There's an interesting idea in this article around how with the increase in convenience that technology brings, we don't realize that something else gets lost. If you can only take one photo and know that it will be hours of work to even find out if it was any good, you're going to invest a lot of time trying to make sure that photo is perfect. You're going to pour your skill and passion into that one photo. Would you do the same when you're taking 200 shots?
Last night my phone's charge cable stopped working and my phone battery was dead. I had to get to a mall 20 minutes drive away without GPS in a city I've never been to before. I realized that in the last decade, I've never once had to navigate, ever. I've used the GPS as a technology crutch for so long that my skill has atrophied, maybe. I made it, thankfully, but I haven't been nervous like that when diving in a long time.
The whole experience has left me wondering just what else I don't know I might have lost because of all the technology around me.
>Last night my phone's charge cable stopped working and my phone battery was dead. I had to get to a mall 20 minutes drive away without GPS in a city I've never been to before.
If you are staying at a hotel, ask at the reception, most hotels do provide nowadays charging cables/adpters as a service.
In some cases you might even be given one (used of course) for free, it seems like nowadays charging cables/adapters are the most forgotten items (very rarely asked for) by travelers, and they end up in the "unclaimed items" cupboard.
It was true thirty years ago when I first said it, still true today: never ask locals for directions. First, you’d be surprised how many people don’t know their own city. Second, if they do know the city, they’ll leave out a lot of assumptions. Like “turn left where the old church used to be”. Personal experience says you’re going to be at best 50/50 on getting useful information.
Source: my motorcycle has been a lot of places over the years.
When I was a kid my dad would occasionally get lost when we were driving to some other town – usually to pick something up, I'd reluctantly tag along as the carrying help – and every so often he'd stop by the side of the road and ask me to pull out the atlas. Then he'd sit there, figure out where we were, figure out how to get to where we were going, or to the next waypoint, then give me instructions to read out where to go. "Next right, straight for about 10 miles then there's a dirt road on the left" – that sort of thing.
Those were good drives. No distractions, other than farm houses and the occasional cow or horse.
Yes, I too have a paper atlas (EU) in the glovebox, there is something in online/navigator maps that somehow prevents me from having a "general idea" of the whereabouts, when you zoom out you often lose details, and at least for me it is confusing whilst with the paper map I find it easier to orientate myself.
BTW I also have a spare charging cable/adapter for the car, actually I have one of those "generic" octopus like cables that fit most phones, with a USB A plug on the other end and the 12 V to 5 V adapter, the cable can be used also to charge from a USB port of a computer or from a "generic" charger with a USB receptacle.
Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear has a tip I found really useful: set the navigation device so north is up, "you'll never get lost again" (he exaggerates a lot).
Yes, that's Jeremy Clarkson, of course he exaggerates, but my issue is not much about "orientation", but rather with the zoom level (on a tiny device), maybe the actual colours/contrast/backlight/glare, I seem to "lose" the actual main road because a secundary one at a different zoom level seems "prevailing".
Or maybe it is just my poor eyesight, I sometimes need to take my spectacles off to see the details on a smartphone at close distance, yet I don't (yet) need reading glasses (at least not for printed paper).
When I dropped my 6S+ iPhone (battery!) off at the Apple store, they informed me they were going to keep it overnight. Having recently moved to the city, I had a very unsettling feeling of not really understanding how I was going to get home ... or, how I was going to get back to the Apple store the next day!
I spent a fair bit of time fumbling around side streets before making the various necessary highway connections, and in the end decided I knew where I was more than I'd expected. The next day I was able to "read" the terrain to make the necessary turns to ultimately end up at the Apple store. I felt like I'd passed some kind of exam.
Maybe folks don't remember the old map books with indexed pages that you could buy at any gas station? None to be found any more. That's ok with me.
We had something similiar in our holiday 7 years ago when roaming wasn't that cheap. I hatted it.
There was no fun in finding out where we are. I'm not going on holiday to look for streetsigns when driving on a autobahn/highway a little bit stressed out when my goal is the goal and not the way.
Last night my phone's charge cable stopped working and my phone battery was dead. I had to get to a mall 20 minutes drive away without GPS in a city I've never been to before. I realized that in the last decade, I've never once had to navigate, ever. I've used the GPS as a technology crutch for so long that my skill has atrophied, maybe. I made it, thankfully, but I haven't been nervous like that when diving in a long time.
The whole experience has left me wondering just what else I don't know I might have lost because of all the technology around me.