Technology for Travel

Let's go travelling

There is a wonderful collection of tools for the traveller available online. Here are some of the multipurpose and specialist sites for planning and organising your travel. Find out how to make your own free travel guide to access offline throughout your trip. Learn about apps for a wide range of mobile devices designed to enhance your travel and for managing your data and photos while travelling. View a range of methods for preserving the memories upon your return home.
This presentation was prepared for a Friends of Noosa Library event held on 17th April in the Noosa branch of the Sunshine Coast Libraries.

Tech for travel from Carmel Galvin

More sites are being added daily Follow Travel apps and tips to keep up to date with the latest offerings.

Related posts: Making Readlists Use a Readlist to compile all those pages you want to take with you.

Making your own travel guide using WikiVoyage

Which of your favourite travel tools have I omitted?

Easy video downloads for presentations

Tube downloader with Dropbox

The inclusion of a short video clip in any presentation can lighten the mood, bring emphasis to or illustrate a point and certainly provides for variety from the presenter's voice. When using video in presentations it is important to remember to seek the owner's permission to  use it and to include any copyright information attached to the video. Here's the simplest method I have found for ssaving and using short video clips.

A range of apps can perform this function on a mobile device but this is a simple method that uses Tube downloader and Dropbox to get the video from the web to your presentation in a few easy steps.

The app is available for iPhones, iPads and Androids. It downloads video from a wide range of sites including YouTube, Vimeo, and Flixxy. If you can play a video in a web browser, this app will enable you to download it. There is both a free and paid version.


1.Open the browser window of the Tube downloader app and paste the URL of the video
2. Select play and then choose download from the pop-up menu. If this is not enabled, select save to cache.
3. When video  is finished locate it in either the Files or Cache menu depending on your  previous choice..
4. Choose Open in Dropbox, this will save the file to your folder of choice.
5. From presentation interface choose Insert Video from file, get it from your Dropbox, adjust size and you're done. Easy!

Remember to delete the video from your Dropbox once inserted into your presentation.

Quick and easy ebooks via Readlists

Readlists

The Readlists site provides a quick and easy method for preparing an ebook from web articles for offline reading.

• Login to Readlists and simply add the URL of each of the articles you wish to compile into an ebook. 
• Add a title and description and you are ready to download the ebook directly to your device or embed on your website or blog.
• The Readlists can also be publicly shared enabling multiple editors to add to or amend any individual list. 
• The range of export options makes this a very useful tool for all platforms.

Kindle

Simple online instructions guide the user through the Send to Kindle option.The contents page displays the title of each article allowing the user to move quickly to the desired reading. Individual articles which incorporate images are reproduced in full. The normal Kindle functions of increasing text size, creating notes, finding definitions and following links are all enabled.

ePub

The ePub version presents in full colour and with full functionality but disturbingly displays the Readlist compiler at the top of each page as if they were the author. Full links are still provided to the individual articles but individual authors are not listed as they appear in the original Readlist.

Readlists are a great method for sharing a range of links for reading on any device.

Related articles:
Readlist creates ebooks from URLs
Create ebooks with Readlists

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2016 Readlists closed in July 2016