I can say with certainty that this is the best roller bag ever made. Why this particular bit of genius hasn’t caught on, I can’t imagine. Possibly because, like those who ride the accursed Segway, riders of this contraption would give off a certain “punch me” vibe. And yet, one can’t entirely suppress the feeling of wanting to switch places with them, if only for a moment. Shameful, but understandable.

The Trolley Scooter from Samsonite und Micro Mobility is the perfect tool for bloggers like myself who cumulates hundred of miles (and that’s no lie…) wandering and running in Airports and at trade shows all year long with packs full of gear.
To be perfectly honest, I’d rather scoot than spend the day sweating my shirt running between airport gates. All the more so as I’ll probably look like the coolest traveller Airport security guys will have ever seen!

No price is given and I can’t find it on Micro Mobility’s site, but I would ballpark its cost at around 100€ — $120 or thereabouts.

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

I’m a happy man. I love my digital nomad life.

I consider myself very lucky to be able to choose every day from where I want to work, how I want to organize my time, but most of all to rediscover the pleasure to ride my bike or drive a car in an empty street. Rush hours? Would you mind reminding me what that is?

Traffic congestions has literally poisoned my life for years. Beside the disgusting smell of exhausts fumes that soaked my clothes every day (I ride a scooter), stress was everywhere, all the time: stress of traffic congestion, stress of the always possible accident I could have with my two-wheels-hell-engine, stress of not being able to find a place to park,  stress of running late, stress of stressed people ridding their car… before landing in an office full of stressed people who got stressed in the same traffic jams. Damn. That was a bad era of BAD stress.

Then things went a little bit better. I did not have to ride any more to my office every day. The telecommuting arrangement I obtained from my management, allowed me then to have a 5 days stress-break every two weeks. Not too bad. However the issue was that I was supposed to telecommute 1,000 miles away from my office, and getting there was no piece of cake. Imagine a 1,000 miles journey starting after a day of work, split between metro, train, bus, airplane, bus, train again and taxi. All of that in 8 hours and following a VERY tight schedule (I only had a 10 minutes window to jump from my plane, grab a bus to arrive on time at the train station to get the last train to my final destination… If I had luck – this means no strikes in Paris or no bad ass air traffic controller in Vienna – I could expect to get home the next day at 2.00am… before getting back on-line at 9.00am.

Wow. Wouldn’t you call that “love” if all of that was for someone? Charlie and Craig Reid, you’re amateurs.

Anyway. After following this “diet” for a couple of month, I started to experience a general weariness. I was tired, easily irritable, and had the feeling that whatever I would try to do, I wouldn’t be able to achieve it. I was not experiencing a confidence crisis. I was just overwhelmed by the stressful idea of my upcoming journeys.

I personally believe in all the positive effects of those Zen-relaxation-hypnosis like programs. Relaxation is perhaps the single most important key to health and well-being. It is the antidote to stress which is known to contribute to the development of many diseases and ruins the pleasure to leave our lives. When we relax, our body has an opportunity to unwind. I just thought it would be too bad not to carry something all the time with me that could sooth my mind in the middle of my stressful journey.

Then I came up by chance with “Recoding your mind”, a very effective 20 minutes podcast  I downloaded on fluentself.com. I first tried it at home and it worked so fine with me that I’m now carrying it everywhere in my mobile phone in case of stress-emergency. You can find plenty of downloadable podcasts featuring relaxation exercises on the Internet, like here for instance. Personally, I found what I was looking for in terms of relaxation programs with the following selection of MP3.

free relaxation on the go (downloadable mp3):

• For a short commuting: 8 minutes relaxation program

• For a longer commuting: 20 minutes relaxation program (Recoding your Mind by Havi Brooks)

• Relaxing at work or during a flight: 60 minutes of soothing relaxation (Hearing Solar Winds by David Hykes on preview on amazon.com – a special thanks to Kerolic for making me discover this great artist). Hykes is a composer fascinated by the deep connection between music and human spirituality. He’s also a pioneer in bringing certain extended vocal techniques to western music. The amazing sounds on this excellent recording are all produced by the human voice, and Hykes’ compositions bring these sounds together into a coherent and engaging whole.

I just recommend that you browse the Internet for similar podcasts, download those you find, and then make your selection on the go, keeping those which work the best with you. Each of us is different, and our preferences (tone of voice, background music, length of the file, topic, etc) vary from one person to another.

Namaste   नमस्ते

***

Why you should take time to relax

• gives the heart a rest by slowing the heart rate
• reduces blood pressure
• slows the rate of breathing, which reduces the need for oxygen
• increases blood flow to the muscles
• decreases muscle tension

As a result of relaxation, many people experience –

• more energy
• better sleep
• enhanced immunity
• increased concentration
• better problem-solving abilities
• greater efficiency
• smoother emotions — less anger, crying, anxiety, frustration
• less headaches and pain

What are the differences between them? How much do they cost? And what can you do with that connection? Kevin Hall at Device.com talked to reps from all three services, putting together all the information in a handy table.

Hit the jump for the info, and the answer to the biggest question about airline Wi-Fi: Can it do VoIP?

The answer is here

***

Source: dvice.com

So I’m now here standing in front of the luggage carousel, waiting for my suitcase together with the other 450 passengers of my flight…

Despite the fact that we have accepted nowadays the need to traverse shoeless, beltless and beverageless through airport security, most of us still can’t stave off baggage carousel gridlock by bringing along anything other than a black roller bag. I’m among the guilty who assumes that my beat-up Samsonite stands out due to a few strands of green yarn I’ve affixed to the handle.

But all this is about to change with MyDotDrops, an innovative concept to customize your luggage. Using the snap-on microdots that come with the bags, you can send a message to TSA and your fellow travellers that says you love, among other things, America, martinis or aliens.

Customization goes like that:

1st, you choose the base color of your case:

2nd, you start your own design (unless you are already happy with one of the designs proposed on the website):

3rd, you save your design and check out (or only save it if you want to rework your design, ad other designs or check out later):

here are some designs I did this afternoon (quite addictive to do your own 15×11 pixels drawings!):

As if that’s not enough, each purchase is accompanied by a DIY toy by French company Artoyz. With several styles of suitcases, an exclusive toy and lots and lots of dots, you can really make a personal statement.

Let’s just hope that the guy who loads and unloads your luggage won’t like it as much as you do…

* * *

links: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/05/05/pixels-go-mad-the-celebration-of-pixel-art/

I don’t want to buy a Mydotdrops suitcase, but I want to know more on how to easily identify my suitcase in an airport baggage carousel: http://www.ehow.com/how_2143398_identify-suitcase-airport-baggage-carousel.html

“man, I need my oil change!”

]]> http://www.52ndwest.com/news/picture-of-the-week/picture-of-the-week-the-secret-life-of-geeki-toys-man-i-need-an-oil-change/feed/ 1 http://www.52ndwest.com/gizmos/mobility/nimbuzz-the-killer-voip-app-for-mobile-phones/ http://www.52ndwest.com/gizmos/mobility/nimbuzz-the-killer-voip-app-for-mobile-phones/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 08:00:21 +0000 Nicolas http://montcalm.wordpress.com/?p=268 If you’re like me and split most of your “online time” between your smartphone, your computer’s chat client and your Facebook/LinkedIn page, Nimbuzz may be for you. It’ll make all those communications smoother.

My Facebook friends sometimes leave me wall messages that I take forever to respond to when I’m running between Paris and Vienna. Now they can call me or chat with me directly via a widget embedded on my Facebook profile page. The Nimbuzz widget detects presence and shows if I’m online. If I’m offline, Nimbuzz also includes a “Buzz” feature to alert me that people are trying to reach me.

The head spins with the potential for abuse of this well-intentioned feature, though. Calling me from overseas from a PC? Nimbuzz can help. Sending international SMS? No problem, you can use Nimbuzz. Theoretically, you could use some combination of Meebo/ebuddy/Trillian, Skype, Fring and your phone’s native IM/text messaging to do all that, but Nimbuzz packages it well and makes it simple! Simplicity comes from the unified interface across devices; I don’t have to import IM contacts into Skype and vice versa, for example.

While lots of companies are working on some combination of voice and IM features, Nimbuzz’s differentiation is its support for a wide variety of mobile handsets (currently at 1000 devices with native support for Symbian, Java and Windows Mobile) and good integration with several other social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Windows Live, Google Talk, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ and many other more.

I downloaded the Nimbuzz social networking widget here, which made it brain-dead easy to add a Facebook application to my profile page. I was then able to send messages and files from Facebook to the mobile phone Nimbuzz client installed on my Nokia.

Call quality using Skype or Nimbuzz’ online widget really went beyond my expectations (as I am a former disappointed fring user): the sound is just as clear and crispy as if I were calling from Skype on a desktop.

Nimbuzz’s last to date release features everything and the kitchen sink: It provides PC to PC/mobile calling, IM aggregation across several communities, group chat and conferencing, free voicemail, file sharing, a Facebook/LinkedIn application, a social networking and email call/chat widget, a WAP site, a Symbian/Windows mobile application as well as a desktop program. It also goes without saying that the company is working on an iPhone-specific version.

Now the mobile version of Nimbuzz convinced me, I’ll probably head for the PC version to benefit from the same “one login, one contact list, all accounts” feature.

Who has never been discouraged to purchase a 30mns Internet credit for €15 from the only local provider available at an airport lounge or at a hotel?

As for my part, I’ve experienced both situations during one of the 140 Paris-Vienna flights I took for the past two years (17,5 tonnes of CO₂ … I know… I’m so ashamed). But I’ve never been so desperate to subscribe to an additional mobile contract for 12 or 24 month and get one of those “cool” broadband Internet access USB dongles you connect to your PC or Mac and which puts the world at your finger tips while on the move…

The main reason? Those mobile broadband packages cost (between €29 and €39/month). And since I already had a very convenient mobile contract with my mobile phone provider which features, among others, unlimited download allowance*, it was not worth having to pay for exactly the same thing (500MB) under a different shaped device (a USB dongle).

To that point, I just needed to figure out a way to properly “spend” those 500MB I was given every month. Most symbian devices, such as Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and Motorola, come with a software full of nice features to install on your laptop. One of those features (supposedly) allows you to connect your laptop to your mobile through a cable or a Bluetooth connection. But in most cases the result does not meet with the expectation of surfing the web at a high speed (in the best case you managed to properly configure your phone…). Surfing the web, in that case, is slow and painful.

JoikuSpot Light is a free symbian software that turns any mobile phone with a wifi connection, to a 3G WLAN HotSpot. You can thus connect your laptop or any other WLAN device to the web from anywhere using your mobile phone and enjoy 3G speed surfing!

In terms of download and upload speed, you can manage to pick at a very decent average of 850 kbps in downloads (I eventually managed to reach 1259 kbps!) and 85 kbps in uploads (peeked at 98 kbps during my speed tests on speedtest.net), which is not bad at all considering the fact that a regular home broadband Internet takes you at 2572 kbps (download) and 391 kbps (upload). So with JoikuSpot you’ll be able to listen to streaming music on Spotify, Deezer or Jiwa and enjoy from the best of youtube and dailymotion while on the move!

I’ve attached below some screen captures of the speed tests done with my laptop connected to my mobile ISP (BOUYGUES TELECOM) through the JoikuSpot mobile application and of the same test done with my laptop connected to my home Internet connection (Neuf Cegetel).

Once you’ll have this free software installed on your mobile, you won’t think twice when you’ll have to spend the week-end visiting your parents-in-law who live in a remote Internet-free location in the country… you’ll still be able, to some extend, to hide in the bathroom and make your pain public on twitter or facebook…

*which is actually not: phone service providers say “unlimited” for a 500MB download allowance… literally “unlimited”, as an adjective, means that something is not restricted or limited or seems to have no boundaries; infinite. Maybe this will be unlimited for M. Jones who only uses the Push email feature of his phone or his happy to surf the web for hours and burn his eyes on his tiny phone screen… but not for me. One more thing: Many “broadband-hungry” applications, such as “Internet Radio” will only be able to run on a wifi hotspot (mobile providers just want to make sure that you won’t be able to use more than 30MB, at most, of your 500MB).

In his study “Predicts 2009: Enterprise Infrastructures Look to Provide ‘Anywhere’ Access” Gartner analysts predict that by 2010, 90% of global wireless operators will cease to offer unlimited mobile data plans. This is mainly linked to the fact that networks are already hitting high capacity with increased customer demand, which affects the network availability and speed that users get on 3G. Data services on PCs and phones are already slowing down, and carriers cannot regularly provide the speeds that they advertise. Also, through 2010, 20% of 3G operators will be capacity-constrained, which will limit wireless network capability.