Internet connectivity

One of the first concern is how do I get online on the go? There seem to be a bunch of companies providing mobile hotspot rental. The one I wanted to use originally is in Taiwan, and tried to arrange it too late (needs ~5 days in advance). Instead I found another company online called Japan Wireless. They can send a wireless hotspot or pre-paid 3G card to a hotel, or to an airport to be picked up. Since the hotspot I wanted to get was out of stock for the first half of the trip, I went with a 3G card and wanted to use an old Android phone to act like the hotspot.

Picking up the card at Kansai Airport was very straightforward. My Android phone worked much less. Might be getting “too old”, sometimes it couldn’t start the wireless sharing at all, though when it worked it was good for a while. It is also worth enabling “network traffic monitoring” and appropriate warning levels. The pre-paid card had 1G traffic included. Definitely does not recommend running a Play Store update while connected, apps can easily take up 30-50Mb, and 50% of your traffic allowance is gone before you can say “Ice Cream Sandwich”…

In the end the hotel had pretty good wifi, on the road the environment was more interesting than things online, and haven’t run into any emergency that needed online connection. I guess this kind of rental is good insurance, but can conceivably get by without it.

Navigation

One thing is going somewhere, and another is know where’s one going. A lot of plans were made in Google Map My Places. Restaurants to try, shrines to visit, shops to examine… Not wanting to rely on constant internet connection, and because My Places in Google Maps for Android is very much not user friendly, had to try another service.

Been using Maps With Me for a while that provides offline map access. The Maps With Me Pro version has KML import and fortunately My Places has KML export.

This solved 90% of the issues. Had places with names and details, and path. The pin types don’t show up (in Maps With Me all the pins are the same), I guess I’ll have to check if they are not included in KML, or something else goes wrong along the way.

Maps With Me Pro is one of the handful Play Store purchases I made, and I think this one totally worth that NT$180 ($6?).

Being able to see the map is good, but it helps if the location is locked on quickly. GPS always takes a while on my phone, and to speed this up, I thought I just run GPS all the way… MyTracks worked for that pretty well, it recorded where we went, and helped to quickly see on Maps With Me as well where we are.

Of course it drains the battery, but being in Airplane Mode and only having the GPS on I could get about 10-11 hours out of the phone, which was okay for the day – provided that I haven’t browsed much on the portable hotspot. :)

Photography

Between the two of us on the trip we had 5 cameras (2 cell phones, a compact camera, a DSLR and a GoPro). Based on experience on other trips, it is pretty difficult to synchronize the clocks of all these cameras, so in the end I could have a real timeline.

The phone synchronized itself just by connecting to the Japanese cell network for a moment. GoPro was synchronized by the GoPro app. That leaves the other two cameras, that needed manual adjustments, so inevitably there were few seconds differences. It also doesn’t help that there’s 1h timezone difference between Japan and Taiwan, so had to set the time ahead and back on the plane, so that it will be correct in the local time zone.

It is still troublesome, and neither Facebook nor Google+ handled the time ordering completely correctly in the end when I was uploading the resulting pictures, selected from all devices. Google+ was a bit closer to be correct and could order in a second. Facebook sometimes was very much off and the ordering hung Chrome for a minute or so…

I guess manual processing would work, using a script (used Python for this before but not now) to turn timing information into filename information, then the ordering can be fixed easier and all the platforms handle that. In the same time, I’d love to see whether there’s a technical solution to synchronize time across cameras easier. I cannot be the only one who need that.

The phone camera had one more usage. HTC has pretty decent HDR (as point-and-shoot HDR pictures go), and could get a bit better scenes out of the very contrasting light occasionally. Though more often it was the “Overly Dramatic Photoshoot” effect. That’s fun too.

The cell phones were backed up over wifi during the trip, would want to figure out in the future how to back up the SD cards of the cameras as well, without a computer.

Communication

Only used a few times, but it does help to know a bit of Japanese. Tried to find any useful apps in the phrasebook category (that’s the lazy student’s solution). There were some good ones, but there was a surprising problem: I was looking for shopping related terms, and for every single app, shopping is a premium feature.

Unlike Maps With Me, I couldn’t find any travel phrasebook that I would want to upgrade to pro. So that’s all, got along with some English and lots of gestures. For the future I will be looking for some proper Japanese learning app instead of the quick solution.

Airport

China Airlines offered online check-in and also a Mobile Boarding Pass. It’s a PDF, and I have saved in Evernote, where I have offline access to it. Supposed to be very handy, though at the very first time it was used by the security at the Taoyuan Airport it kinda failed already: the security guard couldn’t scan my QR Code at all. No amount of resizing nor brightness adjustment worked. Holding up the entire queue did make me sad a bit, fortunately the other scanners seemed to have worked.

The immigration section of the airport was pretty techy as well. For the last few times I’ve been using the Taiwanese e-gate immigration: scan the residency permit (or passport for the Taiwanese), step in a little booth, run a facial recognition, if works let you out, if not then do a fingerprint check and continue. For me it’s the fastest immigration ever: facial recognition just flashes on the screen and lets me through right away. Probably not that many Western guys in the databases so it’s easy to verify me.

Next time

Some of these trick I will like to keep for next time I travel, though I do feel sometimes that technology that supposed to make my life easier and more smooth, when combined with other tech can become overwhelming.

Would love to hear about useful travel tech you are using as well, any suggestions to me?

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1. I’m connecting things in my life, so the things I do usually need some motivation or purpose behind them, without which they are abandoned. The activities I keep up the best are the ones that connect multiple different things.
2. I want to do things as efficiently as possible. Hack the tools, hack the process to make it better. If there are no tools, make some. If no processes, come up with ideas.

Okay, these are pretty vague expressed like this, now let’s give the example that prompted this post: I’m learning Chinese. Living in Taiwan for two and a half years now, so “high time” doesn’t even start to describe it. Finally I got a tutor, and a good one at that, so twice each week I have a good session of chatting and learning. After each of the sessions we have at least 30 or 40 new words and expressions written down. Those would normally be just forgotten, so I take an effort (about another hour or so after the session) to type them into a Google Document, this very one on the picture:

Enter the English expression, the Chinese original and the pronunciation in Bopomofo (which I prefer to Pinyin). This last is possible because of Yahoo Chinese-English Dictionary (one service that is generally better than Google’s own Translate, though I frequently need to use both). The other three columns I’ll came in just recently.

At the moment I’m up to 307 expressions, and that’s just not possible to practice from a spreadsheet like that. I remembered, though, checking out a fellow StartupBus participant, Pamela Fox‘s Google Spreadsheet Flash Cards some time ago. It was fun but followed a different logic than me so couldn’t make complete use of it. But then: why not make a new practice system for myself? This goes back to the precious points: 1) connecting programming and languages – in both I’ll learn something new and they’ll reinforce each other’s motivation, 2) use the exact tools that I need even if I have to make them (because it’s possible to do).

Also after having done Who Said That? (that is currently down due to the AWS fail), I was into guessing games: let’s make a vocabulary guessing practice app that uses the above spreadsheet that I have anyways. What format it should be? Well, for the very first test, to see how to interact with Google Docs and such, just made it as a simple, console-based python app, something like this:

Each practice round has 30 questions, randomized, 4 possible solutions, with the pronunciation as hint. Simple, though very ugly in the inside at the moment (here’s the repo, I still need to write a ReadMe). It works and now I know what to look out for in terms of implementation (how to log in, how to get and update data, stuff like that).

The other 3 columns in the above spreadsheet are explained as well: they are keeping score such as the total number of times a word/expression is practiced, the number of good answers and the number of current good-answers-in-a-row. These provide a rough-and-ready way to diagnose and manage the learning process – until I come up with better ways. Anyway, right now I get about 50%-70% good which is more than I expected, but still a lot more room for improvement.

A list of improvements to the program that I’m thinking about:

• Making it into a site, so I can use my phone on the go to practice. Also, potentially others can use it as well to practice anything based on any spreadsheet with “one side – other side – hint” structure.
• I’m pretty sure this whole things could be done in a single Javascript powered page. I don’t know enough Javascript to pull it off yet, but I’ve seen that all the components separately, and that would make a very portable and compact solution.
• Need to figure out some easier setup of the spreadsheet if this is to be used by others later. I cannot rely on them understanding what they way I was thinking. Maybe in-app option to add more fields?
• I remember reading somewhere that the most effective practice is that I reduce the frequency of checking words that I know well. That’s where the last column comes in: as one has more right answers in a row, one can tast that word/expression fewer times. If there’s a mistake then go back to the original method and test it more until score builds up again. This can potentially be a very complicated algorithm, I got to think of a way that scales well (ie. it is not too bad compared to an ideal method but does not require extensive amount of calculation). Have some ideas, but they need more polish.
• After watching Salman Khan’s TED talk this year it grabbed me just how much information is there in one’s actions (they do amazing feedback to teachers on how the students study), how much better you can understand why did people what they did if you have all those diagnostic information (ah, the temptation of Big Data:). To apply this idea of extended diagnostics I could have a logging system instead of keeping (a simple) score. From there the system could get: how much you practice, how are you doing / getting better, what are easier or more difficult words for you, what two words you mistake with one another, suggest things to practice more, suggest words from topics that you know well to extend your knowledge… And more (this was just a little brainstorming). I don’t think I’d have time to extend it like that, and ideas are a dime a dozen, but one never knows…
• Adding more modes of learning not just multiple choice, multiplayer learning, more game mechanics (achievements, pins anyone? :)
• If there are central datasets instead of self-provided ones, then the system can anticipate what are the difficult parts from other students’ performance before you.

Now, let’s just see how will my Chinese improve during all this hacking, since that’s the main point, isn’t it? :)

Ps: If you have any language learning tricks, let me know in the comments!

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