About 2 weeks ago, I went to Tokyo for a business trip. As usual, I always do some study on the strange city. Every time, when you first arrived to a new city. You need to find the place to stay, and then you can plan the spots to visit.
I found the Google My Maps is a quite nice tool to do travel plans. Since you can easily locale the sign spots and hotels with the Google Map’s geocoding function, take notes and share with the others.
My study on hotels in Shibuya.
After solved the accommodation problem, the other important thing for geek is to find where to get `connected’. A man like me is not possible to live without Internet access.
All most of my gadgets can access Internet. Most of them has wifi, and I can also access to Internet via 3G network. But the problem is the price. My mobile phone operators charge me a expensive roaming fee. 1KB data access for NTD 0.5 via 3G network, and the voice services are not cheap at all either.
As a fonero, of course I find the FONSpots before I get to the city. The wifi from FON community is totally free, isn’t it ? But the thing is the maps.fon.com is not so easy to use, since you can not `mark’ or `store’ the hotspots you plan to go.
It might be more useful, if we can integrate the FONspots information and My Maps. Thanks for Google’s new Google Mapplet service. I create a tiny tool to maskup both services.
The Google Mapplet is a very powerful tool, however it’s not easy to understand howto get it work. The post on Lat Long Blog has a short and nice video tutorial. Here is a quick screenshot shows you how to add the FONSpots Mapplet.
Add the mapplet into your `My Map’ via the `browser the directory’ link. (you have to login first.)
Select the FONSpots mapplet, and click `add’.
The FONSpots mapplet link will show up on your `My Map’ menu.
Click the radio box of the FONSpots mapplet to enable the mapplet. (it takes a few seconds to load the hotspot data.)
After that, you are free to save the hotspots into your `My Maps’ collection. You can also make the mapplet not showing the ‘not-activity’ hotspots by changing the setting.
This tool is developed at Augest, but I never finish my post. Please enjoy this gadget, suggestion and comments are welcome. Flames go to /dev/null.