Magical in its simplicity.

* * *

source: The Form Group

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)

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.”

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?

This is very exciting news. While Apple’s iPhone OS and Google’s Android OS have been fiercly battling for the top-dog spot in the mobile OS market, Intel and Maemo have struggled to be noticed at all. Which is kind of sad, because I consider both of these platforms superior to the two major players (Nicolas already described some of Maemo 5.0′s features on the N900).

With this merger, these two currently minor players promise to become a serious competitor instead of fighting for scraps left over by Apple or Google. After all, Nokia is still the largest manufacturer of mobile handsets – it owns almost 40% of the smartphones market vs 17% for Apple according to Gartner – , and anybody watching the Linux crowd is no doubt aware of  Intel’s  immense contributions to the Linux kernel in the past few years.

I just hope they release a usable SDK to application developers A.S.A.P.  I wouldn’t want MeeGo to suffer the same fate as Maemo did:  a superior platform alone won’t sell many phones if only a handful of apps (~ 164 at the time of this writing) are available for it. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem though. Unlike Android, which has a custom Java-based virtual machine for running applications, both Moblin and Maemo currently use toolkits already well-known within the open-source community, GTK and QT (MeeGo will only support QT, however). The learning curve for new developers shouldn’t be that high.

Let’s just pray that Nokia and Intel will expedite this merger so that we won’t have to wait too long for the first handsets. Nokia had Maemo 6.0 planned for 2010-11, but I think it is safe to assume 6.0 will be dropped in favor of MeeGo.  Early 2011 would be great, but  I guess I won’t get around buying a Nexus One until then…

iPhone + laser keyboard + wireless mouse = a perfect mobile desktop !

Ok, the iPhone definitely seems too small to work correctly, and the laser keyboard is really not the best typing device ever … but I really like the idea Plus, the technical work is pretty impressive …

Maybe someday …

via

1.) Spending a (wonderful) night at the airport

2.) 10 useful tools and tips to help you (better) work remotely!

3.) All-In-One Electronic Card (travel light and green!)

4.) Achieving full mobility with Google voice: reach me wherever I am!

5.) esPRESSivo. What else?

6.) Do you speak RFID?

7.) Spotify launches its mobile version

8.) Turn you mobile phone into a secured Wifi hotspot for your laptop!

9.) Nimbuzz : the killer VoIP app for mobile phones

10.) Portable Map Projector Concept

Here are some other popular articles of 2009 you may also like to (re) read:

• 50 Reasons for You to Choose a Digital Nomad Way of Life
• Nokia N900 – mobile worker’s weapon of choice [by Kerolic]
• In a bubble of serenity: indulge yourself with a moment of relaxation
• Cheap VoIP telephony using Sipdroid
• Time management: the big challenge for freelance workers
• Achieving full mobility with Google voice: reach me wherever I am!
• Create your own digital business card: it is free, “green”, unlimited and mobile
• Mobilis in mobili* (my home in a container)
• Social media: keep in touch with your on-line community while on the move!
• Access your home PC/Mac from anywhere in the World
• Turn you mobile phone into a secured Wifi hotspot for your laptop!

“Marmite is a British institution, a mud-colored, yeast-based gloop that you either spread on your toast or use as a cooking ingredient. It’s got a real love-it-or-loathe-it reputation–rather like working from home. My friends who work in offices are divided on the subject. “Poor you,” some of them sigh when they discover that I spend the majority of my working day–that’s 8.30am until around 6pm or so–like Macaulay whatsisname, Home. A. Lone. “You jammy bugger,” say the others, who see my status as a telecommuter through envious, green-tinted glasses, envisaging my days wafting round in a peignoir, eating violet creams and doing as little as possible. The truth is somewhere between the two–although, for the record, I would like to state categorically that I loathe and detest violet creams.

An estimated 40% of the working population in the U.S. spends at least some of their time telecommuting. (A nonsense word that, for some strange reason, makes me think of James T. Kirk but in reality is a complete non-phrase. The daily commute is what happens between kissing your other half goodbye at the front door and swiping your security pass at the office gate. For me, it’s rubbing the sleep from my eyes, turfing the dog out of the back door for his morning ablutions, and switching on the kettle, before I settle down at my desk and go through my e-mails. And the FAIL blog.) While 50 million folks in this country have experience working from home, there are just 2.5 million of us who currently do it on a day-to-day basis–although a 2005 report on MediaBistro claimed that 9 million individuals have, at one time or other, stayed at home, on their own, doing their work. On their own.

Telecommuting is good for the bottom line of businesses. It saves money on staffing, not to mention office space–one firm that makes home office spaces suggests that housing just one employee in an office costs firms $13,000 per annum. And then there’s the benefit to the environment. According to the American Electronics Association, if every U.S. worker who could telecommute did so for 1.6 days a week, then 1.35 billion gallons of gasoline would be saved, preventing the release of 26 billion pounds of CO2 into the air. And as for us home workers, well, I get tax back on anything I buy for my work–including one-third of all utility bills, office equipment and pajamas. Just kidding about the PJs. But you get the idea.

At times, working from home can be a lonely job. And yeah, sometimes it does feel like that. There are moments when I miss the camaraderie of colleagues, the water-cooler moments, the in-jokes, rolling their eyeballs at the office dunces (and hero-worshipping their more capable team members, lest you think my attitude is too negative) and that great, much-maligned feature of physical offices: the after-work piss-up. But, whether we like it or not, working from home is here to stay. Just ask Charles Handy, who reckons that three factors–globalization, demographics, and technology–are going to cause a revolution in working practices.

I’m lucky. I love the freedom that working from home affords me. I started freelancing after two-and-a-half years in offices and almost doubled my salary in the first year. Then I moved abroad and spent almost four years in a foreign bureau before returning to the U.K. and, bar the odd stint as a permanent freelancer on newspapers and magazines, have spent the past seven years in my own office (sometimes the sofa, sometimes my bed, but for the past year, at a desk in my front room. Here it is. Nice, isn’t it?)

I get to choose what I stick up on the wall (which is not painted a fetching shade of cubicle-jockey gray), what I listen to, when I take my lunch break–and, most important, when I work. Sometimes I get up very early, other days I wander downstairs and plug in when it suits me, although I know my rhythm well enough to realize that, after about 7pm, my brain ain’t what it should be. If I can’t get inspired, I break off for an hour and go for a run with the dog. Sometimes I gossip on the phone with my friends. I can get admin or chores done during office hours, go to the bank, break off for a slice of buttered toast and Marmite (yep, I’m in the Love It category) or just while away half an hour on YouTube.

Starting from today, I’m going to be writing a column for Fast Company about the highs and lows of working from home. It will touch on a whole heap of subjects, from the serious stuff like using the best software and systems to keep the admin side of your work from bogging you down, as well as sneaky little cheats to keep your I.T. costs down. And then there’s the really serious stuff, such as:

What to wear when you’re pounding the keyboard chez toiI say power nap, you say siesta, he says skiving offUsing TV zapping to increase your concentrationThe call of the refrigeratorWrestling with the IKEA flat-pack printer trolleyThe distraction of the firewall-free internetKids say the funniest things (when you’re on deadline)Hello, is that me in I.T.?

Thanks to the glory of the comment system on the Internet, a columnist is only as good as her readers. What is sauce for me may not necessarily be sauce for any of you who have their own home offices. So, my fellow telecommuters, come to the party and tell us what you think of the work-from-home gig. It’s just me for the moment, but anyone’s welcome to pull up a La-Z boy and join in the fun–either via the comments, or on Twitter.”

***

Fast Company

Today, Spotify mobile is finally made available for Symbian devices (Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung smartphones). Just as with the iPhone and Google Androïd’s platforms, Spotify mobile allows you to stream any of its nearly 4 million tracks over WiFi or 3G and syncs playlists for playback while disconnected. Bare though in mind that Spotify Mobile is exclusively available to Spotify Premium members in the UK, Sweden, Spain, France and Norway (a US launch is expected soon).

And if you can’t wait to enjoy from music streaming on your mobile, you can always use and enjoy (I do) Mobbler,  Last.fm‘s  radio player and scrobbler for Symbian smartphones. Mobbler allows you to listen to your Last.fm radio stations and to scrobble tracks played using the standard music player. Magic.

You can download the application directly on your mobile from m.spotify.com

Enjoy the music!

***

Does my phone use Symbian? You can view the entire list of supported Symbian phones to find out.

Want to know why “Mobbler Is Officially The 2nd Greatest S60 Application”? Read this

More info on Spotify for Symbian OS

New-York City, John F. Kennedy International Airport, February 10th 2017. 9.00pm - “Attention to all passengers of the KLM flight KL0644: Due to the current bad weather conditions over the Atlantic your flight to Amsterdam Schiphol has been delayed to further notice. We expect the next flight to take-off tomorrow morning at 8.00am. KLM thanks you for your understanding and wishes you a pleasant night in John F. Kennedy International Airport.”

Such an announcement in 2009 would trigger a wave of panic and distress among travellers waiting for their flight, and a comment like “KLM [...] wishes you a pleasant night in John F. Kennedy International Airport” would be  more than inappropriate considering the context.

Thanks God we’re in 2017 and Airports waiting lounge don’t look like what they looked in 2009.
For the past 10 years, engineers have been working on projects of small individual resting rooms which could provide travellers, moments of quiet sleep and rest from the city without wasting their time searching for a hotel. Such projects, like SLEEPBOX to name the most significant, have started to emerge a few years ago in places like Airports, Railroad stations, Expocentres, Accommodation facilities and even in Public and shopping centers.

Thanks to those revolutionary infrastructures, any person now has an opportunity to spend the night safely and cheaply in case of emergency, or when they have to spend a few hours waiting for their flight or train with their luggage. Most of those resting rooms provide their users with a basic service: a soft  2×0.6 m bed equipped with automatic change of bed linen system,  a ventilation system, a built-in LCD TV screen, WiFi access, electric plugs with built in adaptors and a system that darkens all the windows of this pod to give its user a minimum intimacy. And it is possible to use the service from 15 minutes to several hours.

Just like those public restrooms we could find in many developed countries at the end of the last decade, those resting pods are fully automated. After the clients exit his room, automatic change of bed linen starts and quartz lamps turns green to report that the pod is clean and free for use. Payment can be made on a shared terminal, which provides the client with a disposable electronic key or access key sent to his smartphone.

Sleeping the night over in one of those rooms has turned, for most passengers, to be more convenient and cheaper than a regular hotel room. Since the majority of pods are located near boarding gates, passenger can wait until the very last moment to comfortably board their flight. An unforgettable night before an unforgettable flight on board one of KLM’s brand new WB-1010 “Spruce Whale”.

I can tell now that I don’t fear any more to book this 8am morning flight since I can spend the night on site.

***

SLEEPBOX
Area: 3.75 m2
architects: Goryainov A., Krymov M.
Design: 2009 – Arch Group

***

Too bad we’re only in 2009? Maybe, but at least you can tell one day your kids or grandchildren that once in your live you ended-up sleeping on a bench like a homeless.

Still need some info to spend a pleasant night in your favorite airport? Check The Guide to Sleeping in Airports, The worst, and best, airports to sleep in