Con-Sonar: CRAZY IVAN! In the movie The Hunt For Red October the Russian submarine captains use a technique called a Crazy Ivan by the Americans. Basically every once and a while the Russian captains will make the submarine do a complete circle, startling any potential followers behind them. Unless the other submarine is extremely careful, the Crazy Ivan is meant to detect them since it will likely catch them by surprise. I have a similar technique I use for keeping safe while traveling, in that every so often, usually every few minutes, I do a full scan of everything and everyone around me. Normally ...

A few months ago I started a small series to talk about my ongoing goal to make at least $500 a month from this website. You can read How To Make Money From A Travel Blog: Part 1 and Part 2 here. This Month’s Results In the month of October I made $709 from this website, which is a 100% improvement over the previous month’s revenue of $347. That means I not only hit my goal of making $500/month, but I passed it by over $200. In terms of revenue, here’s where it came from for the month of October. Amazon Associates – $349 Last month I predicted that my Amazon revenue would likely go down ...

If you’re a routine flyer around North America, you may have heard today that United Airlines dropped a bombshell on its loyalty program members. But chances are you didn’t, because it seems that they chose to release the information at night. You know, during Halloween, when everyone is reading the news. The long and short of it is that many people with accumulated mileage, myself included, are facing a pretty severe devaluation of our mileage. On some international routes on other Star Alliance airlines, it will now take almost twice as many miles for the same flight. Their domestic routes ...

I recently sent this out to my newsletter subscribers. For information like this on a periodic basis, sign-up here. I hate SPAM too, so don’t worry, I’ll only send you great travel tips, and you can unsubscribe at any time. I hope by now most of you have read my free eBook, “The Beginner’s Guide to Long-Term Travel and Lifestyle Design”. I plan to update it periodically and send a new version to all of you from time to time, so please contact me if you felt there was anything missing or if there is a particular topic you would like addressed. One area I realized I left out was information ...

A few years ago I visited New Zealand and fulfilled one of my lifelong dreams. The highlight of the trip for me was undoubtedly my trip to Matamata, New Zealand to visit the actual, real-life set of Hobbiton from the Lord of the Rings movies. Hobbiton, in Matamata, New Zealand Due to time constraints, I only spent one month there and only saw the North Island. I had wanted to head down to the South Island at the time and possibly rent a campervan, but it didn’t really seem like something that would be that fun by myself. So I decided at the time to head back to Canada and enjoy Christmas with ...

One of the first orders of business I take card of whenever I land in a new country is to try and get a pre-paid data plan for my phone. Some people chose not to have a working phone when they travel, since it’s sometimes a bit of a pain to find the right provider. But I don’t see much point in owning a smartphone and not having access to data with it whenever I want. Getting A Pre-paid SIM When You Travel Here are some other reasons why I love having a prepaid data plan with my phone when I travel. I can message friends and family back home using WhatsApp or iMessage whenever I want I can ...

After my recent mention on Reddit last week, I decided to try and improve the responsiveness of my little DigitalOcean VPS even more than it already was. I was definitely happy that I was able to withstand almost 20,000 visitors in just a few hours, but thought I might be able to improve things further by switching from Apache to Nginx. I debated it a long time ago, but never made the plunge for a few different reasons. First, I typically used hosting services based on cPanel. From what I gather, cPanel doesn’t really work well with Nginx (or at all), so that was never really an option. And ...

If you travel outside of North America you’ll quickly realize just how different we do things with regards to power. First, power in North America is typically around 110V, but can range from around 100V all the way up to around 125V. In Europe and many other parts of the world, a voltage of around 220V is normal. In the old days, prior to intelligent power adapters, if you plugged a device designed for 110V into a wall socket wired for 220V, you could pretty much kiss that device goodbye as it would likely fry with a puff of smoke. The same goes for razors, hair dryers, curling irons, etc. Different ...

I’ve been traveling around the world for almost three years now. Without a doubt, nothing is more frustrating than trying to access Google, say in Argentina for example, and being presented with a Spanish website. I don’t have exact numbers, but I’d say 80% of companies use some form of GeoIP (geo-location using the IP address as a means to determine where you are) to decide which language to serve you. The problem of course is that even though I am currently in Portugal, I don’t speak Portuguese! So using GeoIP to determine where someone lives is fine, but it should never be used as a ...

Yesterday I was casually flipping around some apps on my iPhone and opened up my Adsense application which shows me how much I’ve made from Google Adsense each day. I noticed almost immediately that there was an anomaly – for the current day I had served almost 4,000 ad impressions, when normally it would have been more like 200 around that time of day. I then followed up by logging into Google Analytics to see if I had been mentioned somewhere, and sure enough I noticed that my number one referrer was Reddit.com at the time. Reddit gets around one billion page views a month I believe, so ...

One of the downsides to always having the latest and greatest iPhone is that most places outside of North America and Europe seriously lag behind in terms of adoption rates. For places like Brazil and Argentina, that’s even more true because the cost of picking up a new iPhone is nearly twice as much as we would pay in North America. When I went to Argentina in 2012, I couldn’t find a Micro SIM card anywhere, and was forced to buy a normal full-sized SIM card and perform surgery on it to make it fit into a Micro SIM holder. I had to do that twice while travelling around the world with my iPhone ...

One of my favourite aspects of travelling is the process of arriving in a new destination. It doesn’t really matter how much research you do online before getting there, the actual experience of seeing it for yourself for the first time is always unique and usually unexpected. Almost always a place is better in person that you imagine in your head after doing research, but sometimes it takes a little time to overcome your first impressions after arriving. For example, both me and a friend of mine thought Buenos Aires was fairly dirty when we first arrived. But it’s the type of city that grows ...

Last month I blogged the first part in my ongoing series in how to make money from a travel blog. You can read How to Make Money from a Travel Blog: Part One here. Basically my goal has been to find a way to make a modest amount of money from my website so that I can offset some of the rather large expenses I incur while travelling around the world. While I’ve become quite adept at finding good deals, airfare and hotels are still expensive. So I set out with a rather modest goal of trying to make an extra $500 per month from this website. This Month’s Results In the month of September I made ...

I was recently generating some new server and email passwords, and realized that while most of the strong password generators available online work great for desktops, they aren’t very user friendly for entering on iOS or mobile devices. Often you can find a few checkboxes and sliders for those tools to make it a bit more iPhone friendly, but they don’t always work. Ideally a password that you frequently use on an iPhone or other iOS device should be “strong” (i.e. have possibly a symbol or two and a mix of upper and lower case characters), but should also be fairly easy to type. So this ...

Walter White’s Last 75 Minutes I’ve been reading a lot of Breaking Bad predictions these last few days and I thought I would toss my own hat into the ring. I’m sure I’m going to be wrong on a few counts, mainly because the writers have been really great at surprising us. There are lots of spoilers here, so don’t read any of these if you aren’t totally caught up with watching Breaking Bad. Here’s what we know based on the end of the last episode: Andrea, the girl Jesse was dating, was murdered by Todd, and Brock is now motherless Jesse is being held captive by Jack, Todd and their ...

I’ve been working on a travel eBook for a few months now, mostly on airplanes and during the odd evening. It’s been slow going since I have a lot of other things going on right now, but I’ve managed to make a bit of progress each week. I’m pleased to announce that last night I managed to put the finishing touches on it, and it’s now officially available. My travel ebook contains two main topics: how you can make and execute plans for long-term travel (anything more than a week or two), and how you can redesign your life to make traveling easier. There are lots of great resources include, ...

The following is an excerpt from my FREE Travel Book. If you’re like to learn more travel tips like these, sign-up to receive my travel book as soon as it is released. Every time I tell my mom about some of the places I’ve recently visited, she seems to reach as though I just barely escaped being killed or taking hostage due to all negative media that certain parts of the world get on the local news. The truth is though that in much of the world it’s just as safe as it is in your part of the world. But crime does happen from time to time, and many criminals purposefully target tourists. ...

I’ve been trying to track where exactly people go when they leave my website for a few pages recently, and wrote some code based on a few other examples on the Internet. Basically this bit of Javascript will force Google Analytics to log a special request so that you can see where the user went. It uses jQuery, so you have to make sure you have that included in your theme. Here’s some code that will let you track outbound links on your WordPress website. jQuery( 'a' ).on( 'click',function( e ) { var url = jQuery( this ).attr( 'href' ); var customName = jQuery( this ).attr( 'data-link-name' ...

Prior to visiting Barcelona for my first time this year, I had no idea who Antoni Gaudi was. But after spending a few days in Barcelona visiting architectural sites, it’s pretty clear what a revolutionary architect he was. Park Güell in Barcelona Park Güell Antonia Guadi was a Catalan architect whose various works in Spain have become extremely important, and draw huge crowds of tourists each day. While not entirely appreciated when he was alive, several of his works have now been classified as Unesco World Heritage Sites and he is one of Spain’s most revered architects. The first of his ...

One of the most impressive geological formations in the world are the Cliffs of Moher located in County Claire, Ireland. Located approximately an hour drive away from Galway, it’s an easily accessible location in the beautiful Burren region of Ireland, which has an eerie resemblance to a moonscape. The Cliffs of Moher in Ireland I visited the Cliffs once in 2011, but unfortunately it was foggy and didn’t make for very nice photos. Thankfully I got a chance to go back again yesterday and got to see the Cliffs of Moher with much better sunshine this time. If you’re going to visit the Cliffs ...