Solar-powered computer for $35 or less

by Sean McLachlan on

Developers in India have announced an iPad clone that costs only $35. Capable of basic web surfing, video conferencing, and word processing and using a Linux operating system, the cut-rate computer is targeted at India’s student population.

India has been undergoing an information technology boom for more than a decade now, and the most popular degree for students is in computer science.

Since the computer is still a prototype, it’s not clear what the cost will be when it finally goes on the market. The target is $35, but that may go as low as $10 with a few tweaks and the help of mass production.

The Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science, who developed the device, announced that international investors are interested in producing it for commercial distribution.

This could make the perfect travel computer–cheap enough that it doesn’t matter if it gets broken or stolen, and no need for a power converter and voltage regulator. Could this be the essential travel tool of the future? Tell us what you think in the comments section.


Photo of an iPad is courtesy Glenn Fleishman via Wikimedia Commons.

Pico Iyer: The trip that changed my life

by Pico Iyer on

Bangkok these days seems about as alien and exotic as its sister City of Angels across the ocean. Hollywood cop films are shot there, New York bars open their second branches on its back-streets and for many a kid just out of college in Seattle, the Khao San Road is as natural a first stop as once the Left Bank was, or North Beach. But in 1983, Thailand still seemed the far side of the universe. And to a boy of 26 who was spending his life in a little room in Rockefeller Center in New York, writing about places he’d never seen, it was an instant initiation into mystery and night-time and the limits of all the things he was so sure he knew.

Men came up to me outside the airport — and it was a dumpy airport then, worthy of an almost forgotten country — brandishing pictures of women in bikinis and rooms whose beds seemed to move like the heavens (now those pictures would be much more graphic — and available to a certain kind of visitor before he’d left home, on the Net). There was a smell of jasmine — of spices and gasoline and all of them mixed together — as I headed off in the dusk and clambered into a minivan for the long, long ride into the city. I’d never really set foot in a five-star hotel before when I deposited my luggage with a towering Sikh doorman at the Oriental Hotel and set off into the dark.

The neon was flashing evilly, and irresistibly then. A young woman was stringing her thin arms around me and cooing things in the universal language of desire (for what I represented, if not for me). A Filipino man in the basement of a four-star hotel was singing Grateful Dead ditties on request. No one had heard of Patpong then, or told me that the most alluring women in the street were men.The sound all night — I couldn’t sleep — of slamming doors and soft feet pattering down the (no-star) corridors. Calls at 1 a.m. from strangers with their coos again, sure that I was the only man for them. The tang of mint in every dish, and tall, cool glasses of watermelon juice that I couldn’t have described the day (the life) before in midtown Manhattan.

A Canadian took me under his wing, a wise old hand at 23, and already well on his way to becoming a part of the nether world that was the real world in the Bangkok night, ready to claim every unmoored newcomer. A train was about to set off for the cool spaces of the north. At night, when the tuk-tuk drivers revved up along the jampacked lanes, the smell of diesel and perfume intermingled, I found myself in alleyways where old-style neon blinked and relayed the promises of Suzy Wong.

It wasn’t Thailand, of course, that was beckoning me, but all the force of the things I couldn’t make out. Night was day and late September was summer and men were women who became men again at dawn. The characters around me on the signs (the streets) were strange, and the language so tonal I couldn’t tell a player from a prayer. There were mirrors everywhere, in bars, hotels and what they gave me back to me was a figure I couldn’t recognize. I hadn’t realized ’til that day that you travel to stumble into the unvisited corners of yourself.

I hadn’t realized ’til that day that you travel to stumble into the unvisited corners of yourself.

In Chiang Mai, two days later, I was walking — puffing, really — up a hill, through a landscape from the Vietnam I’d seen only on telecasts, and sitting in a circle in a village, opium in the air. The villagers were dancing, by the light of a candle, and I couldn’t tell if it was the dog they had just eaten or the drugs. Displacement in time had become displacement in space: nights in a hut, a German’s pupils all red, and then dawn with the sound of a rooster, and the preparations of a village anywhere nearby.

The next thing I knew I was in Burma — the rickety grandfather of the England I’d grown up in (a colonial son, of course, becomes master of the house as soon as his father moves on), sailing on Inle Lake, among opium warlords and guerrillas, wandering, dazed, among the 3000 temples of Pagan. A few days later I was in Hong Kong, on expenses (I hadn’t known the meaning of the word in grad school the year before), being entertained at a banquet by the Chinese billionaire who’d built Macao. The next day I was in Narita Airport near Tokyo, waiting for a plane back, and, stumbling into a temple in the little town near the terminal, coming upon an October scene — bright blue skies and a chill of autumn in the air — that told me that I should return to Japan, as I did, for life, it seems.

I’d traveled around India as a teenager, witnessing with a foreigner’s bewilderment a country that was meant to be, and clearly was not, my own. I’d spent two summers traipsing around Europe writing Let’s Go guidebooks, convinced that I was a doctoral student in foreignness and movement. I liked to think myself a man of the world in those days, the prerogative of innocence being that it cannot see to the limits of its knowledge. When young, we know we know it all, and never imagine that the stock of knowledge will only diminish, trickle out, as the years go on.

But Thailand, and all that followed, silenced me. I sat in a colleague’s house in an October downpour, the torrential rains turning the little soi into a running river (people rolling their trousers up to their knees to get across), and tapped out an article on, of all things, Vita Sackville-West, the sometime lover of Virginia Woolf. I’d taken the artifacts of Bloomsbury into the hills with me, and read them among the animists and the opium. Perhaps I was trying to hang onto the life I knew, measuring out the fluent cadences of Sissinghurst here in the wilderness off Sukhumvit.

A bowing secretary came into the room with a pot of tea (my colleague was in Vietnam). The garden in front of me was turning into a misty, tumultuous scene worthy of Maugham. The house my colleague lived in, the life he’d made for himself (a veteran of the war) was more spacious and extravagant than anything his or my bosses could contemplate in Westchester.

What you don’t know, will never know, will always be more involving than what you can explain: it is the fundamental principle of love and of religion.

I came back, after a fashion, from that trip, but it derailed me for good, and showed me the lure of the dark that lay outside the boxed room in which I wrote. What you don’t know, will never know, will always be more involving than what you can explain: it is the fundamental principle of love and of religion. And love and religion were some of what I thought about as I sat in the Time-Life library, paging through any report I could find of Burma, of Thailand, of Laos even, and Cambodia, where I’d never been. In the midst of the traffic outside my eleventh-floor apartment came the sound of something else, more haunting and fragile: a pipe across the fields, a new day in a very ancient place.

Romantic it sounds now, in the recollection. But it wasn’t a romance, because I went back to check on it six months later, and then returned again five months after that, and then took a six-month leave of absence to get thoroughly lost in Asia. I should have known, as I disappeared into Eighth Street, in search of Thai food, the pictures of the pagodas and jungles I’d seen enlarged and set on my office wall, that this was not mere flirtation. I hadn’t come back at all, and never would. The trips that change our lives are the ones where nothing specific happens, and one can remember, 27 years later, every day from September 23rd to October 23rd, 1983.

Pico Iyer has visited Thailand more than 40 times since his initial trip, but something of the mystery is still there for him. His most recent book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

[Photos: Flickr | Elisa*; Travlinman43; Irene2005]

Kindle tips for travelers

by Meg Nesterov on


The iPad may be the current darling of techie travelers but some of us are waiting for the first generation kinks to be worked out and a decrease in price (or a sudden cash windfall) before taking the plunge. While still a “monotasker” compared to a tablet or laptop computer, Amazon’s Kindle is still a great tool to carry books on the road with a lightweight design and almost limitless capacity to store whatever travel guidebooks, beach reads, or other reading materials you desire. Combined with the easy ability to search within a book for a place name or keyword, a much lower profile than carrying a tourist map, and limited but free web browser, Kindle is a good choice for travelers. Here are a few other ideas beyond ebooks for your next trip:

  1. Google Maps are a fantastic resource when traveling, but lose their usefulness once you are without internet access or unwilling to pay for data roaming. Whether you download individual maps of city neighborhoods or get all fancy with creating your own Google Map of destinations and recommendations, having a “hard copy” on your Kindle is handy when you are offline and want to quickly locate that vintage store in Berlin a friend told you about.
  2. Many free PDF travel guides are available online including In Your Pocket and Arrival Guides. While not as extensive as a guidebook, they provide a few suggestions for where to stay, eat, shop, and what to do in many cities and often cover less-traveled destinations such as Eastern Europe. Lonely Planet has also introduced Pick and Mix chapters for purchase, perfect for when you only need a chapter of a guidebook rather than a whole country book.
  3. Create your own travel guide by saving magazine articles, blog posts, and web pages for your destination with content more recent, relevant and varied than any guidebook. Tote along Gadling’s guide to Paris’ Japanese quarter, The New York Times‘ 36 Hours in Copenhagen, or the Wikitravel page for Mumbai.

How to save documents for your Kindle: most Mac browsers have a Print to PDF feature and PDFs are easily read on the Kindle. PC users can download a program such as PDFCreator to save PDFs. If you have another format including HTML or a Word document (good if you are copying and pasting text), you can email to Amazon and they will convert and send back. Then you can add documents via the USB cord to your Kindle, simply drag and drop into the Kindle documents folder. While many files don’t have the same functionality as ebook format, you can zoom in and often search many of the file types.

While many of these documents can simply be printed, printer access is often scarce on the road and this method saves a lot on paper. Any other travel tips for Kindle? Leave ’em in the comments below.

Mother attempts to flush newborn baby down airplane toilet

by Scott Carmichael on

A 25-year-old medical student has been arrested in Northern India after attempting to flush her newborn baby down the toilet.

The woman was flying home from Turkmenistan when she gave birth in the bathroom. Upon landing, she left the plane, leaving the baby in the toilet.

The entire toilet had to be removed, and surgeons at a local hospital used a saw to remove the newborn from it. According to doctors, the baby is in critical condition.

The mother was arrested in the airport and has been transferred to a local hospital where she was reunited with her baby.

Once doctors declare her fit, they’ll investigate her motives, but it appears she had been studying medicine in Belarus and did not want to return home with a baby.

[Image from Flickr/dpstyles]

Travel Recommendations for The Office

by Andrew Evans on


Back in the olden days, long before the Internet was born, there was this thing called a travel agent–typically semi-self-aware, middle-aged ladies who helped you pick out a nice vacation destination, find a hotel that was “so you” and then book your plane tickets printed on carbon paper, folded and then stuffed into fancy airline covers. The whole process was about inside relationships, consumerist trust and catering to personal tastes. Sadly, travel agents went out of style along with high-top shoes and dual tape decks, or rather, we all became travel agents and the ones who got paid to do it lost their jobs.

As an empowered, self-proclaimed Internet travel agent, I’m offering my services gratis to the folks that need it the most: those overworked, underpaid, Vitamin-D deficient fun bunch of NBC‘s The Office, If they’re like most Americans out there, the employees of Dunder-Mifflin get only 10-15 days of vacation a year and should be using every bit of it (along with a few sick days) to get the hell out of Scranton, PA. Assuming the medicinal and therapeutic properties of travel, and summoning the travel agents’ lost art of matching personality to destination, I offer the following recommendations:

Michael Scott spent Christmas at a Sandals in Jamaica with girlfriend/boss Jan Levinson. So wrong. This was clearly a blatant case of cheesy product placement and failed to take Michael to that place where he belongs, which is on a safari in Tanzania’s Serengeti. Yes, the boss man would be just as happy at some wildlife park in Florida, but for the full range of Michael antics, you’d need him to actually be in Africa, mimicking African accents and getting a royal kick out of all the massive animals. Fast-forward to the zebra carpet on his office floor, Masai shields hanging on his wall and his new moniker “Chief.”Jim Halpert disappeared himself to Australia to avoid Pam’s pending marriage to another man. OK, we get it–Australia is the farthest place from Pennsylvania and he was nursing a broken heart, but in reality, uh, he would have been nursing some hellish jet lag. We love Australia, but it’s not a weekend getaway, or even a one-week getaway. Methinks Jim needs to go to Dublin, Ireland. Not only because he would appreciate Guinness and look handsome in tweed, but that plucky Irish spirit might counter his nervous nature. Also, as one of the better-paid employees in The Office, Jim might actually be able to afford super-expensive Dublin.

Pamela Beesley doesn’t seem that well-traveled, bizarrely. She’s camped in the Poconos and did a brief stint in artsy New York City but this new wife and mother could definitely expand her horizons. Paris for a week of art and luxury should do the trick. We recommend splurging at Hotel Fouquet’s Barrière on the Champs-Elysées (for the spa) and spending her days floating from one art museum to the next. Take your mom or a friend. Let Jim stay home and take care of the baby.

Dwight Schrute already lives in his own little world, nevertheless, he reveals a penchant for large, open spaces. Russia is such a place. Also, Russians love the martial arts and beets. In fact, in Russia there are entire collective farms that grow nothing but beets, so Dobra Pozhalovat Comrade Schrute. No matter that the new Russia is fiercely capitalist and worships pop culture, Dwight will find his own tribe and come back with some sound ideas on organizational behavior.

Phyllis Vance is a classy woman attached to a rich refrigerator-selling husband to pay for all of her audacious tastes. The Moroccan Christmas party she threw in Season 5 reveals a girlish interest in some fabled, exotic Orient, but she also needs dependable electricity and a lot of good restaurants. Hence my verdict of Istanbul. Turkey’s largest city is also one of the greatest eating cities in the world–an explosion of foreign sights and culinary delights. Also, Phyllis loves to wear shawls, of which there are many to choose from among Istanbul’s crazy bazaars. (Bob, you should stay here.)

Ryan Howard needs a double kick in the pants for his affectation and superiority complex. Yeah, he already took time off to “travel” in Thailand but anyone who’s been to Thailand knows that much of the country is just a playground for the sort of entitled backpacker that is Ryan. That’s why we’re sending short, frail, pale Ryan to sunny, sandy Kuwait and not on vacation, but Kuwait as in, “you’re in the army now, kid.” He never makes it into Iraq (imagine Ryan with war stories), but learns to answer every sentence with, “Sir”.

Kelly Kapoor is Indian-American, yes, but those of who’ve actually been to India knows she would absolutely hate it there. Kelly is a serious girl who loves anything pink and struggles with her shopaholic nature. And where is the best shopping in the whole wide world? Buenos Aires, baby, B.A. We recommend Kelly stay at this boutique hotel in Palermo Soho, surrounded by a bunch of unique clothing and jewelry stores. Also, I’m thinking Kelly is liking the Argentine gelato (and men).

Andy Bernard is the ultimate frat boy who just can’t (or won’t) grow out of it. This Ivy League manboy surely has a few pairs of well-ironed Bermuda shorts, folded nicely in his summer clothes box, and he will need them for his trip to Bermuda. In the end, all of his bros will flake on him so he’ll have to go alone, but the pink beaches, sophisticated rum drinks, and yacht culture will suit him just fine.

Angela Martin is a woman who needs to chill out, big time. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the number of uptight career women who’ve found their bliss in Tuscany, so Angela, Italy it is. Please take all that saved-up leave and get lost on some one-lane highway between Florence and Siena, then get found by your future Italian boyfriend. Please come back with flowing skirts and open collars, wearing your hair down and with a new-found penchant for Chianti. Grazie Mille.

Kevin Malone needs to raise hell in New Orleans, obviously. The man has a funky party side that just can’t break free in boring Scranton. As a musician, he’ll dig the jazz and as a fat man, he’ll dig the beignets, po’ boys, muffaletta, and gumbo. He will likely return bearing gifts of hot sauce for all. Go Kevin.

Meredith Palmer is a difficult client for a travel agent to please. The woman is boozy, so the Scotland whiskey tour (with designated driver) seems appropriate, however, this 6-night Carnival Cruise from Charleston, South Carolina would be perfect–if it includes drinks (Meredith, please wear sunblock). And yet, the redhead in Supplier Relations also loves going topless, so the Côte d’Azur would be just perfect.

Creed Bratton has already spent a lot of time in China and even speaks Chinese. He’s also a total whack job and kind of creepy and a schemer. Hmmm . . really old plus Chinese plus funky and scheming equals Macau. Creed will quickly lose track of the days as he gambles his way to oblivion. Once he makes his shady millions, he can go into hiding in the nearby Philipines and never come back, because really, is Creed even necessary?

Stanley Hudson is a no-nonsense kind of guy with predictable, easy-living tastes. We recommend St. Croix, in the US Virgin Islands, where time moves slowly and the fruity drinks are plentiful. Stanley never has to set foot outside his resort, nor will he ever let the Caribbean go past his knees.

Toby Flenderson ran off to his escapist dreamland of Costa Rica but honestly, his skin just isn’t right for it. Really Toby, consider Canada. You’ll never get sunburnt, the people are as nice and respectable as your human-resource mind believes all mankind should be, and it’s so, so safe. I say get your daughter hooked on Anne of Green Gables and then surprise her with a trip to Prince Edward Island.

Oscar Martinez already took a three-month vacation to Europe with his boyfriend Gil in Season 3. Now that he’s single, he should really be more adventurous. You’d think Amsterdam or Sydney’s Mardi Gras but I’m gonna go out on a limb and recommend Tennessee’s Dollywood. What’s better for a gay, Mexican-American accountant than a theme park memorializing an iconic diva, right in the heart of the Smokey Mountains? Dollywood has a huge gay following and yet is so quaint and respectably Appalachian. He’ll love it.

Erin Hannon Somebody in the office doesn’t have a passport and we all know it’s Erin. Coy, naïve, and a little odd, Erin still just doesn’t see the need for a passport. Sending Erin to San Diego, California would be about as far as she could go, plus there are lots of brave Navy guys to show her around. Incidentally, I think she would really love the zoo.

Darryl Philbin represents the blue collar element on the show and yet he’s got way better tastes than most of the office. Urban, hip, and cooler than cool, Daryl would be happiest in Berlin. Germany’s capital-under-construction is the perfect mix of blue collar power, good beats, and good times.