Hasta La Gadget!

It’s a small miracle that you can open up your laptop and surf the web while soaring through the air in a metal tube some seven miles above the ground, but the experience is inconsistent, and when it works, the connection is often frustratingly sluggish. That’s about to change.

Once focused on undercutting the competition, JetBlue is now best known for its in-flight product: complimentary snacks, 36 channels of free DirecTV and friendly flight attendants. This year, the airline is undergoing a service alteration of sorts. The traditionally all-coach carrier will soon cater to business travelers with a bed-equipped premium cabin, and by the end of next year, all customers will be able to surf the web from 36,000 feet with speeds that rival (or often exceed) what we’re used to on the ground. That new service, powered by ViaSat, is called Fly-Fi, and it’s hitting the skies this November.

We spent a day with JetBlue’s subsidiary, LiveTV, the company responsible for providing in-flight entertainment (IFE) on more than 600 aircraft, including 188 JetBlue planes and some 200 United 737s. If you’ve watched DirecTV while flying either of those airlines, it’s LiveTV that put it there, and soon, the Florida-based firm will be responsible for getting you online, too. Fly-Fi, and its to-be-named United equivalent, will deliver up to 12 Mbps of data — not to the aircraft, but to each and every passenger on board. Join us aboard JetBlue’s first Fly-Fi-equipped Airbus A320 after the break.%Gallery-slideshow90014%

Filed under: Transportation, Wireless, Internet

Comments

Man who catch fly with chopstick, accomplish anything. Man who catch most sushi with chopstick, become ChopsticKing. That idea behind – I mean that’s the idea behind Chopsticking, an Arduino-based board game made by NYU ITP students Christina Carter and Jess Jiyoung Jung. It’s a two-player game where you compete to grab the greatest number of sushi.

Chopsticking consists of two pairs of chopsticks, a board with a circular receptacle and tokens that look like sushi. There’s a metal plate that obscures part of the bin as it rotates, making it harder to fish out the tokens. Before you play the game, you first have to hold the chopsticks in the proper manner – your index finger and thumb must be resting on the upper stick while the lower half of your thumb anchors the lower stick in place. The Chopsticking sticks have sensors that detect if your fingers are in the right areas, so no cheating by using a fork or your fingers.

When the game begins, you pick up sushi tokens as fast as you can, but you also have to dip them in “soy sauce”, which is actually an RFID reader that detects the tags on the sushi. The player is awarded two scores at the end of the time limit. One is for the number of sushi you were able to dip in the sauce while the other is for how well you held the chopsticks.

Christina and Jess showed off Chopsticking at the World Maker Faire in New York City. It must have been a hit-and-miss affair.

[Chopsticking via MAKE]

In an attempt to curb the number of dangerous drivers on New York highways who are distracted by their smartphones, the state is introducing dedicated Texting Zones where motorists can pull off, park, and safely use their mobile devices. But the initiative doesn’t require any new construction since existing rest stops and parking areas along thruways and highways are technically being re-branded as the safe places to pull over and text.

Read more…

The world’s most popular social network, Facebook, has certainly gone beyond what they normally do, as advertising does constitute a sizeable chunk of their revenue these days. Well, this time around, they are sniffing for an alternative source of income, and the folks over at Facebook have decided to introduce Autofill, a mobile payment service that ought to make life easier for its users who happen to have a streak of being a shopaholic within.

Autofill is not some feature that will work in the way which we normally envision it to, for example, when you are typing your name and the full name appears automatically. No sir, Autofill by Facebook intends to make online transactions on mobile devices a whole lot easier and quicker, but there is a catch – the Autofill option can only be accessed via an extremely limited number of Facebook users, with a few selective retailers being made available on its store at the moment. Facebook intends to expand the Autofill option to all Facebook users in due time as long as it becomes more popular. Basically, it is a function that saves your credit or debit card credentials to be linked to your Facebook account for faster verification.

Facebook Hopes Autofill Will Make Online Transactions Faster original content from Ubergizmo.

If you use the PlayStation Network in order to play Final Fantasy XIV, Call of Duty: Black Ops II or possibly sit back and watch some Netflix, then you’re going to be extremely bummed to hear Sony is planning another maintenance for its online service in the near future. How near future? How about September 25. Yep – tomorrow. (more…)

PlayStation Network Maintenance Scheduled For September 25 original content from Ubergizmo.