The glamor days of great meals on airplanes, no luggage limits, and easy boarding at airports are long gone. Those Pan Am dreams have disappeared into a maze of airline money-saving efforts and increasingly personal TSA security checks.
Ever since the TSA rolled out its revealing body scanners, we've been in the midst of a contentious privacy versus security debate. … Read more
If you enjoy the ritual of sitting down at your departure gate to kill some time with your iPad while waiting for your flight to board, you might want to avoid flying out of LaGuardia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, or Toronto airports in the coming months.
That's because airport restaurateur OTG will be deploying thousands of Apple tablets at the airports over the next year-and-a-half, and your iPad chillin' time could be taken up by your less tech-savvy travel companions who will likely have all kinds of questions for you about operating the blasted contraptions.… Read more
A cheery, two-dimensional lady will soon be arriving in New York City area airports to make the agony of modern air travel a little easier -- if she doesn't totally creep you out, that is.
The Port Authority of New York yesterday unveiled new customer service avatars at Newark and La Guardia airports. For now, the quarter-million-dollar units are essentially woman-shaped, motion-activated looping video billboards that dispense the same prerecorded but helpful information about shuttle buses and restrooms to anyone who walks by. Port Authority representatives said they hope future versions of the technology will be more interactive and capable of holding conversations.… Read more
Apple has released a small patch to fix a problem a number of iMac users have been experiencing with network connectivity on their systems after waking from sleep. Apparently, after the latest OS X 10.7.3 update, people with iMac systems from late 2009 or newer found that the system wouldn't connect to their preferred wireless network, requiring the user to manually select the network from the Wi-Fi menu.
While not a serious bug, it was a problem that caused a bit of frustration with users. MacFixIt readers wrote in asking about this issue, and while some have … Read more
Leaked from 404 Podcast 995:
Apple Mac OS X 'Mountain Lion' takes more bites out of iOS. Get started with iMessage for OS X. Low Latency No. 10: Good artists copy, great artists steal. Apple PR maintains a blacklist of journalists that it refuses to talk to. Bathroom break video : Live television texting-while-walking fail.If you're traveling, your mom (or any loved one, really) is probably going to want to know the moment you have arrived safely, and let's be honest, you don't always remember to tell her.
A new Web site, Hash tag Mom (#mom), will automatically alert her for you by sending her a text, or calling her, once you check in to an airport on Foursquare.
Setup is simple.
Visit Hashtagmom.com and enter your mom's phone number (or a loved one's), as well as select whether you want a text message or call to be … Read more
Even an airline geek like me wouldn't call an airport "homey."
"Exciting" is a word that I would use and I may even say "comfortable" depending on the airport, but I won't deny that an airport is the opposite of home. Either you're on way to somewhere else or you still have a flight between you and your own bed.
Check in at Helsinki's airport, though, and you'll find a new lounge that is trying to bridge that gap. Now open in Vantaa Airport's Terminal 2, the Almost@home Lounge goes beyond far beyond the utilitarian furniture and simple snacks that you'd find in a standard airline lounge in the United States. … Read more
Having the Airport connection on your Mac suddenly stop working can be a frustrating experience. While such drop-outs can usually be attributed to an improper Wi-Fi configuration or an incompatibility with a router, sometimes it can happen if there are faults in the Wi-Fi hardware itself.
Generally software configuration problems result in dropped connections, the Wi-Fi services constantly attempting to join other networks, or having connection timeouts when you select a network to join. In the case of a hardware fault, while in some instances you might have trouble maintaining a Wi-Fi signal, you might also see the Wi-Fi connection … Read more
Recently I touched on several approaches for addressing Wi-Fi issues in OS X, stemming from configuration problems to Wi-Fi signal quality for addressing dropouts.
These methods are good for situations when even though the Wi-Fi signal drops, the radio still attempts to find a connection. But there may be some instances when the radio stops searching even though a Wi-Fi network is available. Often this occurs when the system wakes from sleep, but sometimes it can happen when the system changes networks.
If this happens, then one option is to remove the airport configuration file, which contains all the information … Read more
For the most part Wi-Fi technology works quite well to keep your Mac, iPhone, and other devices connected; however, there are times when certain devices or setups may be plagued with Wi-Fi dropouts.
Recently I covered a number of approaches to fixing Wi-Fi dropout problems, though these only covered the configuration options in the router and the computer itself. Besides the system configuration, an cause for Wi-Fi drop-outs can also be poor Wi-Fi signal quality.
The quality for any analog signal, be it electrical, optical, or radio, can be determined by comparing the desired signal level to the background noise … Read more
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CNET's Galaxy S4 giveaway spectacular!
CNET's publishing another supercharged e-book. "Mastering the Galaxy S4" is almost here, so we're celebrating with a huge S4-related giveaway.
