March TechnoGeek Learning Rally |
|
As I write this, we are at our TechnoGeek Learning Rally in Bushnell, Florida. This is a joint rally between TechnoRV and Geeks on Tour
. A small group of dedicated learners gathered with their RVs for our third Learning Rally. We offered special sessions on the latest topics of Smartphones and Cloud Computing, but we also taught our old favorites of Picasa, Blogger, and Streets and Trips while TechnoRV taught RV Electrical Safety, LED lighting and Induction cooking. We had lots of food and fun. We all met some new friends. To learn more, check out the Facebook page for TechnoGeek Learning Rally.
|
|
Our Rally attendees were so eager and full of questions over Picasa, Blogger, Streets and Trips and more, that it reminded me how many people need to know this stuff. With each newsletter over the years, we try to produce new information about Technology for Travelers. This time, we're going to get back to basics, realizing that a lot of you may have joined us recently and probably haven't read every previous newsletter!
Our primary program for planning our travels has always been MS Streets and Trips. We love Picasa for making our pictures look so good, and helping us to organize and share thousands of them - all for free! And, we couldn't imagine life without Blogger as our free home on the web to keep and share our stories. So, in this issue of GeekNews, instead of high-tech tips on the latest smartphones, or Internet services, we'll be getting back to basics. This month's articles give you some detail and background of why we use Streets and Trips, Picasa, and Blogger to Plan, Preserve, and Share our travels.
Calendar: Coming up in April/May |
|
As we finish off the winter season and get ready for the summer tour, we will be trying our hand at doing seminars remotely so we can be wherever you are! We have used Skype before, and we've tried Google hangouts. Skype seems to be a bit more dependable for what we want to do. We much prefer being in the seminar room in person - to interact with the people in the room and not be dependent on an Internet connection.
|
|
But, we can't be everywhere at once! With the help of people who are in the seminar room, we're going to try using Skype to project from our computer to the big screen in the seminar room, and Hangouts to connect our iPad to an iPad in the seminar room that can be passed around to the attendees for questions. We'll see how it goes and report back to you next month! For more details, see our website Calendar.
Q&A Forum |
Some Geeks on Tour members tell us that the Q&A forum is worth the entire cost of membership! Here are some of the topics that have been discussed this month:
|
Free Admission during National Park Weeks. Read about that and more RV news in the current issue of
RVTravel.
|
|
|
Picasa for all your Digital Picture Needs |
Sometime in our second year of RVing (2004), we discovered Picasa. Instead of taking an hour or two to go thru our pictures from each day, pretty them up, identify them, and pick the best ones to share in our blog, it now only took a few minutes. Picasa was just SO much easier than any other photo editing software! We would tell anyone who asked that Picasa was the software they should get if they take a lot of pictures. And, it is free. We soon started teaching little seminars at the RV parks where we stayed, and by
2006 we taught Picasa seminars at the FMCA Conventions. We developed quite a specialty in teaching Picasa, and our tutorial videos even caught the attention of Google - they own Picasa. In 2009 Google flew us out to their headquarters in Mountain View, CA ...
Read More
|
|
|
Use Blogger to Keep your Journals |
Did you keep a diary when you were a kid? I did. I love being able to go back in time and find words that express exactly what was going on. Many of my paper journals have been lost or destroyed over the years, I wanted something better for our travel logs. When we started thinking about traveling in an RV back in 2003 - I found Blogger.com and decided to keep my journals there. Tioga and George
were my inspiration. A solo, fulltime RVer, George used Blogger and wrote every day - he still does! Because of reading his blog, we met up with George on the road a few times. We credit Blogger with making us many friends over the years. Most everyone we meet who travels wants some way to record and share their travels. Some keep a paper notebook just for themselves, some send an email blast to their list of friends. We think Blogger is the easiest way ...
Read More
|
|
|
MS Streets and Trips to Plan your Travels |
Long before we took to the road in our RV, we had a computer training center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida called Computer Savvy. We were a Microsoft Authorized Training Center and one of the classes was Mappoint. Mappoint was a very expensive mapping, routing, and demographics database program. As an authorized training center we had our own copies of all the software, including Mappoint. So, after we sold the training center and became RVers - we figured we'd give Mappoint a try for planning and navigating our travels. Mappoint's inexpensive little brother is called Streets and Trips
. We installed it on our laptop, bought the USB GPS receiver for it and found a place to mount the laptop in the cab of our 30 foot Class C motorhome ...
Read More
|
|
|
Become a Geeks on Tour Member! And learn from our online library of Tutorial VideosFacebook, Picasa, Photo Story 3, Smartphones, Streets & Trips, Google Earth/Maps, Blogging, Boot Camp Class, Vista/Windows 7, Internet on the Road, Safe Computing only $7/monthly $58/yearly or $68 one year = access to ALL videos plus the Forums. Click here to Join
That's all for now. We hope you learned something. Your next issue will be next month. Any questions, please visit our forum. If you like this newsletter, please forward it on to your friends! If you received this issue forwarded by a friend you can subscribe to get your own copy delivered to your in box - it's free. To see the archives of past newsletters, go to http://geeksontour.tv/category/newsletter/.
Happy Computing!
|
Sincerely,
Geeks on Tour
jimandchris@geeksontour.com
|
|
|
