. Whoa! The words read so clear. I would later learn that the print came courtesy of E Ink, electronic paper that...well never mind. Look it up. Guaranteed many of you will be reading from some form of E Ink or similar technology in the very near future.

I spent more time with the Kindle. I actually curled up with it, playing with font sizes, creating bookmarks, running word searches, and using the built-in dictionary. I did the kind of stuff I couldn't do with a dead tree. 

But here's the thing that makes the Amazon Kindle the most important piece of travel technology since the inflatable neck pillow. Say you're on the road and you suddenly realize that you must have--must have!--Oprah's new book. All you need to do is turn on the Kindle and connect to the store. (The connection is through Sprint's EV-DO network. It's free.) You'll have to pay for the book, but it will be cheaper than the dead-tree version. Or, if you wish, you can download sample chapters for free.

There are some drawbacks to the Kindle's portability. Right now, the wireless download is limited to the U.S. So if you're heading outside the U.S., it makes sense to just pack your Kindle with reading material beforehand. Amazon says that the Kindle can store 200 books. One more drawback: You probably wouldn't want to take this $350+ device to the beach. You don't want sand to get in the works, and besides, placing a Kindle on your head to block out the sun is both ineffectual and rather silly. Stick with dead trees for that. 

Further reading:
* Gear Review: The Sony Reader

With the help of an Eye-Fi wireless SD card I can share and geotag a photo of the FDR skate park in Philadelphia.

Tired of straining to view photos on his digital camera's tiny LCD screens and sick of losing spontaneously snapped cell-phone pictures to cell phones gone by, Alex C. Pasquariello examines the wireless ways to upload images to his computer and the Web.

The promise of Eye-Fi's wireless SD cards would seem much too complicated and functional to come to fruition in a normal-sized memory card. But pop it into any old digital camera saving to an SD card, snap a photo, and the camera wirelessly uploads its stored pictures to a Windows or Mac OSX computer. It also will put your memories in the cloud, uploading them to whatever photo-sharing site you use. If that site supports geotagging, your antics will show up plotted on a map, retracing your every move. And again, all with an SD card--no longer, thicker, or wider than the one you're using now.

Seems too easy, right? I tested out the wireless SD card last Sunday in Philly. One of my favorite things to do on the road is hit up the local skate spots, so I started my morning at the legendary FDR in South Philly's Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park. This skater-funded and -built course curls in, around, up, and down the supports elevating I-95 (a.k.a. the Delaware Expressway). (The graffiti scrawled on the banks and walls, alone, are worth the shot.)

From there I headed north to South Street and one of the City of Brotherly Love's true gems, Magic Gardens, where it would be impossible to take a bad picture.

by Mollie Chen

When it comes to technology, I operate at a grade school level. Email I can handle, but once you get into the realm of RSS feeds, twittering, and network clouds, you've lost me. I am, however, a prolific picture taker. Until now, I've been painstakingly uploading my pictures to sites like Kodak Gallery and then forwarding them to all my friends. (And I'm guilty of creating the occasional Facebook album.) But I'd love a more streamlined way to share photos and files with coworkers, family, and friends.

My good friend Sam Lessin has come up with a perfect solution. His site, Drop.io, is basically a drop box for whatever you might want to save or share from movies to PowerPoint presentations (that's for all you consultants out there) to photos. It's so easy that I think even my staunchly anti-Internet editor (she only semi-jokingly asks me to look things up on "the Google" for her) could figure it out. I love that you don't have to create an account in order to use it: All you do is pick a name for your "drop" and as long as it isn't taken, it's yours. From there you can customize your drop--add a password if you like, set up administration controls--and then e-mail the link to anyone you want. A recent Ars Technica article explains it better than I can. All I know is that this past Sunday I had Saturday's birthday party pics up and distributed faster than you can say Snoop Dogg.

VIDEO: Laptops reviewed

All hail the MacBook Air laptop.  So narrow you could stuff it in an envelope.  So sleek and sexy, you could close it and use it as a cocktail tray.  But wait...Apple isn't the only player in the race to outfit business travelers with lighter, smaller, portable laptops.  In this month's Conde Nast Traveler, Mike Haney takes a look at the MacBook Air and two lesser known players, the Linux-based Eee PC and the HTC Shift which runs a version of Windows Vista.

I carried three of the latest?the much hyped MacBook Air and lesser-known models from two Taiwanese companies?on various trips and tried common tasks on each, including Web surfing, editing a Word document sent to me as an e-mail attachment, watching a movie, posting a blog entry, and uploading photos. Each laptop had its strengths and weaknesses, but the takeaway was clear: There's never been a better time to be a laptop-toting traveler.

Read the article to find out how each laptop fared.  Then watch CNT's Alex Pasquariello give the laptops the hands-on treatment in a video review.

Towel boy.
Nintendo of America

by Tom Loftus

Westin Hotel & Resorts guests jarred awake by nocturnal rumblings coming from another room now have something else to blame: the Nintendo Wii. This week two Westins, the Westin Times Square in New York City and the Westin Bellevue in Washington state added the video game console to their fitness centers as part of the hotel calls its WestinWORKOUT program. An additional eight Westins will receive their Wiis later in May.

Video games in the gym?  Surely this must be one of the signs of the Apocalypse! But this is the Nintendo Wii, the console credited with getting couch potatoes back onto their stubby appendages--called "legs" in the pre-remote control era--thanks to its unique motion detection controllers. 

Sidenote: I've played the Nintendo Wii and can vouch for the sweat (as well as the humiliation) generated in a quick match. 

The "Westin Wii's" will come outfitted with Wii Sports, the title credited with causing tens of thousands of dollars of household damage nationwide as players flogged their controllers as if they were playing the Centre Court at Wimbledon, as well as Wii Fit, the platform's first exercise game. According to Nintento's Web site, Wii Fit will allow players to do everything from engage in muscle toning and flexibility exercises to checking their body mass index. 

Does this signal the end of the hotel gym as we know it?  More important, where do you get your towels?

The Conde Nast Building?
Image: Rockstar Games

by Tom Loftus

Here's a vacation suggestion for all those worried about gas prices: Liberty City, an East Coast metropolis with all the perks of New York City--architecture, culture, diversity--plus a little more. Never heard of it? Liberty City is the setting for the recently released video game Grand Theft Auto IV. 

Since the title's release the other week, players and reviewers have identified the "touring" aspect of the digital experience--tooling around the virtual five boroughs listening to Karl Lagerfeld (!) deejay one of the dozen in-game radio stations, checking out the Empire State Building, etc.--as enjoyable as partaking in the usual mayhem that has defined the series and angered senators for the last decade.

In the spirit of travel reportage, the Daily Traveler decided that Liberty City was worth a visit and, taking solace that its editors have visited gangster redoubts in the past, the DT shelled out $60 for the game and found someone with an Xbox 360.  Surprisingly, the owner wasn't a subscriber!

The verdict? Anyone who recalls the last time game creator Rockstar Games made news knows that this particular experience is not G-rated. Still, the DT discovered that one can traipse through Liberty City without firing a shot--one does pass a number of strip clubs, however. The virtual world as presented in Grand Theft Auto IV is so detailed--and so cleverly a send-up of culture--that it's actually worth exploring, if only to discover how much of New York City it got right (hello, Domino Sugar Factory!) . . . and wrong. We really don't think that "borrowing" someone else's car in real life is so easy.

Is this virtual world worth spending all summer cooped up in Mommy's basement? No. But the DT is not going to judge. There are a number of very real locations that have a virtual-world quality to them.   

More Reading:
* A helicoper tour of Liberty City. Some of the audio comments are NSFW.
* Real-world inspiration for some of the restaurants found in Liberty City.

Conde Nast Building: Where
the "magic" happens
2008 Google

by Tom Loftus

Productivity dipped last week after the latest Google Earth, version 4.3, hit servers and the beleaguered workforce found yet another tool to add to its desktop. Don't have it? Get it now! Check out Google Earth's new ability to swoop through a landscape of three-dimensional buildings. Outdoorsy types should appreciate the sunlight feature that allows them to track the sunrise and sunset from any location (thus identifying those shady spots that still might be too cold in late spring). Over at the technology blog Slashdot, one contributor had fun using this suntracking feature to look at the entire globe at once:  "It really brings home why northern latitudes get longer daylight this time of year."

Of course, the required first stop for most Google Earth users: seeing what their houses looks like. My Brooklyn street still looks like a dump, but at least the 4.3 upgrade includes a rough date of when the satellite photographed my nabe.

More Reading:
* Google Street View Gallery:  A neighborhood block party, a kid wiping out on his bicycle, topless sunbathers...all forever immortalized
* Video:  Google Earth 4.3 demonstrated
* UN uses Google to pinpoint refugee crises 
* Some potholes: A municipal company asks citizens to use Google Earth to indicate trouble spots