Matt

Darwin to Perth Day 2 – Katherine to Kununurra via Nitmiluk

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Matt at the Western Australia-Northern Territory border crossing quarantine station
Driving between Katherine NT and Kununurra WA
Driving between Katherine NT and Kununurra WA

Day 2, driving from Katherine, NT to Kununurra, WA is long but pretty amazing. I thought I’d start with a quick summary of the adventure:

  1. An early start to go on the sunrise cruise at Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge).
  2. Headed West towards the WA border.
  3. Stopped at Victoria Crossing roadhouse for fuel.
  4. Drove through Timber Creek.
  5. Crossed the WA/NT border and had our van checked at the quarantine station
  6. Turned off to Lake Argyle and checked out the lookout and shop there.
  7. Got to Kununurra, got a few more groceries, checked into the Hidden Valley caravan park and then went to Miramar National Park to see the striped hive formations there.
  8. Back to the caravan park for dinner and bed.

We covered about 620km’s, so it was a pretty long day, and there isn’t much of anything along the road. The sunrise cruise at Nitmiluk though was fantastic and well worth doing.

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Darwin to Perth Day 1 – Darwin to Katherine via Adelaide River, Pine Creek & Edith Falls

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Enjoying the serenity at Edith Falls

On day 1 of our Darwin to Perth road trip, we picked up our campervan, stopped in at Adelaide River, Pine Creek, Edith Falls and finally arrived at Katherine. It was a long, hot day, but we saw some amazing sights!

7 Days of ExpanDrive Cloud Unification – Review

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17/12/2017 UPDATE: This review was based on ExpanDrive 5. ExpanDrive 6 has been released with some big changes. Check out my review!

ExpanDrive LogoI started trialling ExpanDrive 5 to see if, compared to Odrive, it would be a more or less viable alternative to running all the different cloud synchronising apps for all the different cloud services I use. That includes Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive, and OwnCloud. I’m also looking at it as a way of reducing the data footprint of those cloud platforms on my local machine, so not actually storing files locally is a significant benefit here. Manually removing files from synchronising with my various cloud accounts is a pain, especially since there are terabytes of data in my Dropbox and it takes quite a while to load the full folder tree.

ExpanDrive behaves like an external USB attached drive, or more accurately a series of USB attached storage. Each of your cloud storage systems becomes a drive connected to your computer. As long as you are on the internet, you can then enter these storage destinations anytime and access the files on them as you would any other external drive. Similarly, you can save directly to them just like a regular external drive. The only difference is that the speed of access is highly impacted by the speed of your internet connection.

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30 Days of Odrive Cloud Unification – Review

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I started trialling Odrive 30 days ago to see if it is a good alternative to running cloud synchronising apps for the many different cloud services I use. Those cloud services include Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive, and OwnCloud. I am also looking at ExpanDrive as another possible option. Besides doing away with additional applications, … Read more

Darwin to Perth Road Trip Day 0 + Darwin Mercure Airport Hotel Superior Queen Room Review

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Departing Sydney for Darwin on Our Jetstar Flight.

To begin our Darwin to Perth road trip (and squeeze as much in between work as possible), we got a late night Jetstar flight from Sydney to Darwin. It departed at 9:00 pm and arrived at 1:05 am in the morning. Hence, since it was so late by the time we left and we were able to do a full day at work as normal before our flight, I figure it hardly counts as a day, and so I call it day 0. Being a Jetstar flight it was not super comfortable, but we were able to get a little bit of sleep on the plane at least. Even so, it was pretty tiring, so we were looking forward to getting into a proper bed and sleeping for a few hours.

I have to admit the Darwin airport is bigger than I expected, but given how late we got there, we were eager to get to bed and didn’t spend any more time there than absolutely necessary. We were quickly outside where we were hit by 27°C temperatures and very high humidity. We expected it, but it was still a shock to the system after our highs at home of 22°C and lows of 5°C from the few weeks before the trip.

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My Macbook Battery is Swollen, What’s Going On?

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The swollen battery pack of a Macbook Pro

It’s a common problem with ageing Macbooks. In fact, every single Macbook I’ve ever owned has had this problem, some more than once.

It starts out with what seems like a bit of a bulge under the front of your Macbook. Soon the trackpad starts to have problems. Sometimes it seems like you can only press it when you apply pressure at the correct angles. Soon that bulge gets bigger and you can’t press the trackpad at all.

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14-Day Darwin to Perth Roadtrip Itinerary

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So, we flew to Darwin, hired a camper van and road tripped to Perth following as close as we could to the coastline within the limitations of the van that required we only use sealed roads with some small exceptions. There are a lot of unsealed roads in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, so there are a lot of places we had to miss, but at the same time, 2 weeks or 14 days is not a huge amount of time to do the road trip in either. We didn’t really have the time to have done any more than we did. Our original itinerary actually did have more in it but we had to revise some parts of it due to time constraints and availability of the Horizontal Falls Tours as well as doing extra things we saw along the way. In fact, if you do your research, a lot of people would recommend taking a lot more time to do this trip than we did. However, if you really want to do it, are used to driving long distances, and are willing to pack as much in as possible, then it is possible to see and do an awful lot. In short, there is a LOT to do, so consider this just a portion of what you could do and see if you really want to push it and pack everything in you can.

One thing to note, the approximate driving times here are just driving and are not including stops or detours to places along the way. Those add more time, sometimes lots of it!

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Watch it instead: You can watch the itinerary on my Youtube channel or below!

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How To Setup Arq 5 Backup on a Mac with Amazon Drive

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arq logoArq Backup provides a simple backup solution for your Mac that can run in the background, constantly keeping your important files backed up to your choice of cloud storage platform. It encrypts your files locally and regularly backs up your changes when you are connected to the internet. Since it is merely a tool that connects to your choice of storage provider it gives you a lot of flexibility to handle your backups as you see fit to provide the greatest level of control and redundancy. The quickest and simplest solution that provides a low-cost cloud backup option though is Amazon Drive, so I’ve chosen to use it for this tutorial, but you can connect to other cloud storage providers in very similar ways.

Let’s get started.

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10 Tips for Saving Money on Fuel while Road Tripping Around Australia

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130km/h Sign in the Northern Territory

We have done quite a lot of road-tripping in a number of countries, but Australia is our home turf and there is a lot of ground to cover here. As a result, we have done a lot of road-tripping in Australia (like our road trip between Darwin and Perth and Sydney to Uluru return) and that experience has taught us a few things that add up to make a big difference in the cost of a road trip. It doesn’t matter whether you are driving a car and staying at motels/hotels/cabins/etc, towing a caravan or cruising in a camper van, these things will help save you money.

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Does Royal Caribbean charge Your Credit Card twice and then release one transaction?

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I’ve seen this question come up a few times, so thought I would answer it. First, let’s elaborate on what is actually being asked by using an example: If I buy a shore excursion onboard, does Royal Caribbean place a hold on the funds, then at the end of the cruise bill that shore excursion to me along with anything else I have purchased. Thus meaning I have to not only wait for the hold to be released but also ensure I have double the funds in the account in the first place?

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