Cramming everything you need for a vacation or business trip into a carry-on friendly suitcase is the best way to avoid checked baggage fees. It’s a refined skill that bag maker Briggs & Riley has just made a little easier with its Baseline luggage featuring a clever compression mechanism to ensure your bag always fits in an overhead bin. More »
The Sunshine Aquarium—located atop an entertainment complex in the Ikebukuro district of Tokyo—features a unique ring-shaped see-through tank perched seven-and-a-half feet over guests that usually lets them watch the facility’s seal population swim laps. More »
Border crossings are usually designed to suck your soul while you wait in endless lines for a customs agent to approve or cancel your travel plans. But if your journeys have you crossing between Georgia and Armenia in the near future, you’ll be treated to this amazing architectural wonder at the border. More »
Vacations are supposed to be a chance to travel to an exotic locale, enjoy a week of rest and relaxation, and leave your worries behind. But if your destination can only be reached by plane, your trip ends up being wrapped in hours of stress while you’re flying to and from your vacation spot. More »
Do you deal with visiting family members during the holidays that more than overstay their welcome? This year try putting them up in one of these Podtime tubes, they’ll quickly get the message that maybe they should have booked a hotel instead. More »
A “tasteful” ad campaign by a Korean food manufacturer has Chinese commuters holding onto Nong Shim instant cup ramen whether they’re hungry or not.
Traveling with a guitar is always a pain in the butt. Anything as oddly shaped as a guitar is a pain to haul around with you. If only you could fold your guitar between gigs. Well, with this particular instrument, you can.
These folding travel guitars come from California-based company Voyage-Air. While not as compact as the Ministar guitar, these ones look like traditional guitars once assembled. They are designed to fold forward at the base of the neck and that makes them much easier to carry around. They come in acoustic and electric versions and yes they include their own specially designed carrying cases.
Of course, this kind of guitar isn’t cheap. Voyage- Air Guitars range from $399(USD) for an entry-level model to $1,700(USD) for the Premier edition. A foldable solid-body electric sells for about $750(USD). Not cheap, but if portability is important to you, it will be well worth it.
[via Laughing Squid via Like Cool]
Qantas just upped the ante for its Australian counterparts Jetstar and Virgin in the airline tablet wars. Following an earlier trial, the transporter plans to hand out free iPads to all of its passengers — not just the high-flyers in business-class, like with Jetstar’s iPads or Virgin’s Galaxy Tabs — on every Boeing 767 aircraft in the fleet. The rollout, which starts in the last quarter of the year, will let those bored in the back seats watch an equally free 200 hours’ worth of QStreaming audio and video. Don’t confuse the gesture with a sudden bout of altruism on Qantas’ part, however. The pound-and-a-half weight of a current iPad sheds the tremendous amount of weight that would normally be needed for a conventional in-flight entertainment system built into the headrest, which on a typical 375-seat 767 could see the iPads pay for themselves within years, if not sooner. The option will give many Aussies something to look forward to for their domestic summer vacations. In the meantime, hop past the break for a Qantas video explaining how QStreaming worked during the original trial run.
Filed under: Tablet PCs, Transportation
Qantas to hand out free iPads to all passengers on Boeing 767s, save fuel and our sanity (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Jul 2012 15:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
If finding the right hotel is a problem for you, Hotels.com has recently launched a new Facebook app that will allow users to view the most frequented places within their network. The Deals Facebook app, as it is called, does this by incorporating social recommendations into the travel booking process. Hotels.com combines its collection of more than 150,000 hotels with your friends’ top destinations to find the perfect place for you to stay. Essentially, the app will show you the top destinations of your friends on Facebook (given that they use the app of course), and it will also allow you to save all your desired destinations into a “Wish List”.
“We at Hotels.com are pioneering a new approach to social recommendation and discovery on the Facebook Platform,” said Nigel Pocklington, CMO, Hotels.com worldwide. “This application and the algorithm behind it, surfaces friends’ popular destinations and matches that with great hotel deals. This creates a powerful social context that will drive travel recommendations and enable users to find their ideal destination.” You can get the app here.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Facebook for Android updated, StumbleUpon rolls out Facebook Timeline app,
Taking a virtual tour of the Amazon or Antarctica? Totally doable with Street View. But some of America’s finest National Parks? Yeah, those have been a long time coming. Today, Google announced the inclusion of five California-based US National Parks in Street View, and for those who haven’t had the opportunity (of a lifetime) to visit, they’re absolutely worth a look. Starting at the top, Redwoods National Park provides a street level look at some of the world’s most mysterious trees, while those looking for even more Treebeard-type characters can point their browser to Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks. Naturally, Yosemite and Joshua Tree (shown above) are included as well, and the 360-degree views Google’s cadre of motorcars managed to capture really do a fairly astounding job at capturing the splendor. The toughest part? Knowing which one to traverse first.
Filed under: GPS
Google brings five California-based US National Parks into Street View originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 14 Jul 2012 09:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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