I fly a bit for work and play. Of all the regulations that require compliance the worst are the limitations on the use of electronics “during takeoff and landing.” When you’re flying in and out of large markets the “takeoff and landing” portion of the flight can be an hour or more.
Nick Bolton does a good job asking the question on his New York Times blog but comes up empty.
According to the post, the FAA requires airplanes be able to withstand 100 v/m (volts per meter).
From the blog post:
When EMT Labs put an Amazon Kindle through a number of tests, the company consistently found that this e-reader emitted less than 30 microvolts per meter when in use. That’s only 0.00003 of a volt.
OK. But the post goes on to ask the obvious next question: LOTS of people have Kindles and iPads. What about THAT!?
But one Kindle isn’t sending out a lot of electrical emissions. But surely a plane’s cabin with dozens or even hundreds will? That’s what both the F.A.A. and American Airlines asserted when I asked why pilots in the cockpit could use iPads, but the people back in coach could not. Yet that’s not right either.
“Electromagnetic energy doesn’t add up like that. Five Kindles will not put off five times the energy that one Kindle would,” explained Kevin Bothmann, EMT Labs testing manager. “If it added up like that, people wouldn’t be able to go into offices, where there are dozens of computers, without wearing protective gear.”
Sometimes it’s the small things that make a difference. In this case a friend of mine referred me to a very clever little utility called Caffeine. From the product’s webpage:
Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.
Run and get some.
Since my “clean” installation of Leopard I’ve been making a point to avoid making a mess of my “personal information space.” One area of marked progress has been my bookmarks.
A lot of my time is spent demonstrating our products. In various situations I use Safari (of course), Firefox, Opera, and Camino. I use multiple browsers in order to demonstrate application compatibility, to exercise multiple authenticated user perspectives and to take advantage of browser-specific features. My demos (and most of my routine browser use) are based on a large set of bookmarks.
Until today I tried (and mostly failed) to keep bookmarks in sync manually. Not any more!
Today I found Safari Bookmark Exporter (SBE).
SBE is a free and simple utility that exports my Safari bookmarks into mutiple formats. It is smart enough to find my Firefox profile directory and render a proper bookmarks.html. I’ve been using this just for a day and I can’t imagine not having it!
As a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (aka GTD) approach to task management I was eager to see a “proper” implementation. I’ve experimented in the past with kGTD (the creator of kGTD has joined OmniGroup in a marketing capacity) and EasyTask. Neither had the desired level of polish and features.OmniGroup (developers of OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, etc.) recently announced that OmniFocus 1.0 will be released on January 8, 2008. I signed up to beta test this product in September or so and have been following it since. I’ve started using the recent betas as my primary means of task tracking and… it’s awesome. With a whopping five or six days of using it I recommend it.They have a deal going where if you order “soon” you get a fifty percent discount. I’m going to use this until just after Thanksgiving. If I like it then as much as I do now I’ll be a customer of yet another OmniGroup product.
