Broadband for Seniors. 06/07/2010
 Broadband for Seniors The internet provides many opportunities for older Australians to stay connected with families and friends, access information, and to perform activities such as banking and shopping online. It is therefore important that seniors are able to use the internet safely and securely. The following top tips will help older internet users stay smart online:
 Reg and I have had a lovely day, here at Half Way Creek, free campsite no 43 in the Camps Australia Wide book, NSW section. It is a rest area 27 km SE of Grafton or 29 km North of Woolgoolga. Even in a free bush camp I have access to my website to update it with my travel news and photos.  Half Way Creek, is near a service centre with full facilities, see photo and it is in the Telstra mobile internet range so we have set up the generator and I have been able to work on line on and off through the day. Such is the amazing nature of wireless internet connection. Wonderful to have an office in the bush, complete with wildlife.  It is quite amazing that with internet connection and website hosting I can work on my blogs wherever I am as long as I have a wireless or satelight signal. Web hosting, is one of the most important functions in the website process, allows website owners to put up their creative masterpieces Trying to identify a web host can be a very daunting task especially when there are so many available nowadays and all of them promise one thing or another because looking for and buying a reliable web hosting solution is an imperative decision.  I used to pay hundreds of dollars a year for business web hosting but now, having gone on line and searched Independent reviews of the best web-hosting providers, I found cheap professional web hosting services under $10 a month. All these webhosting plans include at least one, free domain name registration and 30-day money back guarantee. I am delighted with the highly affordable domain web hosting I now use and suggest that even a gray nomad just wanting to do a travel blog to share with family and friends could afford one of these websites and domains. If you would love to blog your gray nomad, travels, check out the website hosting independent reviews of the best web-hosting providers for a good cheap professional web hosting services. Photo below shows our car and caravan with the Honda 20i generator that powers my computer, chained to the draw bar.  Online backup.~ Trip preparation. 11/27/2009
 The photo above, is of Indigo, far left, Reg and me, on the left and our wonderful WA friends, Jo and Wayne, on the right. We always visit, Jo and Wayne, when we tour to the other side of Oz. :-). That's one of the great joys, of caravaning, visiting friends, accross the country. Photos like this, that show happy times are worth backing up, so they are never lost. Reg and I are preparing the Eco-Tourer Caravan for our 2010 tour of Australia. It is time to begin thinking of everything, well in advance. My computer is currently running well, but because I am very dependent on it, I will be carrying a spare. I also need to use online backup for all my pictures and documents. I never only store my word documents and photos on my own computer and hard drives in the same location, as I would not want to risk losing copies of my work. Last year we had some stupid thefts from our van, a $50. Pair of shoes and a TV remote control but it was a reminder to us how easily we could have lost our computer and while this would be costly, any unpublished photos and writing are not replaceable, so I recommend getting a password protected area, on line photo and document, host. These photo host programs are great. You can have free storage for small home accounts and paid storage for larger space requirements. You can set up photo albums that you can share with friends and family or keep albums of photos and documents private, only for your own use. I am also checking out my camera equipment and deciding if I am ready to upgrade to a more professional system before this trip. I will be searching in the post Christmas sales for a superior one, which will help me provide a better quality image to illustrate my blogs, where I use photographs. I am also considering illustrating more of my blogs with a quick sketch or caricature, where I do not have a quality artwork available to serve as an image. Photo, fine art image, sketch or caricature, what would you prefer to see illustrate blogs? I would love your feedback on this questionJ. Choosing a computer for the big tour. 11/08/2009
 At the same time, we were choosing our touring rig and towing vehicle, Reg and I were striving to decide the right computer and internet connection package to use in our new travelling home. It amazed me that in all the caravan and camping shows we went to and all the traveller's workshops and seminars we attended no one was there representing the traveller's need to remain in internet contact with family, friends and even business while they travel. We gained more information browsing the internet than attending seminars for travellers. I usually do a lot of comparing one type of computer to another, via the web, then check out the reviews from computer owners, to narrow down what I am going to buy, before I even start shopping around for my best price. I wish Australian prices for computers were as reasonable as the U.S. prices I see at The SOURSE . If they were, choosing the right computer, might not be such a huge decision, it currently is for me. I could happily leave the BBQ behind, but I would not leave home without a good computer. When you head off for a long, road tour, it is important to have chosen the computer and internet package before you leave home. I have travelled light with lap top computers and I have travelled with heavy desktop computers, each has their own advantage depending on the work you are planning to do. Do a lot of comparisons, before you choose, just like you need to do when choosing the rig and towing vehicles, sometimes it will be a compromise, and sometimes the prefect computer for home and away will ‘stand out’, and your decision will be an easy one Here are a few computer travel tips of mine; I would love to hear any of yours. Must-Have Items for your computer. · Firewall and Virus Protection: Many people load their virus protection and firewall onto their home computer, but forget to do so on their portable computer. · Software Components: Use the same software on tour as you would use at home or at work. This way you should be able to access your files when you are back working on the home or office computer and you do not want to have to be learning how to use new software when you want to be enjoying a holiday. Important Note: Test any new software before you leave, and bring backup disks with you when you travel · List of Necessary Passwords: I put all our passwords into a code that all the family know. Then if we forget one of them we have it written down somewhere safe, but in code that only the family knows, so we are not likely to be stuck someplace having forgotten a password and unable to access important files via our computer. Do not carry non-coded copies of your passwords or save them on your computer. · Contact Numbers for Technical Support: I bring all the information, book, CD, for our internet provider, back up computer discs and phone numbers for technical support. Meat in a Park 11/07/2009
 Do you love a BBQ? Do you like to travel light ? Meat in a Park is a great facebook compatible service for finding the closest public BBQ. I can see Reg and myself having fun using this application, if I am ever brave enough to buy the iPhone I want and learn how to use it within my budget allowance. I think that used intelligently the iPhone will be a fantastic aid on our next tour, certainly smaller and lighter than packing a BBQ. It is a new service so it currently does not cover all of Australia. Currently the service only contains BBQ locations for Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and various councils across Australia. More will come! You can email the creator of the Meat in a Park, application at adyster@gmail.com. Meat in a Park uses Facebook for authentication. Once you set Meat in a Park, up as a facebook, application, you can log in to Facebook and you are also logged into Meat in a Park. You can then use facebook application, Meat in a Park to invite your facebook friends to meet you at a public BBQ site at an appointed time. My facebook ID, if you would like to add me as a friend, is Kathy Joy Shell Communications Road. 10/28/2009
 I have been asked to answer a question about communication system in the event of an emergency and I am diverging out of the traditional home set up, because our home is not traditional, we are on wheels for half of the year like many of our gray with an a for active, nomad, generation. We could plan for every possibility with hugely expensive set ups but we need to make affordable choices. When we are at a fixed home base, for half the year, our neighbour has our house key and us, and there is someone we all trust, who has 200 local home keys. This is an ideal country living safety arrangement. In the event of a grass fire across the oat field opposite us, we would know our pet would be taken to safe shelter quickly and our home would be cared for as well as our neighbours home, regardless of if we were home or not. Now my husband is ill, everyone knows. Recently we were given bags of fresh bread. The vet refused to take payment from me when Indigo got a grass seed in her ear. All because everyone knows how ill my man is and while we never overhear our neighbours or neighbours care about us, and they are not in view of our home, they are all keeping an eye on us making sure we are OK. This buddy system is not time consuming. We do not meet for coffee, though we could. Some locals gather together on verandas around 5 pm and we wave to the small happy hour groups of rural neighbours gathering together after work for a drink before heading home for dinner. Happy hour is a common event on a summers evening. We go out and speak to neighbours when we hear a car come along our private rural road. Our road is our, communications system. Any unusual change in pattern of coming and going or if a dog barks unusually, we go and knock on a neighbours door and ask if anything is wrong, or we would enter and check. It is a buddy system I have never seen work in the suburbs where perhaps people do depend more on landline telephone. Here in the bush, we know that landline telephone lines are something that the cockies might have a chew on, and disrupt, right when you might have been depending on them. We have overlapping buddy systems going so if two buddies were out of action , another buddy would wake up to it and would be here in a shot. It's not nosey, nor time consuming, we keep to ourselves, don't hang around for coffee, but we would water someone’s garden or mow their lawn if they were away, these things just happen, unspoken. You cannot buy this sort of country community caring and security in a Telstra store. Then I have a CB radio and we never travel on roads without having my radio roaming between Channel 18 the caravaner’s news radio and the truckies news, channel 40 so I learn in advance of risks up ahead and can communicate any risk situation we see or emergency we potentially might have. I have not needed to use it for this but it is more useful for fast help than a mobile phone and I have a mobile phone antenna mounted on the car so I have wider coverage along the highways. That's our security communications security set up, along with solar power and petrol generator and a diesel engine so we have four potential power supply sources to power our communications systems. These are more secure systems, but that would be looking at enormous cost. Insurance is not my expertise, I have full insurance on our car and caravan, it gives me peace of mind, and I’m insured through RACV simply because of 50 years of habit and having our 50 years a member gold card discount. http://www.wholesaleinsurance.net is a web site you can reference for some comparable insurance ideas.  It has been a great first of October in the grey nomad home. Reg is feeling 95% better todayJ. I have recovered an old domain name I owned and begun my 'A Creative Life, Blog' over at Art of Kathy Shell , life is settling back to normal and Reg and I are talking about travel once more. Reg watched a great edition of Postcards on TV tonight, and was once again in love with the Pilbara and Kimberly regions of Western Australia. I could do with an upgrade to the newer mobile phone, touch screen easy texting and internet connection from a hand held device, technology if we are heading back, ‘out back’. I am loving blogging on a daily basis and I want to look into learning how to update my blogs when I am on tour, quickly, using Twitter and my mobile telephone. It would be great to pull over as we drove through outback towns like Coober Pedy or Tennant creek and just type in a short 60 word post about our arrival in that town, what we have seen and where we are headed without needing to set up a generator, computer and the wireless modem to do it. I have begun looking at the Apple iphone and other touch screen phones, I tried a larger screen Nokia and it was much easier for me to type on than my small screen mobile phone. I would not attempt to post blog updates on the small phone keypads. So over the past two month I’ve been looking at iphone and iphone accessories, I rather like this pink cover and I love the iphone.  My current contract on my husband's and my phones expires in June next year and as Reg never uses his, I am hoping to upgrade from the two contracts I am currently under to just one contract that allows me a phone, texting and internet package for a similar monthly spend to what I am already up for, but with an extended range of use that suits my mobile writer lifestyle. The internet addict, travelers toys, lap top, wireless internet and silent mode generator. 09/27/2009
 I am hooked on travelling with my notebook computer. Like most travelers I find it is the perfect way to stay in touch with my family through emails and friends via both email and my facebook account. Internet research time is a lot less costly that using the telephone. Few travelers have easy access to a land line phone and our mobile telephones can be charged at a high rate. Few Australian travelers can even shop around for competitive prices on phone plans; most gray nomads need to go with Telstra so they have a reasonable coverage around the country. Those who head outback with some of the lower cost mobile phone plans soon find they are out of range a lot more of the time that they expected. Best advice I can give from my experience, is make sure you buy the best memory you can afford. Ensure the lap top has a good cooling system if you plan to be on line for a while and use it indoors in the caravan, an unexpected gust of dirty wind can make a mess of the keyboard and internals of the computer. Computers like clean air. If you use the lap top computer in bed, place it on a tray so it can breath, don’t swaddle it in the donna cover, and let it overheat. Many of my tips are from learning ‘what not to do’J. . I now invest my money in all small portable equipment I have a compact printer that fits with my computer in its bag and I work off the Telstra wireless internet system at the moment and I carry two one meter long antennas with me, one for the mobile phone and one for the wireless internet.We carry a Honda 20i generator the generator that has made carrying a generator on your travels a quieter, cleaner and more portable alternative if you need electric power in the bush to run a computer. I use silent solar power for all our other power needs. If you don’t own your own computer, don’t attempt to do internet banking on anyone else’s computer and if you must use internet libraries be sure to change your password after EVERY use for any financial transaction and then SIGN OUT. If you also travel with and use your notebook computer to access friends on facebook, I would love to have you add me as your friend so I can share your travels too. Gray Nomads learn all the best places to visit, from each other.  | Kathy Shell on Facebook  Advertisers, This 160 x 160 advertising space, could be yours. See our advertising page above then contact Kathy to arrange your advertising package. Kathy Shell,
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