Since the MoGo devices were originally geared towards the mobile warriors among us, we know that a lot of readers tend to be on the road at any given moment. So today I’m breaking with the hot!new! tech news and for you, a post with some humor and timely tips.

News: Did you know that if you want to keep using your driver’s license for ID to travel, you’ll need to get it updated in the next 6 or so years?  According to a new regulation published by Homeland Security in January (but passed back in 2005):

“The American public’s desire for greater identity protection is undeniable,” said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “Americans understand today that the 9/11 hijackers obtained 30 drivers licenses and ID’s, and used 364 aliases. For an extra $8 per license, REAL ID will give law enforcement and security officials a powerful advantage against falsified documents, and it will bring some peace of mind to citizens wanting to protect their identity from theft by a criminal or illegal alien.”

Read the USA Today article to get all the details in plain speak.

News: Ever wonder when restaurants will finally make a to-go meal that fits in your cupholder? Well, wonder no more! BBQ Chicken, a fried chicken fast food chain in New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina has launched a new meal that is served entirely in…cups!

No, really. Check it out.  (Thanks to the Road Warrior Blog for the item.)

Funny:  Once upon a time, I used to collect hotel toiletries from my many travels and donate them to a local shelter. But my Marriott hunter/gatherer ways were nothing on my old man (also a road warrior). Notoriously thrifty, I once saw him pouring the contents of about 15 itty bity bottles of shampoo into the regular-sized bottle in the shower.

Like no one would notice.

The combination was a frightening shade of milky green and smelled something like a gas station rest room.

My mother, bless her, has a lively sense of humor. Perhaps in revenge, she sent me this via email a long time ago. Still cracks me up. The original hysterical tale of a traveler, a hotel maid, and a whole lot of hotel soap.

Funny:  Dave Barry. Wrote about airplane travel. Don’t try to read and eat at the same time, you could hurt yourself.

Funny:  You say you’re stuck at the airport again and ready to commit mayhem? Just sit back, point and click yourself here, and relive the witty goodness of those early West Wing years.

Here’s one for free, just because:

Josh: You’re going to be reading a bit today about your secret plan to fight inflation.
Bartlet: I have a secret plan to fight inflation?
Josh: No.
Bartlet: Why am I going to be reading that I do?
Josh: It was suggested in the press room that you do.
Bartlet: By who?
Josh: By me.
Bartlet: You told the press I have a secret plan to fight inflation?
Josh: No, I did not. Let me be absolutely clear, I did not do that. Except, yes, I did that… I denied it for half an hour, they wouldn’t take no for an answer!
Bartlet: You were clear?
Josh: I was crystal clear! They said, “Do you think that, if the President has a plan to fight inflation, it’s right that he keep it a secret?” I said, of course not!
Bartlet Are you telling me that not only did you invent a secret plan to fight inflation, but now you don’t support it?

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One of the biggest challenges on the road can be getting something printed out. There’s two problems: first, finding a printer. This usually means finding one you can piggyback on. And second, getting what you want onto the paper you got.

For the second problem, there is now a really cool piece of freeware called GreenPrint.  This nifty piece of software allows you to pick out just what you want to print.

For example - say you’ve got a webpage with a ton of information about the convention you’re attending. A straight Control-P is going to get you something like 6 pages. With GreenPrint, you can condense the parts that you really want onto a single page or two. Nifty, no?

And because GreenPrint is an environmental initiative, it also tracks for you how many pages you don’t print over time - and converts that into real-life statistics that demonstrate what that equals in trees, resources, and waste.

If you’ve got your page all lined up but still need a printer, there’s a great how-to over at HowStuffWorks. One of my common fall-backs is printing by emailing my documents to a local fax machine. Reality is that I am more likely to find WiFi than an open printer on most days. But most places have a fax, and there’s a ton of services that will do it for you for free or very low cost.

Good luck!

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When I was compiling notes for my post on the best airports for wired travelers, I realized that the recent bloom of free WiFi is shrinking. Fast.

Fee-based WiFi access has become standard in most urban airports. In fact, even when companies offer to build free WiFi for cities, they are sometimes turned away as local governments prefer the tax revenue over the convenience for the travelers.

Police are cracking down on ‘free WiFi’ usage at restaurants by non-customers. (Remember the poor guy who got charged with a felony for not buying a donut?)

And even places we think of as WiFi refuges - like hotels - are quietly moving to a fee-based system. Where before you could just turn on and surf away, now you need a code associated to your room number. A bill that says the WiFi fee is ‘$0.00′ or ‘waived’  is a quiet clue that maybe it won’t always be.

One of the biggest investors in free WiFi - Earthlink - has had to stop investing as they reorganize in response to their corporate financial health. Among the cities they had planned to build free WiFi infrastructures for was the beleaguered New Orleans.

By 2006, they had completed access for a “wireless system in 20 square miles of New Orleans along the repopulated banks of the Mississippi River“. But there they must stop and future plans for other cities have been scrapped, as well.

Like most wired travelers, I had assumed that someday I would be able to flip my laptop open most anywhere, anytime - like my cell phone - and find signal.

And while that may still happen, now its clear that there will be a tug on my credit card each time I hit ‘Enter’… and that, I should of seen coming.

But didn’t.

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According to their press release, Motorola and  Microvision signed a deal this week to implement projectors in the next generation of Motorola’s SmartPhones.

The technology will  project pictures and video on the wall.  On the road, this will mean a new tool for giving presentations and at home and in personal life - a way to share video and pictures without doing the ‘pass the phone’ dance.

Check out Microvision’s “Pico Projector Display” for details of their projector technology. Very slick.

The site quotes Rob Shaddock, CTO of Motorola Mobile; “Working together with Microvision, we are pursuing ways that projection technology can redefine how mobile consumers view and interact with the media they take with them.”

Already, seniors are pointing out that this technology will allow them a larger viewscreen for things like text and pix messages.

Microvisiondemonstrated its Pico projector in a mobile device  for the first time last May during the Society of Information Display conference in Long Beach, Calif.

Next up is a working model of the projector embedded in a Motorola phone. The partnership has not yet revealed the estimated time to arrival.

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Winter’s long snowbound delays in the airport lounge begin to look downright restful as the wild weirdness that is summer travel gets underway.

On this sunny day, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite tips to help keeps those “stuck-in-line behind the Von Trap family blues” at bay:

1) Take your WiFi with you.

For an extra $11 or so a day, Avis now offers the ‘Autonet Mobile Service’. This is a portable WiFi receiver that can be carried anywhere; “from the hotel room to the conference room and beyond.”

Autonet provides you WiFi access for your entire trip. No extra equipment needed - your WiFi card in your laptop is your passport to connectivity. No getting codes from the hotel, hunting for an Internet cafe, or beseeching your clients for some uptime.

It even works IN your Avis rental car. Although they politely ask that you not use it while driving.

2)Use an all-in-one booking service.

Remember in olden times, when you had a corporate travel agent? The kind that would say “Oh, you’re headed to Richardson? I know the best place for lunch…”

These days even when there is one available, it is usually just for ticketing. Where to stay, where to eat, these are things we research and follow-up ourselves. In between checking the local weather, tracking flight times and printing out local maps.

Using an all-in-one service, like Orbitz, really did have me slapping my forehead and wondering why I hadn’t done it before.

In addition to sending travel alerts to your PDA or cell phone (which all airlines do these days), Orbitz also gathers up the weather reports and delays, cool destination podcasts (I love those) and travel guides, global news that could affect your travel, and even maps to airports all in one place.

3) Check the local traffic.

Last year, some of my far-flung family were passing through the Chicago area on their way to Wisconsin and found themselves spending hours at the state border, absolutely paralyzed in holiday traffic.

I felt for them, deeply.

If you haven’t already discovered Traffic.com, you’re in for a treat. It is a free website that saves you from such horrible fates as the one that befell my family by clearly displaying real-time traffic and detours.

One of my favorite functions? It will send you email or text message alerts on the road, so you know when to exit off the highway before giving away a few hours of your life to some gaper’s gridlock.

Bon Voyage!

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Here’s five quick and easy solutions to protecting your laptop and its data from prying eyes and sticky fingers. These are suggestions meant for the most common and blunt security threats; shielding yourself from worms, spam, and spies (oh my!) are posts for future days.
Without further ado…

1) Before you leave, Disable Auto-Logon.

I know, it’s convenient to be able to power up your laptop and have it automatically go into your system.

But this is a major invitation for a security breach. So when you travel, disable it.

How? If you’re running Win2000 or WinXP, Microsoft has the following instructions:

- Go to START and select RUN
- In the script box, type “control userpasswords2″
- In the dialog box that appears, make sure that ‘Users must enter a username and password to use this computer’ is checked
- Click ‘OK’

Instructions for other Microsoft operating systems HERE.

2) Along those same lines? Use Strong Passwords.

Although this seems obvious, the truth is that we are creatures of habit. Which is why so many of us STILL aren’t using strong passwords regularly.

So go ahead. Change your login password right now. If you need to write it down and put it in your wallet, feel free. The point is is to make it hard for a thief and/or hacker to get at your data.

Unsure what a “strong password” is? Wikipedia has a good definition, here. Unsure if you can create one? There is a random strong password generator here.

3) Lock access to your laptop.

Your car and house have keys, shouldn’t your laptop? Securikey is a system (about $130 at MacWorld) that gives you two USB ‘keys’ to lock your laptop. You install their software (works for most Mac and PC systems) and from then on, you have to provide a password AND have one of the USB keys in the laptop’s port before you can access your system.

The USB keys are pretty durable and designed to hang on your key-chain.

4) Lock your laptop.

We all know a co-worker or fellow road warrior who has stepped away from whatever temporary office they’ve been using only to come back and find their laptop gone.

A simple $40 laptop lock would prevent about 90% of these thefts.

So go ahead, buy one. (like Kensington’s). It takes up very little room in your bag and can mean all the difference.

5) Use a privacy screen.

I can’t tell you how much proprietary and private information I’ve been exposed to over the years in various coach seats at 15,000 feet.

40% of those surveyed, like me, will admit to seeing what they are not meant to from time to time. The rest? Well, maybe they have portable blinders.

Privacy filters for laptops run about $40 - $125. If you’re like me, you’ll soon get in the habit of leaving it on all the time, even back in the home office (because prying eyes can be anywhere.)

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Obvious Statement #147: Your web-based apps stop working when your drop your Internet connection.

But… what if it didn’t have to be that way?

Last week as the worldwide Google Developer Day 2007 kicked off, Google officially announced what had been its worst-kept secret - Google Gears is here.

Google Gears is an extension that allows developers to enhance their web-based applications (like Google Reader, see beta here) so they work even without web access.

Simplistically? It’s open-source multi-platform JavaScript Application Programming Interface (API) that lets Web applications work offline by creating a local cache on your hard drive .

Yes, before you say it, the desktop traditionally is Microsoft territory.

But Google Gears is more than another David-wannabe with a slingshot and a sharp rock. Already, Gears has a lot of support behind it: Adobe Software, Mozilla Corp., and Opera Software all made statements of support.

No one is arguing that traditional desktop applications have their place. The code does not yet exist to make a product like Adobe’s Creative Suite, especially the industry-standard Photoshop, effective as a web-based app.

But for the standard corporate user, managing desktop applications can be a hassle. Even if you are using a product - like Lotus Notes - that lets you work offline or online, you still have to synch and organize as you move between laptop and desktop, or during hardware upgrades. “I think the growth of the Internet has really reflected the difficulties people have running desktop software,” Chris DiBona, open source programs manager at Google told InformationWeek.

What does Google Gears mean right now? Not much beyond a way to make it easier to bring today’s industry news with you onto the airplane.

But looking at the horizon, expect an evolution. Google has word processing and spreadsheet applications that will soon be available to you for both online collaboration and as an offline tool.

Now that developers have their hands on the code, we’ll stay on top of the products and innovations as they are released.

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In a couple of weeks, we’ll be launching a contest looking for ideas for Bluetooth gadgets. Along with that theme, here’s another one that recently came to market.

Alive Technologies is an Australian company that has launched Blutooth-enabled health monitoring systems.

One of these, the Alive Sports System has applications for the serious athlete. It tracks your heart rate as you exercise, sending the information to your Bluetooth phone or computer.

You can use this information in many ways; in conjunction with your doctor as part of treatment, in partnership with a trainer to improve your workouts, to see your trends ( e.g. Do you stay at peak heart rate longer during morning or evening workouts?), and  track your preparedness for an event - like a marathon or triathalon.

If you’re the type that runs or works out in the hotel fit club as your way to shake off the grit of being a road warrior, this is the kind of information can help you compare apples and apples, when you are trying to get a feel for how the road effects your performance.

According to Gizmag, Alive is tying this functionality in with other gadgets to enhance the information even more.

By connecting the system with a GPS phone that tracks your route, Alive is creating a package that will tell you where you peak and where you struggle.

And Microsoft Australia is getting into the game, too. They are testing a system where the heart rate monitor will communicate with an MP3 player. This gadget will prompt faster or slower songs to cue you to change your effort level so you keep your heart rate at the optimal level for your health goals.

What do you think?

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Who needs a flash drive that can survive spills, shocks, drops and smashing? We do, that is who. If you’re a mobile road warrior, you know how hard the road can be on your delicate electronics. You’ve seen what can happen to a peripheral in the airplane if it’s allowed to dangle loose, you’ve seen the effects of baggage handlers on electronics. Yikes.

Enter Corsair Survivor…Exit Worries. I just found the coolest USB flash drive I’ve ever seen. According to the specs, it is “engineered to be the industry’s toughest USB drive, Flash Survivor is water-resistant, CNC-milled aluminum encased, and shock-proof.” Wow. So all you entering the war-zone that is business travel, fear not, yet another indispensable goody has just entered your Must-Have list.

Head over and check out the Flash Survivor, then head over to Mogo and learn more about the Road Warrior’s mouse that is already on everyone’s must-have lists. Remember what I told you about baggage handlers…imagine what they do to a mouse that Doesn’t hide itself inside your PC Card Slot…yikes is right.

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