A few months ago, on a return trip through the Cincinnati Airport, I learned the hard way why you should always check-in to a flight online in advance. I was coming home from a business trip the night before my son's high school graduation. With over two hours before departure, my colleague and I decided to get some dinner and then head to the airport. We finished dinner with plenty of time to spare, returned the rental car and walked up to the Departures area leisurely. I stepped up to one kiosk to check-in while my colleague went to another.
I punched in my frequent flyer number, brought up my reservation and the dreaded message, "Please see an agent" appeared on the screen. My colleague, boarding pass in hand, turned and said. "Did you check-in in advance? I checked in on my smartphone while you were presenting to our client. I just needed to print out my boarding pass."
So at 43 minutes prior to the scheduled departure time, I flagged down a gate agent in the otherwise empty terminal. The dialogue that followed was eye-opening:
"Hi, can you help me check-in please. I had trouble with the kiosk"
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It's now time to display a presentation on the road without my laptop. First I have to get my slide deck ready to go on my iPad. I am a hardcore PowerPoint user so step one is converting the file over to Keynote so that I can display it on the tablet.
Before I left home, I imported the file by opening it using Keynote on my Mac. The import worked well with only a few minor positioning tweaks needed to some of the graphic images. I then copied the file over to my iPad using iTunes and was ready to go.
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 NetZero 4G HotSpot
So here I am in California and want to get online. I was too cheap to buy an iPad with 3G connectivity so I need a wireless hotspot, but an even faster 4G connection would be better. Fortunately, the home office recently received a NetZero 4G WiFi hotspot that might do the trick. The NetZero, about the size of a deck of cards has one feature that I love - a small LCD status display - that other portable hotspots lack. The LCD lets me know when I have a live connection both to their 4G network as well as its WiFi status. Other personal hotspots I've used consist of a single colored LED with blinking patterns acting as status indicators. Incredibly frustrating if you have any type of connectivity issue.
Before I left, I connected the NetZero to my laptop with the included USB cable to both charge it as well as to set up the WiFi network key. Once again, the NetZero plugs into the same tiny USB charging plug that works with my iPad. Good thing that I brought two!
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 Seagate GoFlex Satellite Media Drive
TechDadCentral is embarking on a challenge: can I go on a 4- day business trip without my laptop? Namely, can my iPad2, complemented, by some keystone new technology, fulfill all of the tech needs where I traditionally use my laptop? Will I make it home smiling or will I be stymied by a lack of technology?
So here I go:
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It’s the first week of March and I’m starting to gear up for my 3 favorite TV viewing events of the year; namely The Masters Golf Tournament, the NHL playoffs and the NCAA hoops tournament. This year, I’ve raised my game by upgrading my key viewing components:
ROKU 2 XS
One of earliest articles here was about installing and using a Roku streaming video player tied to Netflix. Two years later and the range of streaming video channels available has increased to over 300 channels. Roku now offers Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus and even HBO Go for the latest and greatest content as well as sports offerings such as NBA Game Time and NHL Gamecenter.
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TechDadCentral has been on the road ... lots of miles and plenty of travel apps. Here are the four must-have apps that I cannot travel without.
Poynt
Frankly, I was skeptical when I heard about Poynt. It is positioned as a "location-based search engine" and when I found out that they were located in Calgary, Canada (not eactly known as a city full of software developers) I just had to find out more. I met with the Poynt team at CES 2012 and they walked me through the app. Since then, Poynt goes everywhere with me. When traveling, I use if for:
- Restaurant reservations
- Finding nearby and inexpensive gas
- Local deal finding (using your current location!)
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TechDadCentral’s humble abode has one major drawback … no cell phone service from any of the major carriers. We’re talking zero bars with the only solution being standing at the end of the driveway and facing facing North.
For those of you with equally challenging cell phone environments, there is a simple solution – install a Femtocell.
The same size as a wireless router, a Femtocell connects to your home network and acts as a “mini cell phone tower” inside your house. During set up, you specify a list of phone numbers that you want the Femtocell to work with. Once activated, when you step inside your home your cell phone connects to this mini-tower and all calls (both send and receive) get routed over your home network. My Femtocell has converted our Dead Zone to four bars.
Femto cells have different brand names as follows:
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Industry analysts predict that there will be 64 million 3D television sets in use by the year 2018. That means over 200 million pairs of eyes will be wearing 3D glasses within 7 years! So it's time for TechDadCentral to learn about the two competing 3D technologies – active and passive -- and then offer up some advice.
3D Technology: Active vs. Passive
In Active systems, instead of showing the right and left filmed images at the very same time, visuals from two different perspectives are shown one after the other at a very fast pace.
Active 3D glasses use batteries and must be electronically linked to the screen. The glasses are equipped with shutters in front of each eye. When an image from the left side is shown, the shutter in front of the right eye is closed, so only your left eye can see and vice versa. As this effect happens multiple times per second, the brain doesn’t realize it sees the images one after the other, rather than at the same time. This generates a 3D image from a combination of the images seen from the left and right side and your brain then reconstructs a 3D image.
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No need to be funny, witty or even moderately entertaining on this product review – if you have a laptop and like to use a mouse, you need one of these.
Two weeks ago, I received a Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse as a demo unit to review. The mouse is very flat (only a half inch tall) with just enough height to hold two AAA batteries. So I took it out of the package, inserted the included batteries and then looked for the on/off switch and the “connect” button that are de rigueur with other wireless mice. I was baffled by finding neither switch so I actually looked at the quick-start guide. First I was told to “bend” the back half of the mouse in order to turn it on – what? Bend the mouse?
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