Taiwan Beers were open on on the coffee table. It was four in the morning on a Tuesday and six Canadian English teachers were in my apartment crowded around my computer, waiting to watch the Canadian hockey team battle it out with the Russians in the Olympics.

“How do we watch it?” I asked.

“My brother told me that CBC is streams all the games live.”

I opened the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, for the non-Canucks out there) website and clicked on the video.

A little circle spun in the middle of the video. Then a message popped up.

“This video is not available in your area.”

First there were groans of disappointment. Then there was panic. I googled sports streaming websites looking for one that would allow us to see the match, but to no avail, and we missed an epic hockey game.

Such are the travails of life overseas.

The Solution For Streaming Video Abroad

That was about five years ago. I have since become aware of magical Internet wormholes called VPNs (virtual private networks). that enable you to make it look to the Internet as though your computer is in another country.

This is how people in China are able to access Facebook even though it’s blocked by the government.

I’ve tried out a couple of free VPNs before. They work OK, but they’re pretty slow.

The thing about a VPN is that every time you request information from the Internet it has to be transferred through the VPN, and that requires a lot of computing power. So data only reaches your computer as fast as the VPN can send it, which means popular free services can be very slow — much too slow for my favorite bandwidth-intensive activity: streaming video.

Tunnel Bear

Tunnel Bear sent me an email a few weeks ago asking if I would review their premium VPN service, which at the time of writing was $4.99 USD/month or $49.99/year. They would give me a free membership and compensate me for the time it took write a review. The Tunnel Bear folks were confident that I’d love the service, and agreed to my stipulation that I could write anything I wanted. If I hated it and said so, they’d still pay.

“Sure,” I said. I was about to head to Mexico for a week and wanted to keep up with Dexter on my American Netflix account. So, when I got to the hotel I connected to the Internet, turned on Tunnel Bear and set it to USA, and was streaming right away.

There was no buffering. No delay. It was like I was watching at home.

Two days ago I landed in Bangkok, so I thought I’d give it another shot here too. Again, Netflix loaded just as quickly as at home.

Tunnel Bear provides VPN masking (or ‘tunnels’) that can make it look like you are browsing from any of the following countries:

• United States
• Canada
• UK
• German
• Japan
• Australia
• France
• Netherlands
• Italy

I should note here that Tunnel Bear is the first premium VPN I’ve tried, so I’m not really in a position to make comparisons. But, for $50/year, it seems pretty cheap to me and like a pretty rad option for keeping up with your favorite teams and TV shows from home.

Besides, they’re also Canadian and their mascot is a bear that looks exactly like The Oatmeal’s Sriracha bear, which makes them doubly awesome in my books.

You can sign up for Tunnel Bear here.

The post How To Watch Netflix Abroad: A Review of Tunnel Bear appeared first on XpatMatt.

Businesses and individuals can create profiles for their services and users can search the database for the services that best fit their needs. So, if you have a couple of extra kayaks in the garage that you’d like to rent out, you can put up a listing. If you know the mountain biking trails around your city like the back of your hand, you can put up a listing for a guiding service. Think AirBnB.com for adventure services.

How does it work?

The average user can simply browse the website by activity and area to find information about businesses and people renting equipment and offering tours in an area. For example, when I search for bicycle tours in Salt Lake City, Exvana gives me 15 listings. Each listing includes a description of rentals and services offered by the company and contact information. Users can also rate each business and write reviews. Pretty simple.

If you want to take your Exvana experience to the next level, you can log in to create your own account. With your own account you can add a profile picture, description of yourself, and maintain a list of your favourite activity categories for faster searching.

If you want to list your rental or service on Exvana, the experience is also quite simple. You click on the ‘Get Listed’ link and then fill out a series of forms about your business, and pay for your listing which, at $4.99per month or $49.99 per year, is pretty easy on the pocketbook.

The paid listings receive priority in search results, a more detailed profile than the existing profiles (presumably added by the staff), and colour photographs (as opposed to the generic icons that represent most services in the listings).

User Experience

The design is clean and attractive and the interface is easy to use. Creating a free account, managing a user profile, and creating a business listing are all simple, easy, and fast.

The simplicity and ease-of-use come partially from the fact that there are few options for customization and interaction. Although users can create profiles, there is little that they can do with them. There is no way to follow or interact with other users, which would be useful if one wanted to, say, ask for the opinion of somebody else who had rented Bill’s kayak for the day.

So, although Exvana does what it does quite well, I think that it could be improved. I’d like to be able to find out which of my Facebook friends are on Exvana and connect with them there. I’d like to know if my friends checked in on FourSquare at the tour that I’m considering buying, so I can ask them what they thought. And, I’d really like to meet others who are looking for kayaks in Salt Lake City so that we have the chance to interact and become real-life kayaking buddies.

It wouldn’t be fair to expect such a young website to have developed that far in such a short period of time — but as long as I’m writing a review of it, I’m definitely going to make my opinion known. Exvana is a good website for connecting individuals with services that they’re looking for, but it has the potential to be much more. If Exvana can create the tools that will enable adventure-lovers to interact, swap tips, and meet up, I can see it growing into a thriving community (and very profitable business).

If you’d like to learn more, Exvana can be reached on Twitter or through their Facebook fan page?

The post Exvana: A New Website for Adventure-Seekers appeared first on XpatMatt.

One great example is the water hippo. When I think of villagers in Africa walking long distances for water, I think of people carrying two sloshing buckets in their hands or suspended from a stick across their back. That was before Engineers Without Borders tackled the problem. EWB figured out how to repurpose old plastic barrels, which are fairly common and go unused, into water transportation wheels that will carry 90 litters of water and can be pushed over rural roads using an attached handle. They’re easy enough to push that even the elderly and children can use them.

ScotteVest is a clothing design company, but not in the usual sense. They design clothing that is simple, attractive, and solves problems for travelers. The main problem they solve is a common one: how to comfortably and conveniently carry all the extra crap you need on the road.

They solve this problem by designing clothing with tons of hidden pockets designed specifically not to make the clothing look bulky (i.e. like it’s crammed full of your crap) and they have done an excellent job. At least they have in the case of their Travel Vest for Men, which I was given to review.

The ScotteVest Travel Vest for Men

The ScotteVest Travel Vest for men is a stylish well-fitted vest with 24 pockets. That’s right, 24.

With the exception of the two zip-up breast pockets, however, you wouldn’t be able to tell it apart from any other vest — unless you looked at the price tag that is. At $125 this is not a cheap garment.

To be honest, for that price I never would have considered buying one. After being given this one to review, though, I would. This vest has saved me a lot of time and headaches — definitely $125 worth.

How It Works

The pockets on the ScotteVest are designed to be practical, intuitive, and invisible and they have accomplished those things as well as I would think possible. The smartphone and iPod pockets fit the devices snugly and have a transparent front through which you can operate them. The outside pockets automatically snap shut with magnets to prevent thing from falling out, but that are also easily pushed apart when you insert your hand. Rather than bore you with those details, though, I’ll get right down to the real reason you’re reading this review.

For a picture of me.

Now here is a picture of all the crap I that was in my ScotteVest when I took that picture. It’s the normal load that I carry onto an airplane in it.

 The Result

Although some people may feel differently about their other products, I have found the ScotteVest Travel Vest for Men to be versatile, stylish, and extremely useful. Since I received this vest two months ago I have taken seven flights and I will not fly without it again.

When I travel, my carry on bag is stuffed with computer and camera equipment that I don’t want to put in my luggage. It barely fits under the seat in front of me and is very awkward to put in the overhead bin. It’s a pain getting things out of it.

Now, with the my ScotteVest, I don’t have to take things out of it (except for my laptop). I can carry everything I need in once garment. This is also handy when going trough security. I don’t have to empty my pockets anymore. I simply place the vest in the bin.

I actually use it so much that my girlfriend has started referring to it as my ‘purse’.

I haven’t done so yet, but I’m looking forward to taking my ScotteVest out on a shoot so that I can leave my camera bag behind and use the vest to carry my extra lenses and flash.

In Conclusion

The ScotteVest is expensive; prohibitively so. But, if you’re a frequent traveler or the kind of person who isn’t concerned with dropping $125 on a useful garment, then I strongly recommend that you buy one now.

The post ScotteVest Travel Vest for Men Review appeared first on XpatMatt.

I stopped buying expensive sunglasses whenI was nineteen after a pair of $100 sunglasses blew of my head while I was hanging out the window of a speeding pickup truck throwing an empty beer bottle at a road sign (a popular pastime for bored 19 year-olds living in small redneck mountain towns).I never wanted to buy another pair of expensive sunglasses because I was sure that I would just lose them hanging out of a pickup truck drunk, or doing something else equally stupid.

I’ve long since given up hobbies that involve large amounts of alcohol and proving my masculinity by lifting, throwing, or breaking inanimate objects and traded them for sober (well…almost) hobbies that involve large amounts of Gore-tex and fleece and involve proving my masculinity by walking, swimming, running, climbing, flying, and boating long distances while sober (usually). Despite this, the idea that if I bought expensive sunglasses I would lose them stuck with me. So, for the past ten years I wore nothing but $20 off-the-rack sunglasses.

Then, Switch Vision offered to send me me a pair of sunglasses to review on my blog. I chose their Boreal model. They’re totally my style: wraparound full-frame glasses that look sleek yet are large enough to block out most sunlight. I don’t know what the style is called, but I think of them as snowboarder and surfer sunglasses.

A pair of Boreal retails for $150. That’s similar to the prices of many other, better-known brands. The marketers at Switch know that they need to offer something more than just cool looking glasses to woo buyers away from those brands. So, Switch, as the name suggests, allows you to change the lenses in your glasses. The lenses are held firmly in place by a pair of strong magnets. They pop out with a firm push, but are unlikely to fall out unless you bail super hard (in which case the glasses will probably fly off your head anyways). Switch offers several different kinds of specialized lenses for different lighting situations, such as flat-light skiing, and also offer prescriptions. Switch glasses are usually sold in kits (around USD$150 give or take) that include a case, cleaning cloth, pouch, frames, and two sets of lenses. Not bad.

This is Switch’s best selling point. When you have inevitably scratched the hell out of your lenses, you don’t need to buy new glasses. You only need buy new lenses, which only costs around $50 for most kinds.

It is true that good sunglasses help your vision. I realized it one day I while snowboarding on an overcast day in British Columbia. My high-contrast Switch lenses helped me to see the terrain much better. Another time, I was on a banca boat in the Philippines looking for whale sharks. It’s hard to see down through the water on a choppy day. The captain told me that his scouts work polarized sunglasses to reduce glare on the water. I put in my polarized lenses and I was able to see much more clearly down into the ocean. Ah, technology. How you enhance my life.

The one thing that worries me about my Boreal’s is that they are a bit large for me (my head is slightly smaller than average). However, that if your head isn’t disproportionately large or small, then Switch’s sunglasses will probably fit you just fine. I also found that after spending several months in the tropics my magnets began to rust (salty air will do that). I’m not positive, but I think that should be covered by the warranty.

Either way, Switch has converted me. Now that I know the difference that a good pair of sunglasses with the right lenses can make in different conditions, I can’t go back to cheap sunglasses. In fact, I think that I’d like to expand my lens collection.

I’m turning into such a techie-gear dork.

You can check out these glasses on Amazon using he link to the left. I am an Amazon affiliate, so Amazon will pay me a small commission if you make a purchase there after coming from my website (though it will not change the price you pay).

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