SkyMall Monday: Portable Laptop Desk

by Mike Barish on

Business travel can get lonely. You’re either traveling alone or with colleagues whose company you barely enjoy in the office let alone in a Bennigan’s in whatever podunk town in which your company’s satellite office is located. All too often, business travelers spend their free time in their hotel rooms working, eating overpriced-yet-mediocre hotel hamburgers and watching a movie that they would never have considered viewing had they been at home. In those painfully boring, sleepless hours in far-flung towns, even the most stoic of road warriors has turned to every man’s time-filler of choice: internet porn. By day three of any business trip, you’re ready to disregard the fact that your company’s IT department is disgustingly aware of every keystroke you make on your incredibly heavy and sadly outdated company-issued laptop and steer your browser towards whatever perverse videos will help you while away the excruciating hours that stand between you and your return home. Here at SkyMall Monday, we understand your pain. And the SkyMall catalog stands at the ready to help you alleviate that tension in a comfortable and dignified manner. Rather than troll the internet for your favorite fetish while sitting at a cramped desk in your depressing hotel room, now you can recline in your (hopefully clean) bed and conduct some business of your own using the Portable Laptop Desk.This isn’t the first time we’ve tackled portable desks on SkyMall Monday. However, that previous model strapped onto your neck, which isn’t convenient for when you are watching videos of people using strap-ons. When it’s time to seduce yourself on a business trip, you need to be able to relax. Being able to recline while keeping the ten pounds of hot metal and plastic that is your antiquated work computer away from your genitals is just the relief you need to turn boredom into arousal.

Think that laying down with your work computer violates the teachings of the scripture company handbook? Believe that computers should only be used at immobile desks? Prudes like you need to read the SkyMall product description:

Fully adjustable to maximize comfort while in use, the laptop table helps to relieve neck and back pain, and allows for the correct placement of your arms for easy use of your computer… It also eliminates the heat on legs or lap.

When spending special time alone, correct placement of your arms is key. No longer singeing your inner thighs is simply icing on the cake.

Business trips are tedious and draining. Being away from your friends, family and normal routine can make anyone crazy. Rather than let that frustration boil inside you, release the pressure with the Portable Laptop Desk. Just be sure to clean off the keyboard.


Check out all of the previous SkyMall Monday posts HERE.

Plane Answers: Pilot asks, “Is there anyone on board with internet access?”

by Kent Wien on

It just might surprise you to know that when sitting on the ground, waiting out a line of thunderstorms, we don’t have access to depictions of real-time weather updates. We can fire up the radar and look ahead for 40 or so miles, but there’s just no way to know if a re-route offered by ATC is going to keep us out of the weather or create more problems further into our flight.

Cessna 172s have real-time weather capability with a $50 subscription to XM Radio’s WX Satellite Weather, but so far, no domestic U.S. airline has incorporated that technology in their airplanes. We checked out Virgin America’s cockpit a few months back and found that even they don’t have this capability built in yet, though they did at least have GoGo inflight wi-fi which could potentially help.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when passengers aboard a Continental Airlines flight were asked if they had a laptop with internet access while on the ground waiting for weather to pass.

In an apparently savvy move, the captain borrowed Evan Gotlib’s wi-fi card equipped Macbook Tuesday evening to try to come up with a routing out of Newark that would get around ATC flow-control restrictions.

Evan writes on his blog:


There were two or three different lines of storms in the west and south that were affecting all Newark outbound air traffic. There is no mechanism on a 737-500 to look at weather. The radar they have only works in flight, and even then it can’t show what’s happening outside of about 50 miles. We were 50th-yes 50th-in line for takeoff and the captain said that at that point air traffic control really does not care anymore. Their number one priority is international flights, then they get to domestic. So he wanted to see if he could figure out a new route around the storms that he could propose to air traffic control. Neat.

So they used my laptop to go to this site: http://www.intellicast.com. The best part was that neither of them knew how to drive a Mac, let alone Safari, so I surfed for them. It was cool to listen to them talk about different flight plans. This went on for a few minutes and then they got on with air traffic control and someone found a new route. I’m not sure if it was us or air traffic control, but I’d like to think it was us.

I was really hoping for a pair of wings or an honorary junior captain’s badge or something but all I got was an extra cookie from the flight attendant. That was pretty cool.

Oh, one more thing. I’ll never be able to help when the “is there a doctor on board” announcement comes over the PA system. But when the “is there someone with wi-fi who knows how to use the internet on board” announcement is made, I’m there.

Nice job on the captain’s part for thinking outside the box. Of course, a few of us have discovered the power of an iPhone in this situation, but whether it’s a connected laptop or an iPhone, nothing beats the coverage and situational awareness that XM’s service provides. It needs to be built-in and accessible by every pilot, in every airplane that an airline flies to be effective.

I’m hoping airlines will recognize the benefits of connecting cockpits to a reliable weather source. But we could even take it further. Imagine inflight sensors that could transmit more accurate and detailed turbulence levels from aircraft all over the country that could be displayed on our map and updated in real-time. Oh, but I dream.

Until then, if you hear us ask to borrow your wi-fi connected Mac while number 50 in line on the ground, don’t all rush to the cockpit at once.

Do you have a question about something related to the pointy end of an airplane? Ask Kent and maybe he’ll use it for the next Plane Answers. Check out his other blog, Cockpit Chronicles and travel along with him at work.

On Southwest, the internet’s no longer free

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Starting tomorrow, Southwest Airlines is going to start charging for internet access on four of its planes. The fees will range from $2 to $12, based on how long you’re in the sky and how you connect. For the past few months, access has been free, but the lure of additional revenue must have been hard to resist.

Yep, another extra fee to add to the list …

Both Delta Airlines and American Airlines are planning to add internet access to more than 300 planes each, but they’re still in the early stages. The fee to connect can reach $12.95, though less on shorter flights or when you use a handheld device instead of a laptop. I tested out Delta’s offer on a flight from New York to Atlanta and had great results. If you’re looking to recapture a few hours of your professional life, the price is well worth it.

For once, there’s a fee well worth paying.

Building your own travel proof laptop — a step by step guide

by Grant Martin on

The x60s is my fourth generation travel laptop and at this point, I have my laptop system down. Far have I traveled around the world with my Thinkpads, starting with my 240 in Vietnam and evolving up to an x20, x30, x40 and finally an x60.

Fact of the matter is, everyone can use a cheap, lightweight throwaway laptop these days. As long as it runs an internet browser, plays MP3’s and you can upload photos to it, it’s a great alternative to taking your $1600 Macbook into the Amazon and dropping it into piranah infested waters.

Is the solution really in a new fangled netbook though? It’s true that you can get a fancy Acer, Dell or IBM netbook straight off the shelf for $250. New shiny objects can be a blessing and a curse though — many of those units are difficult to modify, some of them are complex and all of them are going to be eye catching to potential thieves.

Instead let Gadling take you through the steps of putting together a good, reliable computer for very little cost, using recycled parts and software from the web and saving you a bundle. With a few tweaks you can make it modular and interchangeble, so that if you drop it in the water or run it over with your rental car (this has happened to me) you can still probably save your data. And If you play your cards right, you can put the entire package together for $150 or so.
Hardware

The CPU: $25 – $125

First, you’re going to need to invest on a laptop on which your foundation will be built. They call these “barebones” systems in the computer world, with only the bare essentials to get your system operating.

You’ll want something small, lightweight, not too complicated and cheap. This can be any brand, but you want it to have at least Pentium III processor over 400MHz or so. Under that point it gets difficult to run an operating system, web browser and Java or Flash (ie, Youtube.) My personal choice is among the IBM X series of notebooks, with the X20 as the lowest vintage machine you want to invest in. With enough RAM you might be able to get away with a 240X as well, but it’ll be close — and there are other problems with that unit as well, so let’s skip it.

Asus and Acer both are fairly easy-to-work-with brands as well, you just need to keep your minimal requirements, sizes and weights in mind. Older Dells, on the other hand, are frequently difficult to disassemble, so you may want avoid them. Apples suffer from the same problem.

You can invest in a laptop in any state of repair that you choose. Starting on ebay, you can pick out systems with no hard drive, memory or battery and a la carte your accessories as you see fit. In a way, this is an advantage because now you have more control over your project.

Expect to spend anywhere from $25 – $150 on the CPU. As an example, two barebones X20 laptops just finished up on ebay for $25 plus $10 shipping.

Memory: $10

You’ll want at least 128MB of memory in your machine to run Firefox, and since it’s so inexpensive, get at least 256MB. Just make sure you get the right type of memory (pc100, pc133, pc2700 etc) or else it won’t fit in your laptop. Go to the product page for your laptop’s manufacturer when you start building to see what variety you want.

Hard Drive: $40 – $100

The hard drive is where you’ll store all of your data from the trip, so you want to make this as robust as possible. Using an off the shelf 20GB IDE is inexpensive and fast, but it’s also got the highest probability of failure because it’s got moving parts. Instead, consider two options:

Solid State Drives (SSDs) consume lower energy and are sturdier against shock and damage. The technology is still fairly new though, so to get an IDE SSD it can cost over $100. But they’re a great alternative to a moving drive, and my last two notebooks have run swimmingly with them.

Alternatively, consider using the combination of an IDE converter and a Compact Flash (CF) or Secure Digital (SD) card. You can get an IDE conveter with an 8GB SD drive combo on ebay for less than $40 shipped. Think 8GB is too small for you? Is it really? If you’re just using the computer to surf the web, write up a few documents and store some photos, you should be able to get away with 8GB or even 2GB without much strain. Heck, if necessary, you can bring another 8GB USB thumb drive with you.

The best part about using a flash card as you hard drive is that the data is portable. If you drop your laptop at the airport, kick it across the street or run over it with your scooter, chances are that the SD or CF card is in tact. Pick that card out, stick it in your change pocket and bring it to a cyber cafe and you’ve got all of your data back. Or, buy another identical laptop off of ebay for $50, put the hard drive in and forget anything happened.

Afraid you’ll drop your notebook in the water? Try getting a waterproof SD card.

WiFi capability: $20

First, check to make sure if your laptop has internal WiFi built in. If it doesn’t, see if it has the capability. Many units come with a WiFi slot and no card installed. You can get a new one on ebay for $10. If you don’t have internal wireless capabilities, you can get a PCMCIA wireless card for about $20 (search “PCMCIA wireless” on ebay.)

Battery: $20 – $40

Depending on your model, a new battery on ebay will run you around $30. Don’t get a new battery from your local Best Buy or direct from the manufacturer. They’ll just rip you off.

Software

Installing a proper operating system and software can be tricky. Effectively there are three routes you can take:

Buy it: $80 upward
At the very least, you need an operating system like Windows 2000 or Windows XP to run on your notebook. You can buy clean versions of these on ebay for around $80 or you could just

Dowload it
Which is basically stealing. So I’ll let you follow up on that if you want to.

Use Open Source Software
Operating systems like Ubuntu and Fedora have made expensive operating systems a thing of the past. You just have to come to terms with your fear and give them a try. Fact of the matter is, system slike Ubuntu are so well engineered and logical that they work just like Windows — you just click on the appropriate icons and run your programs — so the learning curve is fairly shallow. The installation process, furthermore, is just as easy. Which brings us to:

Installing your operating system
All of the above operating systems and example notebooks support a full install by just dropping a CD into the drive and booting. The problem is, none of the above notebooks have CD-ROM drives. You’ll need to find a friend with an external USB CD-ROM drive, buy one yourself or get crafty to get figure out how to install without the hardware. The latter is doable, but chances are that if you can figure out how to do that you don’t need to be reading this article.

Aside from the operating system, you’ll want to install the basics to keep your computer running, Firefox, Macromedia Flash and Open Office (a free alternative to MS Office) as well as some basic drivers depending on your CPU.

Summary

So what have we got?

$50 — CPU
$10 — Memory
$50 — Hard Drive
$20 — Wireless
$30 — Battery
$0 — Software

$160 — Total. That’s still $90 less than most netbooks on the market. Along the way? You’ve put together your own computer, ensured that you’ve got the best value for your dollar and finished an amazing project. Pat yourself on the back, you just created your own modular travel notebook.

Chaos as immigration computers crash at Taiwan airport

by Josh Lew on

A computer crash at Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport caused a major headache on Monday. The computer system used by the National Immigration Agency (NIA) failed, forcing immigration agents to get back to basics, taking down people’s information by hand. Needless to say, lines became quite long, and frustrated expressions of passengers were commonplace. Add to that the fact that yesterday was an exceptionally busy travel day as people headed home after their holiday vacations.

Approximately 20,000 people left the country during the computer blackout. NIA had to wait until the system came back online to see if anyone had entered or exited the country illegally. The agency recently terminated its contract with the company that performed computer maintenance tasks. A new company began working on the system only last week.

According to airport officials, no one missed an outgoing flight as a result of the system’s crash. However, the incident comes of the heels of a baggage mishaps a day earlier. People on a dozen flights were forced to leave without their checked baggage after a conveyor belt broke down for almost two hours.

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