Travel Gear Review 2016

travel gear 2016

Hello everyone. It's been quite a while since I've gone over my set of electronic travel gear. This past year has seen a lot of change in that department for a few reasons. I'll go over these as well as my selections for what I now regard as my equipment choices. Students and other readers have enjoyed this sort of review collective in the past. For those hoping for life news, wait a while longer. Winter can be a slow time of year especially right after the holiday season.

What has driven me from my comfortable laptop and accompanying equipment? For one thing, size. I have sleep apnea and need to bring my CPAP machine wherever I go. The machine isn't heavy or large but is thick and takes up pack space with the hose and power supply. You never want to put too much pressure on the hose. Another thing I've noted during my last few outings was that the laptop took up too much pack space along with other necessities and had to be carried separately. This meant I had two packs to potentially deal with while getting on and off busses and such. The other major change has been hearing aids. This makes wearing earpods uncomfortable while using hearing aids although they still are best for audio gaming and night time listening when I don't wear hearing aids. Hearing loss also makes carrying around various speakers and large headphones less attractive.. At a volume level where I would enjoy hearing music or other audio, other people would find it intrusively loud. Also, when I'm out and about, I like to have situational awareness. I don't want to be isolated from people or events happening near me even if I am doing my own thing. That happens a lot particularly when sports are being watched. Nothing other than fashion bores me more. In such circumstances, it's nice to have unobtrusive entertainment of one's own choosing to hand.

Thanks to a warranty and a battery bulge of epic proportions, my trusty 32-gb iPHONE 5S has gone to iPHONE Heaven. I now carry an iPHONE 6 with 64 gb of memory. This affords me enough space for quite a lot. Compared to the 16-gb iPHONE 4 I started with around five years ago, it's positively luxurious. The speed and responsiveness has reached a point where switching between tasks and having things happen in the background is easy and smooth. In effect, my smart phone has become my laptop. This means my trusty laptop of many years is now my home base and desktop computer.

Having one's smartphone as a travel computer requires you to have some accessories on hand. I carry everything in a small carry-all bag I purchased from Mountain Equipment Co-op. It can be slung over a shoulder or carried in hand. I used it back when I had a netbook and it now comes into its own all these years later. It's sturdy, has several zippered compartments, is rugged and water resistant. I can't remember what its name was for the life of me but Mountain Equipment Co-op has many suitable bags. Visit them at:

www.mec.ca

While the ability to dictate is helpful, you really need a proper keyboard for any sort of sustained comfortable rapid writing. To that end, I have chosen the Microsoft Universal Mobile keyboard. It works very well with my iPHONE. I can type quite quickly on it. The dimensions are 27.2 x 13.8 x 3.4 cm and its weight is around 12.875 OZ or 365 G. I find the keyboard's heft a good thing. It combines nicely with a couple of thin rubber strips on the bottom to keep it sturdy and still while you type. Key travel is very good especially when you consider how thin the keyboard is. There's a nice tactile response. I tend to do mostly typing with the keyboard and use the iPHONE to control Voiceover and do other things. Voiceover features many keyboard commands but I'm not quite as good at mastering a bunch of new key commands as I once was. The touchscreen is so intuitive that there really isn't any great need for me to do so.

Provided I plug the keyboard in every so often for a couple of hours, I need never worry about it lacking power. The battery can apparently last up to six months of average use. Tactile switches and buttons make controlling it easy. The keyboard is sturdy enough for use on one's lap. The hard keyboard cover provides space to lay an iPHONE flat and has ridges to let you stand a tablet at an angle provided it isn't in a thick case. This creates a small basic two-piece laptop. The top detaches which can be useful in tighter circumstances. It is magnetically held on and will turn off the keyboard automatically when folded shut. The top and keyboard are sturdy enough to withstand bumps and other mishaps. I paid under $80 for the keyboard in July of 2015 and doubt I'll need to replace it any time soon. There are switches and buttons controlling volume, music playback, muting, and more. I don't use all of the switches mainly because things are so easy to do on the iPHONE itself. You can acquire  this and many other accessories at:

Www.amazon.ca

For listening privately to what comes out of my iPHONE, I now use the Aftershokz Trekz Titanium headset. This headset is light and is warn hung over the ears with the headband extending down behind the neck. Transducers rest in front of each ear sending sound through the cheekbones and skull. The transducers are about as big as an average thumb. In total, the headset weighs 1.45 OZ or 41 G. This leaves one's ears free for hearing what's happening around you. Also, you can wear the Trekz Titaniums without interfering with hearing aids. The hearing aid receivers and band of the Trekz Titaniums can both fit comfortably behind ones ears. I've found it more comfortable to wear the hearing aids on the outside and the Titaniums next to the skull.

In general, there doesn't seem to be any lag. I can touch my phone and get immediate audio feedback. The Trekz Titaniums use version 4 of Bluetooth and support many different profiles. The only fly in the ointment is that sometimes, calls aren't routed to the headset for a while. You can always answer them using the iPHONE itself provided you can reach it. This only happens once in a while. The battery life of the Trekz Titaniums is said to be six hours of constant playback. They have up to ten days of standby time. I've gotten whole days of heavy use with the battery still in the high or medium range. They require two hours for a full charge. Unlike other headsets, the Trekz Titaniums have built-in speech and can tell you their battery level. You can also check this right in the status line or battery section of your notification centre on iOS devices.

The controls are quite simple. A button on the left transducer lets you use smartphone features like SIRI plus has some added functionality. I found this out when I held it in too long and it called the last number I had phoned. Buttons on the right part of the ban will adjust the volume, turn the headset on or off, and holding both of them in for a second will toggle between two different equalization settings. The button which doubles as a power and volume up button has a slightly raised dot on it and is closest to the right transducer while wearing the headset. Pressing one of the buttons while no sound is playing will inform you of the battery level. A very well considered control setup.

The sound quality depends on one's bone structure. For me, it isn't as full as standard earpods or over-ear headphones. However, the sacrifice in richness is minimal for casual listening. The trade-off is easily worth having situational awareness. Music sounds more than adequate. Stereo positioning does happen but it's less refined than you'd experience with more traditional headphones. I don't recommend these for audio gaming where spacial position of sound is critical. For working or general listening, however, the experience is quite good provided you're not an audiophile and have expectations fitting the technology. Compared to earlier models, the Trekz Titaniums offer markedly superior sound and much less leakage. I can walk outdoors hearing directions from GPS software in my iPHONE while still hearing what's around me. I don't recommend listening to music while navigating via sound. It still distracts even though it comes in via the skull. Hearing rich sound such as music from the Trekz Titaniums as well as sound in your environment does take some getting used to. The mind just doesn't expect to be able to hear both music and surroundings well at the same time when wearing a headset.

For recording, I can't recommend using the microphones in the Trekz Titaniums. While good enough for phone calls, the noise cancellation robs recordings of sharpness. The microphone built into your i device is far better for recording. SIRI understands me quite well if I invoke it while wearing the Trekz Titaniums. It's nice to be able to hold in a button on the side of your head and command the phone in your pocket to do things. Moving around with phone in pocket and no wire dangling down in front of you is absolutely splendid. The other great thing about the Trekz Titaniums is, quite simply, the titanium. The headset flexes comfortably while you wear it and curls up when you take them off. Being a memory metal, you don't have to worry about them losing their shape even if you really scrunched them. They come in a nice travel case which easily fits in the pocket along with your phone. However, I don't often think to bring the case and simply stuff the headset into my pocket when not needed. It does sometimes become uncomfortable after long periods of use depending on how the ban moves. The headset is so light that I have often forgotten that I'm wearing it. In order to fund the creation of these headphones, Aftershokz Held an Indiegogo campaign. I backed the project in time to get in on early bird pricing. The current price for the Trekz Titaniums is $129.00 US. You can order directly from:

Www.aftershokz.com

I resisted the whole Bluetooth movement chiefly due to the extra battery drain one incurs when using it. Why have devices which not only require their own batteries but take power from your computer's battery? Hearing aids were what has finally forced my hand. That and having more than one cord snag and break out of my former wired headgear. Now, I can work completely wirelessly. It still feels a bit strange as well as liberating. Since my computer lacks bluetooth drivers, I wear regular headphones overtop of my hearing aids and Trekz Titaniums while working at home. The Trekz Titaniums are capable of accepting input from more than one device at a time. They call it multipoint functionality. I look forward to using that whenever I get around to upgrading my laptop.

For those occasions where one wants to share audio, I currently lack an adequate bluetooth speaker. My UE Boom is using and outdated version of bluetooth. This imparts a quite noticeable lag to proceedings while navigating with Voiceover. You'll tap or Flick and then wait half a second for a response. There are doubtless plenty of better options out there. However, given my hearing loss, I no longer feel as well equipped to advise people in this area. Finding something at a reasonable price which exhibits no lag yet still sounds good is best left to others to find at this stage.

My iPHONE6 is serving me quite well. It's noticeably faster than the 5S and I get better results when doing OCR or having objects recognized via the camera. I keep it in an Otterbox Defender case. It includes a built-in screen protector and feels comfortable in the hand. The feel and construction are a definite improvement over the Defender model for the 5S. I like the rubbery feel of the case's outer shell. At the moment, I have enough on-board storage for current needs as well as some lavish extras. Sixty-four gb is enough for over a thousand tracks of music, over 100 audio books plus something near 1000 ebooks, a 90hour fully dramatized version of the Bible, an off-line reference containing the most popular 250000 articles from Wikipedia, eleven pages of apps plus associated data, and more. I still have room to spare. Should the need arise, there are now external storage drives for iOs devices. When making the shift from use as a phone to use as a laptop replacement, even thirty-two gb was tight but serviceable. I wouldn't recommend trying it with sixteen gb.

Keeping all your devices charged is the last order of business. Bluetooth does exact a toll on your smartphone or tablet's battery. This hasn't been as severe as I had presumed prior to recent experience. iOS9 is doing quite well at managing power. I recently invested in an

Anker Astro E7 Ultra-High Capacity 26800mAh  3-Port 4A Compact Portable Charger External Battery Power Bank with PowerIQ technology. This is enough to fully charge my iPHONE ten times if necessary. This isn't a pocket-sized battery mainly due to length and weight. It weighs in at 490 G, just short of half a kilogram. Its dimensions are 16.6 x 8 x 2 cm. In a bag with other gear, it doesn't take up much room at all. It is quite rugged and sleek coming with a softer protective pouch. Three USB ports are available to charge multiple devices at once. The ports are intelligent and detect how much charge to give items plugged into them. An 18-month warranty is provided should anything go wrong. It comes with a built-in LED flashlight which is useless to me. I've used a light detector app on my phone to make certain that it hasn't accidentally activated.  As a blind user, there's no way to check how much power the battery has remaining. This would have been nice. However, with so much spare capacity, I don't expect this will be a problem provided I charge it fully every month. When my iPHONE is plugged into it, IOS states that the phone is on AC power. The recharge rate is very fast compared to other external batteries I've used. When the battery itself is charging either via a USB port or wall adaptor like the Apple power brick which came with my iPHONE, the batter warms up. It's smart enough to stop charging when full and will cool quickly when this happens. There's one button on the side of the battery which activates the display. Holding that button in or double-tapping it will turn on the flashlight.

A smartphone is never going to give you quite as much power or storage as a laptop. I'm currently blessed to have both options. Given my current requirements while away from home, this more portable setup works very well. There are some tradeoffs. The bulk of my audio drama collection is for all practical purposes off limits. I shudder to think how much it would cost to store my full collection of audio in the cloud. And then, there's being able to get at it without going over your monthly data plan. That's where an external drive would come in handy provided you could access content without the need for Internet use.

I don't always need to type lengthy emails or documents but can when I wish. I can even set the typing feedback so that it's silent while using a bluetooth keyboard and doesn't cause voiceover's audio ducking to disturb the music I listen to while writing. When using the touchscreen keyboard, typing feedback is there where I need it. The keyboard is somewhat smaller than a normal one. Just large enough not to seriously cramp the hands but you do lose a bit of speed and comfort. When I'm in different places and need to charge up my stuff, I can do so without needing to inconvenience anybody. The only time cables need to be in evidence is when things are plugged in. Otherwise, nothing can get snagged, impede packing up or get lost. Even when I eventually track down a suitable speaker, I doubt my bag of tricks will exceed two kilos unless I add snacks and a bottle of water for an extended trip.

The piper always has to be paid somehow. The price for such convenience is that good devices are held hostage to the capacity of their batteries to hold a charge. When that is no longer possible, the device is useless unless the battery can be replaced. We'll just have to see ultimately how long the batteries maintain the ability to hold a charge. On the bright side, having each component a separate thing makes replacement more manageable. These devices seem to come with 18-month or 2-year-warrantees. Changing to a new iPHONE won't require me to discard bluetooth devices like the keyboard and headset. Provided I don't opt for something lighter, my external battery should serve me for a good many years.

The portability of an accessibility solution centred on my iPHONE is absolutely mind-blowing. My desk used to have an OCR scanner taking up a good part of its surface. That scanner has been gone for over a year now. An app called KNFBReader has let my iPHONE replace it. Most of the time, it does a far faster and better job despite the camera being operated by a blind man assisted by artificial intelligence. You can easily carry all the computing power you need for normal day-to-day tasks in a pocket. Has someone suggested this would be the case even as little as five years ago, I would have laughed openly. All the accessories fit in a small light bag and merely enhance various aspects of the user experience. These accessories can be taken, left and upgraded as required.

I'm glad the iPHONE6 wasn't much larger than the 5S I treasured. A larger screen does nothing for me. This iPHONE6 was an unexpected but very pleasant step in my journey through the Apple ecosystem. Combined with my chosen accessories, it has afforded me the ability to travel a whole lot lighter than I would have thought possible.

this week's happenings

Hello everyone. It's approaching nine o'clock in the morning as I start writing this entry. I've been awake since around five thirty. Thankfully, my new Steelseries headset designed for gamers arrived yesterday. It looks like I've made another excellent move on the technology front. The headset works brilliantly with my soundcard. I'm hearing details through it that I've never noticed before. It took a lot of tweaking with Winamp's equalizer presets to get music sounding good but I've figured that out now. Movies have yet to be experimented with but I predict damned good listening without too much tweaking required on that front. When it comes to accessible games, I've had a few rounds of GMA Tank Commander and Superdeakout. My ability to move and act with precision while playing sound-based accessible games is definitely improved by this headset. I don't put enough time into gaming anymore to have any chance of making those top scoreboards many of them feature these days. However, if I had discovered these headphones five or six years ago, they might very well have given me enough of a technical edge to have achieved that. I'm likely going to be grappling with insomnia and these needless damnably early morning rises for life. Now, I can face that prospect a little more cheerfully. I can listen to things at a reasonable volume without waking either the dead or my parents. Also, as this morning has shown, I won't end up with that headphone fatigue you get after an hour or so of using less costly headsets by the time it's reasonable to go downstairs and grab some breakfast. A very worth-while investment indeed.

The other investment I made this week is one in which I have a lot less faith. You've doubtless heard of the dating site called eHarmony. I don't watch a whole lot of TV as a general rule but have heard countless advertisements from them. Frankly, I've spent too damned many lonely days and nights feeling like my potential for contributing to and experiencing more of life has gone untapped. It's like I'm a car whose engine is going at full speed but whose wheels float mere centimetres above the road spinning uselessly. Church certainly helps as do friends when they aren't otherwise busy. However, when you get right down to brass tacks, I don't think anything else can ever fill that void in my life other than a loving woman. I've never felt more at my best than when I was in a relationship. Given this, I would be less than human if curiosity plus the prospect of more solitary time stretching endlessly ahead didn't finally get the better of me. As with Lavalife and telephone dating, I just had to find out what was behind the door. You can read about my oh so frustrating and fruitless experience with Lavalife if you delve far enough back in the blog. It'll be in that large first entry which contains what can still be found in my initial blog at
www.blindspots.net
I signed up for a three-month subscription. Clearly, eHarmoney has some serious psychology behind it. The report it generated about me was pretty much spot on although the system may perceive me as a tad more athletic than I think I am. It certainly picked up on my creative nature. What it couldn't grasp was how much my disability has forced me to live a different life than I otherwise would. I don't think they expected unemployed blind folks to avail themselves of their services. Despite that, I've found the site pretty accessible overall with a few unfortunate exceptions. Uploading my pictures could certainly have been made easier. I had to use my jaws cursor to pull that off. There were also some parts of the initial questionnaire which I can't be completely certain were filled out correctly. They had to do with how important things like age, ethnicity, etc were to me when it comes to my ideal match. Beyond a certain point, none of these things are overly important. I wouldn't feel right hooking up with somebody my parents' age and would have reservations if she were much younger than twenty-five. Ethnicity doesn't factor into it at all as long as she can communicate reasonably well in English. Education-wise, I just need my partner to be able to appreciate and participate in deep conversation about things. I've met enough people to know that you don't need a degree to do that. Life has its own way of teaching us without classrooms. It's called the passage of time. As to income, what matters is how she approaches the fact that we would largely be living off of what she made. I'm used to living with very limited personal income available and certainly don't need her to be rolling in dough. As long as we have a roof over our heads, if she can face life cheerfully without a lot of spare cash, so can I. There are certainly things I'd love to experience with a loving woman at my side but they're secondary to actually sharing life with said woman. Given a small community of people who I could get to know, I could be quite happy. What's important is that there's respect, love and appreciation on both sides.

Another area which could definitely stand improvement there is their highly touted "guided communication". Basically, after going to all the trouble of finding likely matches for you, you're supposed to see if there are any sparks between you by exchanging short volleys of multiple choice questions at each other. I'm completely serious, folks. Had I sat down and actually tried to conjure an extravert's worst nightmare, I couldn't have beaten this in a million years. If anything screams: "You've reached the very bottom of the barrel in your quest for love on Earth!", this setup certainly lets you know how disconnected and desperate you truly are. Most of the people in the matches I've received so far seem to prefer this inhuman mechanistic method of introduction. For someone in my position who desperately wants to connect more with humanity in general and a loving woman in particular, it seems like a colossal step backwards to introduce yourself to prospective lovers in this way. The only place one can display any degree of his or her actual soul is in one's personal profile. Just like on Lavalife, I can see myself fiddling with mine until kingdom come given its sheer importance. If you flunk out there, you never even get the stimulation of multiple guess quizettes. Due to how the site is constructed, I can't even look at the possible answers to the questions I choose. I presume it's possible for sighted people to do this but my speech software doesn't read the information out other than the actual question. I presume I'll be able to actually read the answers to the questions I administer but won't even know that for certain until I'm found interesting enough by some woman out there to actually bother with answering them. One thing I'm a bit worried about is the potential for sending the same question more than once to a potential partner. Presumably, given the care they've taken to automate damned near everything, they've covered that possibility. I can't imagine a more thunderously insulting blunder to make than that. Nor, at the same time, do I think I should have to keep careful note on which questions I've sent to which matches. I'm searching for a shot at true love, not hoping to pass a bloody university exam. I've done a life's worth of those damned things already while getting my BA.

Thankfully, there is a facility for exchanging standard but anonymous emails with each other if both parties agree to this. I just hope I manage to start up such a dialogue with one or more of these ladies before the three months I've paid for expires. Even if, by some act of God, it were made financially worth-while for me to keep at it for a longer time, I just don't think I'd have the sanity to spare. As always, I'll give this my best shot and represent myself as honestly as their pre-scripted "guided" communication lets me presuming that I actually get sent any questions to answer. As crazy as it seems, I'll also keep initiating this process with people who I find of interest. I did find one lady who preferred "fast-track" communication, otherwise known as saying what you actually want to say via anonymous email. Dare I hope that there are any more who will even come within my per view? I'd love to be dead wrong about eHarmony. Right now, that's pretty much all the hope I have of getting anything other than frustration and perhaps mild amusement for a little over a hundred bucks. Isn't that pathetic? My only sense of hope comes from my having been completely wrong about other things before and having lived to enjoy that. I had been saving up my money in hopes of starting a new life with Janene. Now, I've spent most of that saved money either on places which offer the only faint hope I have of finding someone new to love, or on things to make the single life I see stretching ahead of me more bare able. I still have a good safety margin as I utterly refuse to go into debt. While I certainly don't regret the decisions I made on items, my investments in escaping single life are somewhat more suspect. With nothing else happening over the Summer, there's no better time than now to explore these avenues. It just seems so unlikely to work though. If there were a place I could get to where people came with the expectation of meeting new friends, I would far more cheerfully put my money in getting there. However, there just isn't a place like that. You bring your own crew to bars and restaurants these days.

On that front, I had another mobility lesson earlier this week. I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that the grand idea of attempting to master even three routes was simply biting off more than I could chew. We're just shy of July and I'm still a long way from feeling very confident that I could make it all the way to Symposia's and back on my own. The route has yet to form a truly cohesive chain in my mind. I've already zoned out a couple of times today so don't feel at all safe heading out there now. I need a really good night's sleep. Presuming I achieve one of those, I feel quite confident in starting to practice roughly the first half of the route on my own. I'm going to try to do that at least four or five times between now and my next lesson the Wednesday after next. I ought to have enough source material to put some sort of audio documentary about this Summer's mobility experience by the time September rolls around. By that point, I should have getting to Symposia's and back mastered. The trouble with the bus routes is the sheer amount of time it would take to learn them. I'd go through all that trouble and then have it all blown out the window when I finally get a subsidized apartment in Hamilton or, dare I hope, find someone special to move in with.

As comfortable as living here is for me, I hate being in this Limbo in life. There's just no affordable alternative. When I ultimately get into a place I can afford, there's the question of whether it would then be considered at all responsible of me to leave it in order to be with someone I loved. Given that I've waited my entire adult life to have the opportunity to live in my own apartment, could I ever trust someone enough to let it go again? Especially after how much all of us, my friends, and my family, trusted her to actually marry me. That still hurts a lot. It's going to be a much slower process building that kind of trust presuming I'm ever given the chance to try with another woman. I can just hear a chorus of voices saying: "well then why not go for quantity and the short-term fling rather than this seemingly unattainable permanent marriage?" Because, readers, I just can't be at all comfortable with that. I'm not built that way. Just like I can't see my way to intentionally getting drunk, high on drugs, or wracking up a mountain of debt for instant gratification. That kind of human intimacy simply demands a deep love and level of commitment to be fully enjoyed. Shortcuts only diminish the experience.

Thank God for good friends. Mark and Wendy have rescued me from yet another empty Saturday. We're going to have dinner tomorrow evening. Thanks to my camping trip as well as the trip to Chicago, I'll have quite a lot to tell them about. Those two have really stuck by me over the years. It certainly takes the edge off the glumness of lethargy. It's just getting on five o'clock now. I zoned out at my desk for a chunk of afternoon but didn't type anything in my sleep. That phrase I entered among all the garbage I typed during one night's doze at my desk still sticks in my mind: "They're here because" I've never been able to pull the foggiest notion what I meant by that. Hundreds upon hundreds of random characters with that odd phrase stuck smack in the middle. I got a brief second wind and made another stab at the shorter article I'm writing for the church about my conference experience in Chicago. I'm inching closer to something good but it doesn't yet snap crackle pop like it deserves to. Damned earlier this morning, I did manage to help around ten people with their computer questions. Neither of my two short story ideas aren't going well at all. They seemed so promising when they first occurred to me and they're all I have at the moment. Guess I'll take this weekend off and try again on Monday. I'll feel a heaping bunch better once I've finished *something* and my money's on the church article. That conference was a terrific experience. If I can write something which conveys enough of that to motivate someone else to go on one of these things, I'll have done another bit of good and scored an important victory for my own peace of mind.