nenya_kanadka | the road goes ever on and on, etc.

We are home! I have something of a backlog of comments to answer, which hopefully will happen sooner rather than later.

The rest of the Scotland trip was good, and Oxford was a lot of fun. We took a train down the coast (beautiful) and hit the London train stations at rush hour (yaaaaaay...) but eventually found our Air BnB in Oxford. Kind of did our own Tolkien-influenced tour of Oxford, including seeing where the Tolkiens had lived, and bits of Merton and Exeter colleges.

And the Beren & Luthien grave, which...I don't think of myself as one for pilgrimages, but that felt meaningful in some way. Freighted with all the affection of all the other people who have visited it over the years, for one thing, and the love of all my LOTR friends back home who weren't there. Plus the thought that on some level, JRRT was just this guy, you know, with a family who missed him when he passed away. His son is buried just across the lawn; and what about the people who aren't famous who were laid to rest right next to them? So it was a very meditative morning.

rohan_lady took wonderful pictures, as she usually does.

An interesting note--people had been leaving coins all along the top of the headstone. I counted Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and Turkish coins, along with a number of UK pence and Euro change. I don't know exactly why people were doing it, except that it's a quick way to show where you're from, and won't melt in the rain (like some of the cards people left). We scrounged in our bags and came up with a Canadian quarter, which I presume someone from the local Tolkien society now has custody of.

Anyway. Oxford is a lovely city. Went to the Bodleian library as well, including a museum display of some of the books they have. Queen Elizabeth I's calligraphy as an 11-year-old, wtf holy shit. A book with an engraved ivory cover. An early version of the Principia Mathematica. Etc etc. Really really cool.

Eventually it came time to fly home, so we got up at 5 am, took a bus to Heathrow, and flew about ten hours to Vancouver. Watched Mad Max: Fury Road (now I know what people are talking about with that fandom) and a couple of other things on the excellent in-flight entertainment system. In Vancouver, were delayed slightly because the propeller on the plane headed for Victoria had developed an oil leak. Eventually made it to Victoria, slept for about 15 hours, gained our bearings over the next few days.

Now home. Brain still in UK I think. May paint my nails rainbow colours, since I have acquired many of the nail polish colours that I had been borrowing from

valtyr's set. Oh, and I bought a smartphone (my first!) which is really only of use as a wee tablet out here (no cell service except in town), but is gorgeous and spiffy and named Paddington.

Good to be home.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: my fuzzy snuggly chocolate couch
Crossposts: http://nenya-kanadka.livejournal.com/130315.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

kore

Hunh, I knew people sometimes left coins on military gravestones, or sometimes sobriety 'coins', but not so much writers, that's interesting.

From:

nenya_kanadka

Ohhh, I wonder if the military angle is how it started. (I could google; I am, however, half-asleep.) Since Tolkien was a Great War veteran.

From:

lilysea

There's a Jewish tradition of leaving pebbles/stones on graves - I wonder if it's related to that.

From:

nenya_kanadka

I really am going to have to look this up now! I'm getting curiouser by the moment.

When I'm awake, that is. 1 am here and I should be sleeping...

From:

brin_bellway

Queen Elizabeth I's calligraphy as an 11-year-old, wtf holy shit.

Wow, that is a neat book museum.

Watched Mad Max: Fury Road (now I know what people are talking about with that fandom) and a couple of other things on the excellent in-flight entertainment system.

You...watched a movie...on a plane?

...I presume you gave up on the whole idea of audio and relied entirely on captions. I know that during my own recent plane experience, I certainly couldn't have done anything involving more audio input than short, simple conversations, and I would expect you to have even more trouble.

(When people say they hate flying, everyone assumes they're afraid of heights. I liked the heights, but my ears were killing me.)

Oh, and I bought a smartphone (my first!) which is really only of use as a wee tablet out here (no cell service except in town), but is gorgeous and spiffy and named Paddington.

Congratulations, and welcome to the club of smartphone users without cell access! I've been a member for ten months now; I could show you around if you want. If you've got a non-Android system, my advice is less useful, but some of it still applies.

(Personally, I didn't think "wee tablet", but rather "Android iPod Touch, with bonus 911 access and option to upgrade". We do have cell coverage here, but the very cheapest plan is $100/year, and I don't think I would get $100/year worth of use out of it with my current lifestyle. Still gorgeous and spiffy.)

From:

nenya_kanadka

My ears did hurt for parts of the flight, but I was only ever going to watch something that had subtitles anyway (or that I'd already seen before--but it ended up that Mad Max came with subs, so) so not being able to hear all the dialog through the earbuds wasn't that much of a problem. Stopping occasionally to go "OW" was definitely a thing, though! (I've had my ears hurt while taking off or landing before, but there was a lot more ow during the flight this time. Maybe they changed altitude a lot or something?)

The phone is an Android! Partly because the iPhones were $$$. I didn't need anything with too many bells and whistles anyway, so I ended up taking my mom's advice about shopping on a budget ("don't get the absolute rock-bottom cheapest thing, that's usually bad quality; get the second-cheapest one") which turned out to be a Samsung Galaxy Core. Does plenty of things! I like it a lot so far. And it's coming in really handy now that we're stuck back in town for a while. (With, heh, cell phone access again. :P But even when we're at the lighthouse I can use it as a mini e-reader and play games on it. Certainly happy to take recs for how to spiff it up to use when out of cell tower range!)

(I'm on a prepaid phone plan here, originally because I was broke as fuck, then because none of the montly postpaid plans actually had what I wanted (data and texting, not much emphasis on audio calls because I am deafish) for an equivalent price. And now finally because most of the year I am out of the service range anyway, so when I come to down I just drop $10-20 on the prepaid account and am good to go, and don't have to pay when I'm not in town.)

From:

brin_bellway

which turned out to be a Samsung Galaxy Core.

Ooh. A Galaxy probably means you'd have a lot easier time finding a phone case, should you choose to do so. The second-cheapest option* at the PC Mobile kiosk was an Alcatel Idol Mini; I'm pretty happy with it, but it's neither one of the two most common phone types (iPhone and Galaxy) nor a clone of the outer design, so all the standard-issue phone cases are the wrong shape and/or have the camera hole in the wrong spot. The only store I've ever seen that carried compatible cases was a stand dedicated to phone cases at the St. Jacob's farmers' market (apparently it's the largest farmers' market in Canada and people come from all over to see it; it happened to be the closest major farmers' market to where I live, so I'd kind of assumed it was normal). He wanted $20 for a case that would have made my phone significantly more inconvenient to use, for an $80 phone (on sale from $100) a quarter of the way through the average phone's life expectancy (two years). (To be fair, the average is probably brought down through reckless phone users' "infant mortality". My previous/first MP3 player lasted 7.5 years, although everyone else was surprised by how long it held out.)

I just drop $10-20 on the prepaid account and am good to go, and don't have to pay when I'm not in town.)

They let you do that? I'm on a PC Mobile pre-paid plan (or I would be if I'd ever activated the SIM card they gave me), and you have to buy a minimum of $100 of credit a year to maintain access, even if you haven't used all your credit from the previous year. Mom's flip phone, on the same plan, still has well over a hundred dollars of credit left from previous years, but she'll have to top up again in December just the same.

I mean, you can buy in $15 increments rather than $100, but then the credits expire after only one month instead of twelve. ...actually, is that the sort of thing you meant? I can see why buying $15 of credit and letting it expire after a month might work out well for you, since your expected usage pattern is along the lines of a big burst of activity a couple times a year, but mine is a few minutes of activity once every few weeks.

Anyway, advice. Firstly, airplane mode is your friend. If you do not have airplane mode on, your phone will waste power searching for a cell signal it cannot use** (in your case, can't even find). Only do this when you are not using the Wi-Fi, as airplane mode turns that off as well. (Wi-Fi also has an individual off button, allowing you to keep cell reception without using power on Wi-Fi reception, but not--as far as I can tell--vice versa. The GPS has its own off button too, which must be used in order to turn GPS on and off (also saving power) because GPS--being reception only--is not affected by airplane mode.)

Similarly, since there isn't the possibility of someone calling you, there are a lot fewer circumstances under which you should leave the phone in standby, and correspondingly more circumstances under which you should leave it turned off.

App recs and the occasional anti-rec (many of these are not cell-less specific, but might be helpful anyway):

A flashlight app. I haven't used it much, but it is good to have around. There are quite a few flashlight apps, and they don't seem all that different from one another, but this is the one I have experience with.

I'm not really satisfied with AndrOpen Office, the unofficial but Google-Play-approved and most popular OpenOffice port: it's very clearly meant for tablets, and the phone version is often unusably cramped. Still, it allows me some access to the .odt documents stored in my Dropbox folder, which I keep synced on my phone as a backup. (I used to manually sync a backup of my documents on my MP3 player, where I couldn't access them at all except by plugging the MP3 player into a laptop or desktop, so AndrOpen Office is still a step above that.)

Speaking of Dropbox, I use the third-party Dropsync app rather than the Dropbox-made one. It can be very slow, and it "only allows you to sync one of your sub-folders" (easily fooled by sticking all your files and folders into a single sub-folder within Dropbox), but--unlike Dropbox's official app--it allows for the two things I wanted most out of a Dropbox app: a "download everything" option (the official app only keeps locally a small set of favourite files to "save space", assuming you can "just" grab any other file from the Internet as needed), and an option to store the phone's Dropbox folder on the microSD card rather than internal storage. This is necessary because the Alcatel Idol Mini has very little internal storage.

I have never used my virtual bubble level except for occasionally playing with it, but you never know.

The barcode scanner isn't very useful: all it really does if you're not in a Wi-Fi zone is save the code for later Internet lookup, and even when it has Internet the lookup often fails to find anything relevant. The QR-specific scanner is better, and sometimes even actually manages to do something without the Internet to hold its proverbial hand.

I used to carry around an electronic dictionary as part of my belly bag's Useful Thing collection, so when I got the phone I immediately installed a dictionary app and a Hangman app (the electronic dictionary had a Hangman game, supposedly to help improve vocabulary).

I also grabbed Minesweeper and Boomshine apps, because why not. (They later came in handy to pass the time on the plane.) I haven't looked into any of the less casual smartphone games because I'd rather play more involved stuff on my laptop when practical, and I don't spend enough time without my laptop + wanting to play video games for it to be impractical.

The built-in Google Maps app won't do a damn thing without Internet access. I know you don't have much navigating to do under normal circumstances, but for abnormal circumstances there's MapFactor. Rather than being a mere conduit, the app calculates routes itself and gets its map data from locally-stored maps it pulls from the OpenStreetMaps wiki (or TomTom if you pay them, but I haven't). OpenStreetMaps' coverage of "places of interest" (stores, museums, etc.) is spotty, but it's very good at the roads themselves, and if you know in advance what places you might want to go, while you're still in a Wi-Fi zone you can have MapFactor ask Google Maps for the GPS co-ordinates and save the location(s) in "My Places". (The locations are stored indefinitely, so you can build up a stockpile of places you might possibly want directions to as you think of them/as they come up.) Ask for test directions (the "Calculate route" button under "Tools") to each place before you leave: since it doesn't know what street the building is on, only the co-ordinates, if the building is close to multiple streets it might get confused and think the building is off of, say, a highway off-ramp (*cough*). Catch it early and you can change the saved location to refer to the street just outside the building, at which point it generally runs fine. It also lacks Google's awareness of construction zones, but I think this is well worth not needing Internet.

Note: new map updates are released roughly once a month, and map updates don't show up in Google Play software-update notifications (though updates to the rest of the MapFactor software do). You have to go into the MapFactor app and check manually. Also, the maps update via a peer-to-peer network, which means it bears just enough surface resemblance to illegal torrenting that Tim Hortons won't let me use their Wi-Fi for it. Still totally worth it.

The pedometer only works if the screen isn't locked, which means it burns through battery rather fast, stops working after a few minutes if you forgot to change your settings to "never lock automatically" before use, and has potential issues with pressing the wrong button. The app's FAQ says this is a hardware issue: some phone models simply don't track accelerometer data if the screen is locked. I don't know if your model does, but you might consider the battery usage worthwhile even if it doesn't. It knows how many steps you've taken, but guesses on how much distance that is based on the average person's stride length. I made mine's guess more accurate by walking a mile on a treadmill, then calibrating the stride length until it said I'd walked a mile. Apparently I take short steps.

Google Translate has downloadable language packs for use in offline mode, so I got the French one. It was a couple hundred megabytes. I haven't really tested it, though; possibly I should have grabbed Spanish as well and tried it on stuff in Florida, but it didn't occur to me while I had the chance.

Lastly, I got this because I was looking for a metric converter, and I found it also converts a bunch of other things. The currency exchange rates update via Internet, but if you use it without Internet it will use whatever figures it got last time you used it with Internet. It will not update if you have Internet access but don't open the app, so every couple of days I check in. I have a much better grasp of how the Canadian/U.S rate is doing than I used to, and it means that if I ever suddenly want an exchange-rate calculation while out and about the data will be reasonably fresh.

Have you found any neat apps to rec me? (I already have FBReader, ftr; I just didn't bother reccing it because you said you'd already figured out how to use your phone as an e-reader.)

*I wasn't explicitly thinking in those terms, but that is what I did.

**Actually, as my phone helpfully informs me whenever I look at the lock screen, I am permitted to call 911. That's certainly a nice option to have, but should a reason to call 911 arise, I'll just turn airplane mode off first.