Google Maps 5.0 when traveling off the grid

So we recently completed an amazing trip to Greece and Turkey. Hopefully I'll find the time to blog on that sometime.

One thing that made things less stressful on this trip was the use of the new caching feature of Google Maps 5.0. As I reported earlier, it isn't perfect yet. The biggest issue is it doesn't cache points of interest like expected.


But it was surprising useful even in it's current state of only caching map tiles. Seeing your location as a dot on a nicely annotated google map when in a foreign country while trying to use public transportation was really really nice. We'd be on a bus, and I could whip it out and it would help us figure out which stop to jump off on.

Holding a mobile device up is also much less conspicuous than flapping around with a guide book always out, or god forbid, a big paper map.

And I was able to do it all without having a working 3G connection. Nice.

Shrinkage

Yesterday I got a new USB external hard drive from newegg. I was struck by how much this technology has improved in the last few years. I dug out my very first external drive that I think I got in 2006. It had a noisy cooling fan and required a big external power supply.

So I put them side by side.

They cost roughly the same, the new one holds 1T and if I recall the old one is around 100GB. The old one is the size of a large book, the new one is the size of my passport, except it's thicker.