All In One Boat

I know I’m going pretty far afield here, but having just experienced Southwest and Jet Blue on two consecutive weekends this caught my attention. Virgin Airlines:

For the instant messaging generation, there’s an IM feature on the plane. You can invite up to 14 other passengers to join a chat room. Just remember where the hottie you saw boarding earlier is sitting and then invite him/her into a chat. You just pull your media controller out of the armrest and turn it over and there’s a QWERTY keyboard. Typing is a little stiff but definitely doable.

Under each seat is an electrical plug. Seems like a small thing, but you won’t find that on almost any domestic coach-class seat. That means your laptop won’t have to go on batteries – which is a good thing if you have a computer like mine, with fast-fading batteries.

A couple of services are still waiting to be enabled, but they also show you how cool this in-flight service is going to be. Users will be able to e-mail and text message people on the ground and connect to the Internet. I’m sure how much that’s going to cost, but it’s nice to know we’ll have that feature. Soon, you can drop your friend a quick text message if the flight is a little behind or ahead of schedule.

There are games. No, nothing current. No Nintendo games like on a Singapore Airlines flight. But you can still pass the time playing an early version of Doom, Bomberman or Vectoroid, an Asteroid knockoff.

You can watch satellite TV a la Jet Blue’s DirecTV set up. What’s nice is you can actually set an alert for an upcoming show so you don’t miss it. In addition to the regular lineup, you can watch special episodes on demand for $1.99, including “Heroes,” “The Office,” “Prison Break” and “Scrubs.” You can also watch select recorded shows in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The movie setup is nice, too: You can rent one for $8.

Music lovers can tune in to a radio service or pull up music on demand. Choose from dozens of artists and listen to select songs from their collection. There are also music videos, all for free.

You can also order food from your seat. All the flight attendants have computers with their food carts that allow them to see what people are ordering.

SF Chronicle: Tech Chronicles

Dan Frost at sfgate.com/blogs/tech alerts us to a long-past-due software device that will show you, prior to printing, those stooopid pages with one url on it, or a long disclaimer, or even pages of pages of a site from which you only want the one you are viewing.

GreenPrint, a small startup in Portland, Ore., has an easy answer. GreenPrint, developed by a young former Ford Motor Corp. executive, is able to flag those pages before they print, and make sure they’re something you really want to have in hard copy.

Print Greener

Here’s the product home page. http://www.printgreener.com/ I haven’t tried it yet. I’ll let you know, or you let me…

Well not a tech tip exactly, but using technology to help you out.

California has been in the news for not properly notifying citizens of property in the possession of the state. You can go see if they have any of yours at the State Controllers Office:

Unclaimed Property Search

Two notes: The only MUST enter field is the last name. If there are thousands of Jones then you can enter a first name, or initial. Don’t forget, your property may not be under your full name…

Second tip: Once you’ve got results,if there are pages of them, look at the top right corner of the results and find “Number of records display per page.” Change it to 100 for quicker browsing.

Good luck!

You’re going on a trip, with your trusty wireless laptop. Where can you find wireless connections? Do a little scouting ahead of time, courtesy of Forbes at http://forbes.anchorfree.com/

Some of you would like bigger text on your screen, when looking at this website, or when reading e-mail.

Use the “View” drop-down in your Internet browser or in your mail client, and look for “Text Size.”

In Microsoft Internet Explorer you will find Largest, Larger, Medium, Smaller, Smallest as choices.

In Foxfire you can go to View but you can also hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys with your left fingers and tap the + key twice, a couple of times. The font increases at least two sizes. (To make the font smaller hold down Ctrl and Shift and tap the – (minus) key twice.)

In Thunderbird, the Mozilla mail client, the same Ctrl & Shift plus ++ increases the font size in an e-mail.

Microsoft Outlook has a a View, Text size but it doesn’t seem to do much, perhaps because my incoming mail is all html and not pure text.

On Macs using Apple Mail–at least versions running on OS 10.4.x–with an email selected, all you need to do is go to Format>Style>Bigger (or Smaller) or use the shortcuts, Command + (or Command -). You may need to repeat these commands until you reach the size you like, though there does seem to be a max and minimum. [thx Harry H. and Bea B.]