Eye-Fi upload fix: how to get past hotel logins

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Having been living in Shanghai for some time and travelling all over Asia, it finally occurred to me that I would be well served with a WiFi-enabled SD card in my Canon D100; Imagine! The wonderful convenience of having to never remove the SD card again, simply uploading pictures through the ether as I return from another adventure.

The beginning, middle, and end of all my problems.

Having been convinced of this glorious future, I convinced my buddy Lee to get one for via on Amazon and deliver it to me when he came to visit. I could barely contain my excitement when I finally got the SD card of my dreams.

However, actually setting it up turned out to be a lesson in frustration. It seems that despite the Eye-fi being marketed as an on-the-go device, wifi networks with splash pages are not supported. It even says so on their customer support page. This is certainly a problem when a huge majority of public places use splash screen like this:

And hotels would often have pages like this:

Basically, any page that forces you to login or click a button before giving you access will NOT work with the eye-fi cards.

Being frustrated won’t help, however; Afterall, my own home wifi uses a similar setup and right now I was about to admit I spent $60 on a glorified SD card unless I came up with a way to bypass this issue.

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China – Huangshan (黄山) Part 2

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To start from the beginning of the trip, Click here

Once we were at the top, we found the mountain to ourselves; To our delight. we discovered that since Christmas is not a widely practiced holiday, Winter is by-and-large considered a low season. Lee (Our ever helpful tour guide) told us that we were saving almost a third of the cost compared to if we were to visit during the summer.

After a 30 minute hike from the cable car, we arrived at the most famous of the ten pines of Huangshan, Ying Ke Pine (迎客松).

Looks like the pine is welcoming visitors!
Looks like the pine is welcoming visitors!

Our tour guide told us that this is a common location for foreign VIPs to take pictures while in Huangshan, so of course, we had to observe tradition:

We're friends!
Look! We’re friends!

We continued on for a few more hours, climbing up to Beginning-to-believe Peak and marveled at our luck, as the clear weather afforded us amazing views of the entire range and plains below.

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China – Huangshan (黄山) Part 1

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Back in December, I had the amazing opportunity to travel with my wife and our friend Senai to the famed 黄山 (Yellow Mountain). We had planned to make this one of our must-see trips while staying in China, due to its relative proximity to Shanghai, as well as being close to Hongcun (宏村), another beautiful UNESCO heritage site in the Anhui region.

Rocky granite as far as the eye can see

There were a number of options getting from Shanghai to Huangshan; A 6 hour bus ride, an overnight sleeper, and a daily flight. We choose the sleeper since none of us have ever tried it, and the price was quite reasonable (~$40 per person)

Senai, looking contemplative as the train rolls through China's countryside.
Senai, looking contemplative as the train rolls through China’s countryside.

The sleeper turned out to be an excellent option, as it was a very comfortable way to travel for the price. We arrived in Huangshan city in the next morning, ready for adventure.

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