point fu

A while back (when my laptop chewed through my entire ANA data plan in like 4 minutes) I lamented the fact that laptops don't have the sophisticated data-throttling controls that smart phones do. One of my readers told me about a cool tool for MacOS and Windows that enables these types of controls for your laptop (or desktop) computer. It's called TripMode . It's US$8, there's a free trial , and you can pay by several means, including Apple Pay. Installation is simple, and once it's launched you have a task bar item that lets you selectively enable internet access for various applications and services. You can completely disable TripMode whenever you want. One cool thing I like about the preferences is that you can tell it to speak every time it blocks something (e.g., "Application Calendar was blocked"). This gives you a great sense of how many things are silently sucking bandwidth when you're not even thinking about it. selectively and inst...

JetBlue recently announced "gate to gate" Wi-Fi connectivity but for now I'd recommend against using their onboard Wi-Fi until you're in the air. I just flew from New York JFK (where cellular reception on the ground is a bit spotty) and used the onboard Fly-Fi to access the internet at the gate and during taxi. Once we were airborne I couldn't get my phone to connect . I'm a software engineer and a former technical support person (as is my husband) and neither of us could find any trickery to get my phone to connect. I found a thread over on Flyertalk where a user (ostensibly a JetBlue employee) is reporting that this is currently a known issue. Until a fix is posted, it's probably best to use Fly-Fi only after you've taken off . With my phone now unable to access the internet, I grabbed the laptop out of my bag and it worked fine. Until I tried to access my Google account: Yup, I'd recently enabled 2-factor authentication...

In-flight Wifi is an amazing thing. My first time experiencing it (on Virgin America) was one of those rare moments of "holy cow! we live in the fuuuutuuuuuuure!" moments. Despite being a bit pokey, it still completely changed flying for me. Onboard the plane, there's more than enough bandwidth to stream video from the plane's Wifi router to passengers' phones or iPads, but unfortunately, even with the new, faster Ka-band satellite connections there's still not enough bandwidth between the plane and the ground for everyone to do that. One solution is to bring a large selection of video content onboard the plane and let people stream from a server aboard the plane to their devices. Lufthansa and Delta have both launched these systems and JetBlue has just announced that they're partnering with Amazon to bring AmazonPrime content to the skies. I feel like this technology will eventually replace seatback entertainment systems and I'm actually happy a...