Thousands of POIs for Streets and Trips

by Chris Guld, www.GeeksOnTour.com Back in 2004, we attended Life on Wheels, a week-long school for RVers. One of the best things we learned was about the Discovery Owners website and all the GPS data overlay files they made avaialble for programs like Streets and Trips. In case you’re unfamiliar, this data is called ‘Points of Interest’ or POI’s for short. The data file needs to have the name of the POI and the Latitude/Longitude coordinates. Then, when you load them into your program, they become markers on the map. Our favorite file was a listing of all Passport America RV parks. We take advantage of the Passport America half-price deal whenever possible, so, having them show up on our Streets and Trips map that we use when we’re on the road is extremely handy. Read more  Read More →

Gotta Have Internet

We’ve said it before, … and I’ll say it again, If you really *need* the Internet, you need more than one way to connect. On the road, that means wireless, and there are 3 ways – Wi-Fi, Cellular, and Satellite. See our video on High Speed Internet on the Road: 3 Ways to Connect. We’re at a hotel in San Jose, California at the moment, and we’re using the in-room Wi-Fi … at $12.95/day! But, just now I tried to use the Wi-Fi and, even though I connected fine, there was no Internet. So, I used the Ethernet cable and plugged it into the wall connection for ‘Network.’ All is well. Wired is always better than wireless if you have that option. Read more  Read More →

The Best Wi-Fi in RV Parks

Wouldn’t it be nice for us travelers if we could find a list of parks with *really good* Wi-Fi?  There are lots of directories of RV parks which include information on whether Wi-Fi exists or not – but those of us who use these systems know that the quality varies *greatly.*  Some systems are blazing fast, and some are unusably slow. Then, the really bad news is that, even the blazing fast ones are subject to variation depending on the other users in the park. Because of all these factors, most of us who travel a lot take our own Internet connection with us, either with a satellite dish or a cellular data card.  The main problems with satellite and cellular is that there are usage limits.  We don’t want to go over our limits with Verizon – I’ve heard of people getting $500+ bills for overages!  So, we keep looking for those parks with the really good Wi-Fi. Read more  Read More →

Sebastian Inlet – Florida State Park

by Chris Guld, www.GeeksOnTour.com Florida has a lot of great State Parks and, in this one you can walk to the beach from your RV site.  We highly recommend it.   We took a little walk to toast the sunset last night.  This is our last night with my Mom traveling with us.  It’s been a great 3 1/2 weeks. There was a distant thunderstorm turning the sky all sorts of ominous colors. Mom got all snug in her ‘room’ where she could watch the action. Then, this morning was beautiful.  I made everyone go for an early morning walk. Florida is so much more than Miami Beach and Disney World!  And, it doesn’t get any better for Winter weather!  Florida was our home before becoming fulltime RVers, and it’s still a favorite destination.  The post above was originally written for our personal travel blog.  I looked through my archives and found a few other posts about Florida that I thought you may enjoy. Fort Lauderdale Water Taxi Paddle the Peace River Paddle to Caladesi Island Wakulla Springs State Park I know I’m supposed to write about computer stuff, so here’s a little behind-the-scenes information.  Blogging Tools: I use Microsoft Live Writer to do all my blogging.  It is a fabulous, free application where you can write your blog posts and add your pictures, links, and maps, all offline.  Then, when you’re ready, just... Read more

Tribute to early RVers: my parents

by Chris Guld, Geeks On Tour One of the seminars we taught at the Gypsy Journal Rally was one of our very favorite topics: “Creating Narrated slideshow movies with Photo Story 3”  We have our routine and material down pat with this one, so my mind was free to wander a bit in getting prepared.  It dawned on me that since my Mom is with us it would be cool to show a sample Photo Story movie using pictures from my family’s RV travels in the 60s.  RVing in Alaska, Mexico and Canada are popular topics in RV circles – and we did it in the 60s.  So, I made sure my Mom was in the audience for this seminar and I quickly put together this little movie as part of our presentation:   To learn how to make your own narrated slideshow/movie, see our tutorials at: http://geeksontour.com/photostory.cfm It’s SOOO easy!  And, Photo Story is free, just like everything else we teach.  Read More →

Rallies and Seminars

Last week, we were at the Gypsy Journal Rally in Celina, Ohio.  About 130 RVs gathered at the rally to meet, greet, and have fun, but also to learn.  They know that going to rallies and attending seminars is the easy way to learn. Learning the hard way is having 3 tire blowouts your first year on the road before figuring out how to manage your tire pressure.  Learning the hard way is having a minor traffic accident that punctures and ignites your propane system before figuring out that you should turn off the propane while on the road.  Learning the hard way is to lose all your travel photos to a computer problem before you figure out how to make backups. Learning the easy way is to take a seminar from someone with experience.  They don’t get much more experienced than Joe and Vicki Kieva.  You probably know of them because they’ve been writing a column in Good Sam’s Highways magazine for many, many years.  I found their website, RVKnowHow, very useful even before we first got our RV. They’ve been writing and giving seminars on RVing for over 20 years – they say that they are now retiring from the seminar business, giving their last one at the Gypsy Journal Rally.  You’ll still see them on the road, they’re just not going to let the seminar circuit determine their route!  It was a real treat to get to see them again. But, theirs wasn’t the only seminar.  Jim and I (Geeks on Tour) presented 6 different computer-related... Read more

Are you Online while Driving?

by Chris Guld, Geeks on Tour I remember when we had to schlep our laptop up to the RV park’s office and plug in to their phone line in order to use dial-up to get online.  Then came Wi-Fi.  You could browse the Internet from the comfort of your RV.  We even got a Datastorm Satellite dish that gave us high-speed Internet *wherever* we were parked – in the middle of the desert, or in the most remote national forest.  What luxury that was.  We live fulltime in our motorhome and we need to work to make our living.  Our work is primarily on our website so it’s important that we be able to connect wherever we are. Read more  Read More →

Streets and Trips 2010

by Chris Guld, Geeks on Tour We’ve been wanting this new feature!! And now, with Streets and Trips 2010 – we have it. We can now plan our trip on the laptop with Streets and Trips, then transfer the locations to our Garmin Nuvi 255W.  As I wrote in a previous post, we like to use both the laptop and the Garmin Nuvi to navigate while we travel.  We recently attended the Hershey RV Show and were thrilled to meet Larry Petersen at the Microsoft booth.  We attended his seminar to learn about the new features in the 2010 version.  He demonstrated several methods of sharing data.  You can import and export .gpx files, you can use a USB cable and ‘Send to GPS’, or you can use the MSN Direct service.  I researched our device – the Garmin Nuvi 255W and decided the USB method was the best.  For more information directly from Larry – check out the Streets and Trips Blog. Here is a short video on the process to send Locations from a Streets and Trips 2010 route to a Garmin Nuvi 255W.  All you need is a USB cable (with a mini ‘B’ connector that fits the Nuvi) and an Internet connection: (You can view the video full screen by clicking on the icon in the lower right corner that looks like an X.)  Read More →

Free Computer Anti-Virus programs

By Chris Guld, GeeksOnTour.com: Have you heard that using Free anti-Virus programs is not as good as using the ones you pay for? We don’t think that’s true. But, we’ve heard that opinion tossed around enough that we want to give you our opinion. There are several Free anti-virus programs that we think suit most people’s needs just fine. They are: AVG free Avira Antivir Avast Read more  Read More →

Kindle Book Reader is perfect for RVers

GeeksOnTour.com: I love to read, but I don’t get to do it anywhere near as much as I like. Books are heavy, so we don’t carry many in the RV. The hardest part of selling our house and getting rid of all our possessions was the bookshelves full of books. I have to *really* want a book to buy it, or I have to luck into a good find at a park’s lending/trading library. All that has changed with the Kindle. Read more  Read More →

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