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Tips For Avoiding Air Travel Delays

December 11th, 2007 by iDunzo

Without questions, air travel delays are out of control. Because there is no denying the need for safety, we must explore other solutions for a problem that will only get worse during the holidays.

First and foremost, DO NOT BLAME THE MESSENGER FOR THE MESSAGE.

What this means is that the airport staff and airline attendants can not change the situation that you’re in.

Trust me, airline attendants, of all people, don’t want to have to be at work any longer than required.

Forget the stories you’ve heard of free upgrades, free flights, free stays in a four star hotel.

Sure it might happen but don’t expect that as soon as your flight is delayed or canceled, the airline will beg your ultimate forgiveness by showering you with consolation prizes.

So, please don’t berate, assault, castigate, rebuke, or otherwise attempt to belittle the gate attendant.

Instead, here are a few tips and resources from around the web that can help ease the pain of modern day air travel, often by preemptively avoiding the situation altogether.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Technology + Travel | 2 Comments »

Laughing Gas Dulls the Pain of a Savage Dentist

December 11th, 2007 by iDunzo

December 11, 1844: Nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, is used as a dental anesthetic for the first time.

English chemist Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, first synthesized nitrous oxide in 1775. Priestley, however, was content with having “discovered an air five or six times as good as common air.”

He did not experiment with inhalation, however, so did nothing toward developing its practical and recreational uses.

Nitrous oxide, along with chloroform and ether, became popular anesthetics. While not sufficiently effective as general anesthetics for the modern operating theater, all were effective enough to become popular in dentistry. Of the three, nitrous oxide is still widely used.

Nitrous oxide is also used as an aerosol-spray propellant, especially in whipped-cream canisters and cooking sprays. Its solubility in fatty compounds allows for up to four times as much whipped cream to be produced as the liquid contained in the can.

Owing to its nontoxicity and relatively easy storage, nitrous oxide is also a popular oxidizer for rocket motors and is used in car racing to boost power.

Outside the commercial world, nitrous oxide is best known for its recreational use as an inhalant for getting high. The resulting euphoria is often accompanied by some pretty loopy behavior, which is where the “laughing gas” moniker comes from.

For every upside there’s a downside, though, and nitrous oxide’s is considerable. It’s a major greenhouse gas and therefore a major contributor to global warming.

Posted in Geekipedia + Technology + Trivia | Comments Off on Laughing Gas Dulls the Pain of a Savage Dentist

JetBlue, Yahoo and RIM Plan FREE In-Flight WiFi

December 7th, 2007 by iDunzo

It seems that JetBlue, Yahoo and Research in Motion plan to offer free, in-flight, WiFi web connections for laptop computers and advanced cell phones. RIM made the announcement yesterday.

The service will apparently allow passengers to access customized Yahoo mail and Yahoo instant messenger services on their laptops or to access corporate e-mails on WiFi enabled BlackBerrys.

According to a spokesperson for RIM the first JetBlue flight offering the service will be on December 11, on Flight 641 from New York to San Francisco.

I hope this proves to be an indicator that RIM is going to start putting WiFi in more and more BlackBerrys – right now the only modern generation Berrys to have it are the BlackBerry 8820, 8320 and 8120.

I think WiFi has now become a smartphone must-have… it should be included on every BlackBerry released from now on.

Too bad I never fly JetBlue. Airlines….are you reading this?

Source: Yahoo News

Posted in Geekery + Technology + Toys & Gadgets + Wireless | Comments Off on JetBlue, Yahoo and RIM Plan FREE In-Flight WiFi

Get And Give The Gift of Open Source

December 7th, 2007 by iDunzo

This Christmas I decided to give a few gifts to people in the open-source community.

I’m making donations to the maintainers of some of my favorite and most widely-used software projects. They’ve earned some payback!

Most of the programs I depend on most, I’ve discovered, are actually not big ones — they’re little things, applications that fill in the gaps between other apps, and that make my work all the easier.

The first big open-source project that gets a little of my Christmas cheer is the PortableApps suite, an incredibly useful bundle of no-install-needed editions of popular open-source programs.

It’s a one-stop shop of sorts for a whole slew of common apps — Firefox, the OpenOffice.org suite, VLC, and 7-Zip — and it can be run either from a removable drive or from a single self-contained directory on a PC.

I’ve pointed a number of friends at it as an easy way to consolidate all of their applications and documents into one place.

If they upgrade to a new machine — or if their PC ever gets borked and they need to recover files from it — they can simply copy the PortableApps directory somewhere else and pick up right where they left off.

It’s funny how many open-source projects of one kind or another you can end up using without even thinking about it.

Not long ago I started using the above-mentioned 7-Zip as my archiving application of choice — not only because it was open-source, but because it actually gave me slightly better compression ratios than WinRAR on certain kinds of files.

I’d originally started to use it provisionally, more as a companion program to WinRAR than a flat-out replacement.

Eventually I disabled WinRAR’s Explorer menu integration; not long after that, I deinstalled WinRAR completely. Any program that gets that much use from me deserves a hand.

Some of my other favorite programs are not open source, but are freeware and get my support just because they’re that good.

The image viewer and converter Irfanview, for instance: I can’t think of any other program I install as unhesitatingly on any computer as this one, and that I get quite as much use out of. Its author definitely gets a donation from me this year, whether there’s source code or not.

What projects, open-source or not — but ones you’ve used regularly — have you donated to?

Posted in Open Source + Software + Technology | 1 Comment »

Attack at Pearl Harbor a Bold, Desperate Gamble

December 7th, 2007 by iDunzo

December 7, 1941: Air raid, Pearl Harbor. The Japanese, concluding that war with the United States is inevitable, attempt to knock out the U.S. Pacific fleet based in the Hawaiian Islands at Pearl Harbor.

Japan knew it could not defeat the Americans in a conventional war, lacking as it did sufficient manpower and raw materials (notably oil) for such a sustained effort.

By destroying the U.S. fleet all at once as war began, the Japanese were gambling that they would be able to complete their Asian conquests before the Americans could recover.

A successful raid, the Japanese believed, would delay America’s entry into the war by months, if not years. Faced with the reality of an unassailable Pacific empire, the Americans might then choose negotiation over fighting.

Minoru Genda, one of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s most innovative officers, was the primary architect of the Pearl Harbor raid. Success, he knew, could only be achieved through total surprise.

Relying on carrier-based dive bombers, fighters and torpedo planes, his targets included not only the ships anchored at Pearl but the nearby airfields and oil storage facilities.

Observing strict radio silence, the Japanese task force put to sea November 26 and steamed undetected to within striking distance of the Hawaiian Islands.

The first wave of attackers left their carriers upon receipt of the signal “Climb Mount Niitake” and were guided in by picking up the signals from a Honolulu radio station.

Early on a Sunday morning, Pearl Harbor was not exactly on combat alert even though the Americans knew — from having broken the Japanese codes — that an attack somewhere was imminent.

They never dreamed an attack would come this far east, however. When a couple of radar operators working a test problem near Pearl reported a huge blip headed their way, they were essentially told to forget about it.

The attack unfolded almost exactly as Genda had drawn it up and might have succeeded strategically, too, if the American aircraft carriers had been in port on December 7.

As it was, the three carriers were at sea that day and escaped unscathed, a fact that would come back to haunt the Japanese seven months later at Midway.

The raid must be considered only a partial tactical success as well. Surprise was achieved, and the American fleet took a beating, particularly the battleships. The major airfields were put out of action, and most of the planes were destroyed on the ground.

However, the Japanese failed to get the carriers — which would prove to be the decisive weapon of the Pacific war — and also committed a major blunder by failing to destroy the oil reserves on Oahu, reserves that would have taken months to replenish from mainland refineries.

A third wave was to have attacked these tank farms, along with U.S. Navy machine shops, stores and administrative centers.

The commander of the Japanese task force, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, canceled the third wave and withdrew, fearing that his own ships were vulnerable to an American counterattack.

Posted in Memories + Trivia | Comments Off on Attack at Pearl Harbor a Bold, Desperate Gamble

Folding Cup: Flawed Cootie Avoiding Concept

December 6th, 2007 by iDunzo

The premise of the Folding Cup is that, at a party, you are forever in danger of grabbing somebody else’s paper cup.

Designer Jaehyung Hong solves this problem with tiny fold up tabs around the base, each carrying a number, letter or symbol from a deck of cards:

So. The procedure: First, choose a code and twist the tabs to mark your drink.

Second. Try to remember it.

Third, try to both read and remember the code after several cocktails.

See the problem? The concept will probably never surface, but don’t despair.

The time honored method still works: write your name on the cup with a sharpie. And use big letters.

Posted in Food + Geekery + Technology + Toys & Gadgets | Comments Off on Folding Cup: Flawed Cootie Avoiding Concept