Cars.com’s David Thomas speculates that the iPad could prove to be a serious problem for automakers that charge a ransom for rear entertainment systems.

The base iPad, Thomas notes, costs far less than most DVD options offered by automakers. Ford charges $1,995 for a dual-headrest-mounted DVD system in its Flex crossover. In the Acura MDX, its single-screen system, with three wireless headsets and a 9-inch screen, costs $1,900. At $500 a pop, giving two kids their own iPads would cost far less than what the automakers charge for an ICE system.

The Cars.com article mentions some of the advantages of ICE, including being weather-tested to work from -5 to 160 degrees F (-20 to 71 C), and being far less prone to breakage.

Alternatively, if you’re planning a long and unconfortable flight, discover how your iPad can Make Air Travel Considerably Less Terrible.

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Source: Slashdot

Cars.com's David Thomas speculates that [0]the iPad could
prove to be a serious problem for automakers that charge a ransom for
rear entertainment systems. The base iPad, Thomas notes, costs far less
than most DVD options offered by automakers. Ford charges $1,995 for a
[1]dual-headrest-mounted DVD system in its Flex crossover. In the Acura
MDX, its [2] single-screen system, with three wireless headsets and a
9-inch screen, costs $1,900. At $500 a pop, giving two kids their own
iPads would cost far less than what the automakers charge for an ICE
system. The Cars.com article mentions some of the advantages of ICE,
including being weather-tested to work from -5 to 160 degrees F (-20 to
71 C), and being far less prone to breakage.

Most of the time, we don’t really need to own THE newest and coolest gadget that has been released to feel happy and complete; just convincing ourselves that we don’t actually need it is often well enough to make us feel satisfied anyway.

So if after reading this review you still think “what is the purpose of this?”, then there’s probably no reason for you to get an iPad.

Smile, you just saved $500 (sorry, $499)

The Finnish company of Tampere (and now Espoo) produced at one time or another paper products, car and bicycle tires, communications cables, televisions  and other consumer electronics, personal computers, electricity generation machinery, robotics, capacitors, military communications and equipment (such as the SANLA M/90 device and the M61 gas mask for the Finnish Army), plastics, aluminium, chemicals and footwear. Yes, you read correctly, footwear!

To make the (boot) story short, the Nokian Footwear story began in 1898, when a group of Finnish business men decided to establish the company Suomen Gummitehdas Oy (Finnish Rubber Works Ltd) in Helsinki. After operating for a few years, the factory began to produce high quality rubber galoshes, which competed successfully against Russian imports.

As production grew, the factory was moved from Helsinki to Nokia. Soon the rubber company began to highlight the name Nokia, communicating Finnishness, in its marketing. Demand for the company’s products grew strongly and the rubber boot became a utility item for the whole nation! And this has been lasting until today!

If you’re a reaaal dyed in the whool Nokia fan, then you won’t resist the temptation of buying your very own pair of Nokia(n) boots and carry your beloved brand wherever you go!

“Nokia, shoe fitting people”

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Source: Nokian boot wear and Wikipedia

When I’m working from home, I have a dual-monitor setup for my PC. Very useful on busy days or for keeping an eye on RSS feeds while watching a movie. The truth is, it makes me feel like being some kind of a successful trader who monitors the financial markets… “buy, buy” or “Oh my God! Sell, sell!!”. Really??!
No. But some fellows do that, I’m almost sure.

On the road I take my MSI Wind netbook, and while multiple desktops are handy, I sometimes wish I had a second screen for that thing, too – all the more so as netbooks have such a tiny screen that you get your eyes burnt after 30 minutes of browsing the Internet. Yeah, it’d though be pretty weird to set up a 13-inch LED-backlit secondary screen at a coffee shop but anything to get the job done, right? Right.

Made by MEDL Technologies, it’s called simply “The Panel” and it’s exactly what it says it is: a secondary screen that uses USB as its display link. There are smaller solutions, of course, but this is the biggest standalone monitor I’ve seen that just runs off USB. It’s also battery-powered, and will run for five hours, which… is good, I guess, but it isn’t clear whether it’s charged by the USB or not. If not… why not?

It weighs just over 2 pounds, and at a 1280×800 resolution, it’s just big enough for HD stuff. One really handy use I can think of is if you have kids, you just hook this sucker up, put a few cartoons into a playlist, and put the screen facing away from you so the kids can watch while you work. Handy for airports and vacations.

Unfortunately it’s not a touchscreen. That would have been a really nice feature, but I guess we’ll have to wait for “The Touch Panel.”

I guess we all somehow experience the same feelings when we move for good to a new place we don’t know, a place we don’t speak the language and are not familiar yet with the culture.  A place we feel like a foreigner, though we now leave there. In her post Alison explains how to turn this, at first challenging, change into a wonderful adventure.

I’d like to dedicate this post to my friend Tanya, a wonderful Mexican expat who lives in Paris and meets with the same issues as Alison did when she started her new life in Brussels.

Hold on and keep faith amiga!

When I started blogging, I wasn’t trying to make money on-line or become famous. In fact, I never expected anyone other than my friends and family would read it. But now, I’m pretty sure that blogging saved my expat life.

I moved to Belgium five years ago as a trailing spouse. My husband and I decided together that we wanted to try living in Europe. The opportunity came up sooner than we expected, when his company offered to move us to Brussels. Legalities being what they are in Belgium, I was unable to get a work-permit as the trailing spouse, so my days were filled with getting our new life settled.

Back then, blogging wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now, and I didn’t know much about it, but I got tired of writing the same things and answering the same questions in a dozen e-mails. I had learned basic web design and HTML in school so I decided to start a website to share stories and photos with my friends and family back home.

My blog posts were basically extended letters. I didn’t think much about grammar or structure. My posts didn’t have a topic other than what I had been up to since the last time I wrote. I never expected anyone that didn’t know me would bother much with my blog.

In those first few months, I wrote only about happy things – new places we travelled to, new discoveries we made, etc.

The shiny newness of expat life wore off pretty quickly though. The reality was I was mired in mountains of Belgian bureaucracy and red-tape. We had no support from my husband’s company; we didn’t speak the language; we knew no one and we lived in a small community with limited public transportation. I spent most of my days feeling isolated and depressed and wondering what the hell I had done.

I didn’t want to burden my family and friends with my woes. Honestly, I felt like a failure for being depressed in the first place. I mean, I was living in Europe after all. Something that is a dream for most people was my reality. Except most days it felt more like a nightmare.

I turned to the blogosphere for help. Although there weren’t many expat blogs based in Belgium at that time, I found some blogs written by expat women in other countries who were writing about the exact feelings I was having. Suddenly I didn’t feel so alone and it gave me the courage to write about what I was really experiencing.

It was scary to put my stress, struggles and depression out there, but instead of scorn for my whining, I started to get email and comments from other women in my situation. Some were already in Belgium, some were planning an expat move and all of them had similar fears and worries as me.

I was contacted by an expat news website in Belgium and asked to do a weekly column about my experiences in Belgium. Through that column, even more trailing spouses contacted me and encouraged me to keep writing and sharing.

It didn’t happen overnight, but gradually things got better. Because of my blog, I met people, I had an outlet for my stress and worry and I had a sense of purpose. Blogging and the support of my readers gave me the courage to pursue my career as a photographer.

Five years later, my blog and my life have changed dramatically. First of all, we have both moved out of isolation – me to the centre of Brussels and my blog to its own domain.

CheeseWeb is now much less focused on my day to day life and more on expat life in general. It covers a range of topics about life and travel in Belgium. I have guest posters on different topics from art to technology and I write about many different travel destinations around Europe.

Blogging opened so many doors for me in the early months of my expat life and continues to today. I honestly believe that blogging saved my expat life.

About the author:

Alison Cornford-Matheson is a garden and travel lifestyle photographer based in Brussels.  Her website, CheeseWeb has grown into a resource for expats in Belgium as well as a guide for interesting places to visit, eat and shop, but first and foremost it remains  personal journal of one expat wife, making her way in a foreign land.

My Paper Heroes is a blog which offers for download (and for free…) a variety of very detailed DIY paper heroes models already printed on plain A4 paper. All you need is a color printer, a pair of scissors, a little bit of glue and some patience to create your very own collection of paper heroes/pop culture figures.

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So far, more than 30 models are available! Well enough to keep kids (or yourself) busy during Easter holidays…

This is a sample of how a model looks like once printed in A4 format (the IronMan model fits on seven A4 paper pages)

And if you feel like “scissoring” a rabbit instead, you might have some fun with Cutnejo!

Some time ago I wrote about this issue many of us unfortunately already faced once or regularly face when traveling by plane: the scarce number of electric plugs in airports.

As you might imagine, most airports were built long before we were all carrying around all kinds of electronic devices, and as such, finding a place to charge them up can turn today into a real challenge. I expect many of us have snooped around for the outlets the airport cleaners use or that operate vending machines (that’s bad!) so we can plug in and charge up our laptop or cellphone during a stopover. Some of us may eventually have ended-up charging their device in the bathroom. But that’s another story I guess…

So, unless airports management decide to undertake a costly reorganization of their infrastructure or implement a wireless power solution – which won’t be made available tomorrow to the many – , the problem may last some time.

The question is, “shall we cry on our cruel fate and accept that?”. I think we shall not!

Designer Ryan Klinger has identified this big flaw and has created the Empower Kinetic Rocking Chair which harnesses your body movements to provide power for your devices. A small box under the seat stores the generated power in a battery, which can then transfer into your devices using either a regular plug or USB. LED indicators on the box tell you how much of a charge the battery is holding.
So simple you wonder why nobody came up with this idea earlier.

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The Empower Kinetic Rocking Chair is a finalist in this year’s Greener Gadgets Design Competition. Let’s hope it will win and start blooming everywhere we need to plug.

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Greener Gadgets Design Competition, via Inhabitat.com

Hartmut Esslinger, one early superstar of high-tech design, was responsible for the design of Apple devices in the 80s. He then developed together with Steve Jobs a prototype of a touchscreen phone whose main function was to make possible sending digital bank checks though a phone wire. This quite revolutionnary gizmo – remember that we’re then in 1983 – was part of the Snow White design language applied to the IIc and the original Mac.

Was Apple already trying to raise the buzz?

The pleasure and part of the fantasy of Up in the Air [...], is that it wafts us through a very different aerospace. This is a realm where all the officials treat “guests” with pearly-teethed gratitude, where queues are non-existent, and the seats recline just so. Up, up and away: to a retro-tinged zone free from the gravity and tedium that earth-bound drones have to endure.” – The Telegraph

If just like me you consider yourself a “World citizen”, not because you disapprove traditional geopolitical divisions derived from national citizenship (wikipedia) but because you’re actually travelling it, then you should go and watch this movie: Up in the Air.

I could of course make a thorough review of this movie, as they’re are many ways to do it – I guess everyone of us who has watched this movie has found something in it that reminds him or her of something individually experimented in their real life, should it be the rituals of their corporate life, this feeling of being at home while flying at 30,000 feet, the complexity of human relationships, or their quest for the most optimized trip through an airport. As for myself, I watched with delight the scene of the airport security control.

But that was not really the purpose of my post, and I’d rather leave this task to people who do that for their living (and do it good) and who’ll probably better explain why you should consider taking the time this evening or this week-end to go to your nearest theater to discover what’s in this mind-blowing movie.

And if today you’re too lazy to read, then just watch the trailer of Up in the Air. Within two minutes you’ll have a better idea of what I meant.