Osprey Originally uploaded by Rick Blythe. I got this photo today of an Osprey, a bird that mostly eats fish. The nest was in fact atop a pole right in a water reservoir. The mother was returning...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

The JOBO PhotoGPS has some cracking reviews, but I’m a bit less enthusiastic, especially now that I am using Windows 7 32-bit and the application, which is supposed to be Windows 7 compatible, stopped working properly leaving me with nothing and hoping that JOBO will release a version of the software that actually works on Windows 7.

The PhotoGPS unit works well enough from the flash shoe of my Pentax and records the location every time I release the shutter. So far so good. I found that it is not recommended to leave the PhotoGPS on the camera while walking around as it keeps falling off the camera. It would have made sense to add some kind of locking to the unit.
The PhotoGPS unit can store over a 1000 locations of photos, and that would be okay for one or two days’ worth of shooting for the serious amateur or professional (and this appears to be the target market), but very little if you are on a vacation trip and don’t want to carry a laptop around. Each location is, after download on the computer, a 129kb file which appears to be a lot for a longitude/latitude, height, a timestamp and possibly a checksum. If the data in the unit takes up as much space, then there is a possibility to optimize this so the number of points kept in the unit can be extended tenfold with a firmware update. Even though the file

...

To say I travel a lot, is an understatement! I am well over the implied romance of flying and I particularly zone out through the airport ordeal. With security now beefed up it is time to slim down the stuff inside my camera bag, which I always hand carry on flights. I haven’t got enough trust established to let anything breakable go into checked in baggage. I also always hand carry my laptop computer. None of this seems to come under special scrutiny from the Security X-ray team.

So what to I like to carry?  As little as possible. Extra memory cards, SD cards are getting cheaper and are the best way to give yourself extra capacity. Don’t be afraid to buy extra cards along the way (but they will be overpriced in those duty free shops). Next I have a simple USB memory card reader. I have an SD card reader built into my laptop, but not many cyber cafes do. I can also easily transfer stuff to clients computers via this card reader. This has saved my bacon many times. Next I have my phone and a cable to connect it to my computer, and still use it occasionally as a GPRS modem (this is painfully slow but works reliably). I also have a Next-G modem (not shown, because it lives with my laptop) with which I have a love/hate relationship (its broadband and...