I tried out a new posting setup this time, as opposed to what I did in California. There I had brought my laptop and done all of this work through that machine. This time, I used only my tablet.

A few months ago I had picked up a folding keyboard and a USB OTG cable. (And a lot of other stuff to make my tablet more usable, none of which worked…). Because the Kindle Fire has no bluetooth, it had to be a USB keyboard. I didn’t want one of those rolling ones, because I like the tactile feedback of a real keyboard. The USB OTG cable is great, because it turns the little mini-USB port on the tablet into a full USB port (and other, more technical things). This little cable lets me plug in my keyboard, and also plug in the camera to transfer photos to the tablet. So the process is – plug in the camera, transfer the days photos over. Edit them using the Jellybean Gallery editing software (surprisingly good). Plugin the keyboard, use WordPress for Android to write the post and add the photos. Hope I have wifi so I can publish it, or I can save a local draft to be published when I find the wifi. It’s a pretty decent setup. I get to leave the bulky laptop at home, the blogging works because it’s a full keyboard, and the photo editing isn’t bad due to decent software. There are a few significant issues though. The photo import replaces the time on the photo with the import time (ridiculous), so the photos are in a random order per transfer. It works out, because I transfer each days photos at the end of the day, but it’s hard to keep the blog posts well-ordered because of this. The Kindle Fire only has 5.5gb of storage space, so I’m running out of room at the end of the trip. The keyboard isn’t powered, which is nice because it means I don’t have to recharge it. But it’s a problem because it looks like at 60% battery on the Kindle, it decides that it can’t power external devices anymore (ridiculous) and stops powering the keyboard. So I have to keep the Fire fully powered to use the keyboard at the end of the day. I’m thinking of buying a Nexus 7 when I get home. More storage space, smaller profile, bluetooth so I had more keyboard choices possible.