The 10 Most Downloaded Free iPad Apps Of All Time

iPads are the way to travel now.  No longer do you have to pull the device out of your bag as you go through security in the airport and for portable or short-term use you just can’t beat their convenience.  Add all those reasons in with the fact that you can still get more apps from apple than any other provider and why wouldn’t you use one for travel?

Apple recently released a list of the top ten free iPad apps downloaded from the App Store.

Just because you spent serious cash on an iPad doesn't mean you need to spend even more to take advantage of various games and utilities for it.

Have a look and see if anything suits your needs.

1.   Solitaire is the definitive one-player card game. Play it anywhere you go.

2.  The Bible app is exactly what you'd expect it to be. Choose different translations, search words and phrases, or just read from it.

3.  iBooks is Apple's exclusive online bookstore and eBook reader. Start reading differently.

4.  Use Remote to control your iTunes library over wifi. Adjust volume and change songs effortlessly.

5.  With Fandango, you can read reviews and buy movie tickets before you ever get to the theater. Stop waiting in line!

6.  Yelp finds establishments near you and provides you with user reviews. Make an informed decision for your next impromptu dinner date.

7.  Use Google Earth to help you arrive at your destination, or simply browse interesting satellite photos of the entire surface of the world.

8.  Movies by Flixster sets you up with trailers, showtimes, and critic reviews of new movies. Know what you're getting yourself into the next time you head to the theater.

9.  Search Google by voice, check your email, access your calendar, and more with the Google Mobile app from everyone's favorite search engine.

10. Pandora builds a radio station customized to your liking and streams it to you for free.

Hotels With Free Wifi

For our guests we offer wifi throughout our hotel so we find it ridiculous that in 2011 we still have to have to pay for wifi in public places.

And hotels are some of the worst culprits. The most expensive luxury hotels tend to be the ones more likely to charge for wifi while budget hotels give you free access.

We found a list from Wifi Free Spot that lists every major hotel or chain that offers free wifi. It's crowdsourced, so you can add to the list if you know a location that's missing.

Here are a few notable hotels where you can score a free connections. With some exceptions, they're nothing fancy, so free wifi could possibly be the only true perk:

• Best Western

• Country Inns and Suites (select locations)

• Courtyard Marriott

• Days Inn (select locations)

• Econo Lodge

• Hampton Inn (free in the lobby)

• Holiday Inn

• Red Roof Inn

• Super 8 Motel

• W Hotels

Electronics by our Pool?

While you’re enjoying our hotel, you may want to take a bath, but expect a call? Or want to read an e-book by the pool? Hate the very idea of getting your gadget wet? Don't want sand in it? No problem!

1   Dig around in your kitchen for a zipper storage bag and keep this in your suitcase just in case. (For most cell phones, a sandwich sized bag works well.)

2   Stick the device in the bag and seal it up. Make sure it's sealed completely.

3   Fold the excess behind it.

4   If it has a touch display, make sure there's some air in the bag to keep the plastic off the surface where you are not touching it. The touch display on most devices will work fine for single-finger taps and gestures.

5   Enjoy your phone or reader or tablet device with no worry about it getting accidentally splashed or dipped.

When you're done, don't reuse the bag. The zippers aren't really made for repeated use, and some sliding switches (like the power switch on a kindle) will tend to abrade the bag where your finger operates them.

Protecting a Folding Phone or Device1

You say it folds? Not a problem! Devices like flip phones can simply be folded with the bag around it.

2   Get a bag a little bigger than the device.

3   Put the device into the bag.

Travel Apps

I try to stay on top of what is trending now in the world of Travel Apps since our guests are constantly looking for something that can make their travels easier.  I found this from CNN and think it could help a lot of travelers get apps that can help or update an old or not very good app.

(CNN) -- There are seemingly millions of smartphone apps out there designed to make traveling easier, but not all of them are very good. Every company seems to think that it needs an app to be cool, but not every app is worth the effort.

Here are some of the apps that I find to be most helpful while on the road:

FlightAware

I'm one of those guys who always thinks that more information is better, and that's why I like FlightAware. You can see exactly where your flight (or any other flight) is at the moment. I've used the FlightAware website for years to see near real-time flight tracking, and now there's an app as well.

Were you told your airplane is coming from Wichita, but it's still not there and you should be boarding? Go to FlightAware to see where the airplane is right now. FlightAware is hardly the only one in this space. Other frequent fliers swear by FlightTrack Pro, for example.

GateGuru

When I was in Atlanta recently, my wife was looking for something before our next flight. Trying to find the right store in an airport the size of Hartsfield-Jackson is a mind-numbing experience. GateGuru, however, gives the rundown on which stores and restaurants are in each terminal and it pulls in reviews as well. If you're in an airport looking for a particular product or service, this will make your task much easier.

Hotel Tonight

Have you ever been somewhere and realized you needed a room for the night? Maybe your flight was canceled or perhaps your meetings ran long. This company negotiates deals with hotels for last-minute rooms in many big cities. Within seconds, you can have the room reserved for a low rate.

Taxi Magic

If you don't know a city well, the taxi scene can be confusing. Where is the best place to hail a cab? How much should you pay? Taxi Magic makes it a lot easier. If there's a participating cab company in your city, Taxi Magic will have a cab sent right to you.

You can pay directly through the app so you don't have to worry about whether credit is accepted or not. The app and booking services are free, and there's a $1.50 documentation fee for using a credit card through the app.

If there isn't a participating cab company in the area, Taxi Magic will give you phone numbers for local companies so you can call and arrange for a cab yourself.

TripIt

If you've ever used TripIt online to manage your travel, you know it's a great tool for keeping all your travel plans in one place. Of course, there's also an app for that. See and manage all your travel plans in the TripIt app so you never lose your details. Beyond the basics of flights, hotels and cars, you can also put in things like appointments and meals.

Your airline app

This isn't one app; it's dependent upon which airline you fly. If you fly a different airline every time, then it's probably not worth downloading every single airline app. But if you're a loyalist, you should absolutely have it.

There are some excellent apps out there that allow you to check flight status, see the standby list, book flights and even check in. Apps will store a mobile boarding pass so you can just flash your phone to get on the airplane (not in all airports, but it's getting there). Some airlines have better apps than others. I've heard rave reviews about the new United Airlines app, but get the apps for the airlines you fly frequently.

What would you add to the list?

Change the Time

Spring forward...Fall back....

It's ingrained in our consciousness almost as much as the A-B-Cs or our spelling reminder of "i before e...." And it's a regular event, though perhaps a bit less regular than the swallows coming back to Capistrano.

Yet in those four words is a whole collection of trivia, facts and common sense about Daylight Saving Time.

Beginning in 2007, Daylight Saving Time is extended one month and begins for most of the United States at:

2 a.m. on the Second Sunday in March

and lasts until

2 a.m. on the First Sunday of November.

The new start and stop dates were set in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Daylight Saving Time - for the U.S. and its territories - is NOT observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and by most of Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona).

Daylight Saving Time Saves Energy

One of the biggest reasons we change our clocks to Daylight Saving Time (DST) is that it reportedly saves electricity. Newer studies, however, are challenging long-held reason.

In general, energy use and the demand for electricity for lighting our homes is directly connected to when we go to bed and when we get up. Bedtime for most of us is late evening through the year. When we go to bed, we turn off the lights and TV.

In the average home, 25 percent of all the electricity we use is for lighting and small appliances, such as TVs, VCRs and stereos. A good percentage of energy consumed by lighting and appliances occurs in the evening when families are home. By moving the clock ahead one hour, we can cut the amount of electricity we consume each day.

Daylight Saving Time "makes" the sun "set" one hour later and therefore reduces the period between sunset and bedtime by one hour. This means that less electricity would be used for lighting and appliances late in the day. We may use a bit more electricity in the morning because it is darker when we rise, but that is usually offset by the energy savings in the evening.

In the winter, the afternoon Daylight Saving Time advantage is offset by the morning's need for more lighting. In spring and fall, the advantage is less than one hour. So, Daylight Saving Time saves energy for lighting in all seasons of the year except for the four darkest months of the year (November, December, January and February) when the afternoon advantage is offset by the need for lighting because of late sunrise.

History of Daylight Saving Time

Daylight Saving Time is a change in the standard time of each time zone. Time zones were first used by the railroads in 1883 to standardize their schedules. According to the The Canadian Encyclopedia Plus by McClelland & Stewart Inc., Canada's "[Sir Sandford] Fleming also played a key role in the development of a worldwide system of keeping time. Trains had made obsolete the old system where major cities and regions set clocks according to local astronomical conditions. Fleming advocated the adoption of a standard or mean time and hourly variations from that according to established time zones. He was instrumental in convening an International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884 at which the system of international standard time -- still in use today -- was adopted.”

Daylight Saving Time has been around for most of this century and even earlier.

Benjamin Franklin, while a minister to France, first suggested the idea in an essay titled "An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light." The essay was first published in the Journal de Paris in April 1784. But it wasn't for more than a century later that an Englishman, William Willett, suggested it again in 1907.

In 1918, in order to conserve resources for the war effort, the U.S. Congress placed the country on Daylight Saving Time for the remainder of WW I. It was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919. The law, however, proved so unpopular that it was later repealed.

When America went to war again, Congress reinstated Daylight Saving Time on February 9, 1942. Time in the U.S. was advanced one hour to save energy. It remained advanced one hour forward year-round until September 30, 1945.

From 1945 to 1966, there was no U.S. law about Daylight Saving Time. So, states and localities were free to observe Daylight Saving Time or not.
This, however, caused confusion -- especially for the broadcasting industry, and for trains and buses. Because of the different local customs and laws, radio and TV stations and the transportation companies had to publish new schedules every time a state or town began or ended Daylight Saving Time.
By 1966, some 100 million Americans were observing Daylight Saving Time through their own local laws and customs. Congress decided to step in end the confusion and establish one pattern across the country. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 (15 U.S. Code Section 260a) created Daylight Saving Time to begin on the last Sunday of April and to end on the last Sunday of October. Any area that wanted to be exempt from Daylight Saving Time could do so by passing a local ordinance. We’ve Had DST in one form or another ever since.

Classic Halloween Movies

If you’re like me you want to take in a couple of classic horror films around this time of year.  I’ve compiled a list of some of my GO TO movies that never get old.  Hope you like them.

The Shining, 1980

What's scarier than a haunted house? Try a haunted hotel. Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film centers on the young Torrance family — writer dad Jack (Jack Nicholson), homemaker mom Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and clairvoyant son Danny (Danny Lloyd) — who've taken on the task of caring for the remote Overlook Hotel in Colorado during the off-season. However, isolated in the snowed-in location, it isn't long before cabin fever and writer's block (not to mention the hotel's ghosts) begin to drive Jack murderously insane. Despite being markedly different from the Stephen King novel it was adapted from, The Shining is widely considered to be one of the scariest movies of all time, full of creepy twin girls, decaying corpse ladies, blood-spewing elevators and one hell of a hedge maze.

The Haunting, 1963

It's no surprise that a movie based on one of the best haunted house tales ever written (The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson) would be this good. A scientist and two women with psychic gifts visit an evil-looking mansion named Hill House, a place where everything is just slightly wrong, where the angles at which walls meet are off by half a degree, so that doors are always closing on their own. The trio is accompanied by the skeptical young heir to Hill House. As directed by Robert Wise (who had a delightfully diverse career, helming movies from The Sound of Music and West Side Story to the first Star Trek film, as well as being the editor on Citizen Kane), The Haunting perfectly demonstrates the power of suggestion. We never see any ghosts. We hear them — banging, giggling, crying behind walls. We feel them. But they always remain just on the other side of the door. Which is where they are scariest. For the second after we first see the thing is the second at which the fear begins to fade.

Poltergeist, 1982

The brilliance of Poltergeist isn't in its special effects or its Steven Spielberg-branded movie magic. It's in the film's mundaneness. The Freeling family home is an ordinary house inside an ordinary suburban community. The characters aren't overly likable, special or interesting. The Freelings could be any typical American family. Therein lies the terror. While the film lends itself to some wonderfully quotable moments, it also brought the good old fashioned haunting into the modern suburban home. As the Freelings got sucked into closets and harassed by electronics, audience members began to glance suspiciously at their own TVs, and white noise began a reign of terror that reached its apex with 2002's The Ring.

The Lost Boys, 1987

"Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire." That says it all! This one is just plain fun. The cast features Kiefer Sutherland as a punky teen vampire, Jason Patric as the newest reluctant convert, and the two Coreys (Haim and Feldman). Feldman plays one of two wacky brothers (Edgar and Allen) who insist the town is crawling with vampires. They made the phrase "vamp out" famous.  Plus the Soundtrack was AWESOME!

The Evil Dead, 1981

Filmmaker Sam Raimi first hacked his way to notoriety with 1981's The Evil Dead. The film follows a band of students on a weekend getaway to a rickety Tennessee mountain cabin, where they plan for the typical sex and booze-type debauchery. Unfortunately for them, the gang encounters a group of demons and quickly realize these are no idle spooks. Even the forest greenery is under their control. (Is it possible for a tree to be misogynist? Watch and find out.) The gore fest, in which all the usual horror appliances get ample screen time (by film's end, the dagger, ax, chainsaw and shotgun get more than their share of screen time), was widely criticized as too gruesome by critics and theaters alike, which only seemed to hasten the audience's desire to watch the corn syrup flow.

The Others, 2001

Grace (Nicole Kidman) is alone with her kids. Stuck in a giant, fog-shrouded manor on the British isle of Jersey during World War II, Grace can't leave because her son and daughter suffer from extreme sensitivity to sunlight. She's isolated and anxious. But Grace and her kids are not alone, because there's something with them in the house. Kidman shines as a mother incapable of connecting to her kids, a mother who hides her fragility behind a stern countenance. The film begins with Kidman shrieking loudly and near the end, she breaks down in hysterics. The Others is as affecting as it is chilling.

Nosferatu the Vampire, 1922

Let's start at the beginning with F.W. Murnau's silent film featuring the creepiest looking vampire ever -- Max Schreck. Rumors at the time of the film circulated that the strange looking Schreck was indeed a real vampire. That became the inspiration for the film Shadow of the Vampire. But you can decide for yourself.

Arachnophobia, 1990

Spiders. John Goodman with a blowtorch. Who's scarier? I'm sure we could ask Roseanne, but that's the subject of a much more frightening movie. Anyway, as anyone who has ever squashed a spider can attest, things with eight legs are creepy. Gross. Big ones that fly through the air when provoked? Even worse.

Amityville Horror, 1978

A family moves into a perfectly nice house in Amityville, N.Y. Then things begin to happen: black goo comes out of the toilet, flies appear (does this have anything to do with the toilet?), a voice tells a priest to "get out," and something with glowing red eyes peers through the windows at night. Sure it was an "Exorcist" rip-off, but it was "based on a true story!" That's got to count for something.

The Exorcist, 1973

Spinning heads. Vile expletives. Buckets of vomit. Sound like your last blind date? It was worse for Ellen Burstyn and Max Von Sydow, who had to play opposite Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." When this puppy first hit the silver screen, people were running out of the theater in droves. Now we call those people sissies. But as approximately 6,453 previous "Scariest Movies of All Time" lists have noted, this movie is scary.

Happy Halloween Miami!

The autumn season is in our hearts, if not in a chill wind. Even though the leaves are not changing color, there are still plenty of activities for all ages to help bring fall to Miami. Whether you're looking for hayrides or Halloween frights, there's sure to be something here to interest you this time of year.

The Little Farm Pumpkin Patch, Oct 8 - 31 -- Enjoy picking pumpkins, pony rides and scarecrow-making at this farm in South Dade. You can bring your own scarecrow clothes to stuff, or you can purchase a scarecrow kit there. You can also walk through the farm animals and buy bales of hay- all you need for Halloween decorating all in one place! 22400 SW 134th Ave, Miami.

ZooBoo at Zoo Miami, Oct 29 and 30 -- Children 12 and under can enjoy costume contests and safe trick-or-treating in a wholesome environment at Zoo Miami. This event is free after paying standard zoo admission fees.

Halls of Terror Haunted House, Fridays and Saturdays, Sept 30 - Oct 31 -- The Super Wheels Skating Center at 12265 S.W. 112th Street transforms into a spooktacular haunted house. Admission is $13 for the haunted house and an additional $6 if you'd like to skate afterward. For details, call (305) 270-3986.

Monster Splash at Miami Seaquarium, Oct 28 - 31 -- Miami Seaquarium opens its doors for a special family-friendly Halloween event. It will feature animal shows, a haunted house and trick-or-treating for the kids. Admission is $35.95 for adults and $25.95 for children ages 3-12. For more information, call 305-361-5705.

Early Evening of Spooky Adventures, Oct 22 & 30 -- This family-friendly event at the Gold Coast Railroad Museum offers trick-or-treating in special sandbox, pumpkin decorating, story telling and, of course, a Halloween train ride! For more information, call the Gold Coast Railroad Museum at 305-253-0063.

Halloween on the Mile, Oct 30 -- Miracle Mile in Coral Gables features a family-friendly trick-or-treating event from 3PM-6PM. In addition to trick-or-treating, the event features kiddie and doggie costume contest, live performances, storytelling, and a Halloween photo booth.

Happy Halloween, Miami!