Mike's List
Power to the People!

I WALKED INTO THE STARBUCKS on the corner of Matilda and El Camino in Silicon Valley Monday with a laptop in one hand, its AC adaptor in the other and hope in my heart. The Starbucks, which is a huge, brand-new store has 35 places to sit, 15 tables and exactly one available AC outlet.

My hopes were immediately dashed. The plug was taken.

I have never actually plugged into the outlet, mind you -- it's always in use. If there are four people in the Starbucks, two of them are plugged in. There's huge demand for electricity in places like Starbucks, which makes its fortune in part from providing a place for people to hang out and read, talk and use their laptops.

The geniuses at Starbucks have to know that the demand in their stores for AC far exceeds what they're supplying to customers. It strikes me as willful, anti-customer negligence that they don't add more plugs for people to use.

But Starbucks isn't as bad as most airports.

An airport is a perfect place to plug in. You can charge your battery before a long flight, get some work done while waiting two hours for your flight and talk on the phone without burning down your phone battery.

There seems to be plenty of electricity for those loud TVs, locked onto one channel (paid for by CNN), the unintelligible announcements over the loudspeakers, the bright lights, ubiquitous lighted advertising, electric cars that mow you down, etc.

Why won't the airlines and airports supply electricity for customers to use as they really want: To power their laptops and cell phones.

Some terminals I've seen have plugs, but they're few and far between, located in places where there are no chairs. Others somehow keep AC outlets totally unavailable to airline customers.

On my recent trip to Germany for CeBit, I experienced the best and the worst. I marveled at the apparently total absence of plugs at the Zurich airport in Switzerland during a stopover. Trapped for hours before boarding an 11-hour flight to Los Angeles, I was desperate for a small hit of juice, but alas it was not to be. How do they vacuum the carpet?

Upon arrival at LAX for another stopover, I was happy to find plenty of outlets situated right next to comfortable chairs. LAX was built in the 1960s before people needed electricity while waiting for their planes, so they built plenty. I saw dozens of content business people getting their work done, and one guy watching a movie on his laptop. 

I can't know the motives of Starbucks and the airlines. In the worst case, they deliberately prevent you from using their electricity because they want to control what you do. In the case of Starbucks, they want you to pay for your latte and muffin, sit there long enough to consume it, then get out. They don't want you lingering for hours, taking up tables and discouraging fresh money walking in the door. The airlines don't want you working, but paying attention to the TV, advertising and announcements. They want you to be bored and go spend a fortune on overpriced airport junk food, magazines and gift-shop junk.

Enough already. We need an outlet! Power to the people!

Idiot Box In Your Pocket

Sony is embracing mini TV in some surprising places. At CeBit, the company was quietly showing off a tiny TV tuner Memory Stick. Offhand I can't think of a single Memory Stick product that has the physical room for bunny ear TV tuner electronics to stick out of it, but let's not let impracticality stop us from oohing and aahing the technological achievement and sheer geek factor. The company also confirmed rumors recently that it plans to build TV functionality into future versions of its Clie Palm-based handheld organizer.  

Use Your Face As a Pointing Device

Give your hand a rest. Nouse software lets you use your face as a pointing device. Nouse stands for Nose as Mouse. It's a research project to develop movement-based input devices. You can download the software and try it yourself with your existing PC camera. Different applications let you use your nose to draw pictures, blink to double-click, play games and more. The Nouse is a project of Canada's Institute for Information Technology.

Bad Robots

Intelligent Earth, based in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland, has created a robot called "Doki" that can tell how attractive a woman is. I mean, really, is this something humans aren't capable of? The head-shaped android robot uses artificial intelligence and a camera to scan and interpret facial characteristics, determining both the gender of a person, and how feminine they are. Irresponsibly, the company plans to give the randy robot an entire body and sell it on the open market.

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The Ultimate PC

While at CeBit in March, I discovered what has got to be the ultimate PC. The Trapezia UM300 from Korea's UMDigital Inc. sports three built-in, side-by-side 17" LCD displays, which are all connected as one large virtual monitor (windows, mouse pointer, etc., can travel from one screen to the next). The system sports speakers in the front pointed right at you, as well as an integrated web camera at the top. The UM400 has all that, plus a built in TV and yet another LCD display (just 6.4" at the bottom). It's the perfect configuration for maximum productivity and -- as was made clear at CeBit -- maximum kills in Doom.  

Cell Phone Follies

Asian phones these days come with high-speed data capability, built in cameras and brilliant color screens. Yawn! But now, Korea's Intercube has come out with a new phone feature that is guaranteed to be popular: Karaoke on demand. With the new Horizon handset, users can download the music to songs and watch lyrics on the screen as they belt out their favorite tunes. It also has a built-in WAP browser, supports MPEG4 and takes an optional clip-on digital camera.

NTT announced its new Wristomo watch phone-and-computer. The water-resistant watch can log onto the net at 64kbps to surf the web, send and receive e-mail. It can also sync with Microsoft Outlook, has a talk time of 120 minutes and 200 minutes of stand-by, and features a color screen.

 ElekSen is showing off a flexible cell phone. The company specializes in flexible portable keyboards, and is making this first foray into telecommunications.

The exotic cell phone market in Europe and Japan is really taking off these days. We Americans are left on the sidelines, struggling to extract the most basic service reliability from our carriers. Still, it's fun to cast our collective gadget-loving gaze across the ocean and marvel at phones with built in camcorders, megapixel camera phones, and phones with 3D surround sound!

Mike's List on the Radio

Craig Crossman's Computer America features Mike Elgan every Thursday night. The show runs from 7pm to 9pm SVT (Silicon Valley Time). Listen to Computer America on your local Business TalkRadio station or over the Internet every weeknight. Don't miss Computer America!

Gotta-Get-It Gadgets

A company called Skullcandy, yes Skullcandy, has come out with an audio headset product called LINK that enables you to listen to your MP3 player and talk on the phone at the same time through the same headset. Just make sure you keep your hands on the wheel!

Wacky Web Sites

The Lunchclock is a PC application that displays a clock on your desktop that actually slows down during your lunch break, giving you more time. The amount of extra time is user configurable, from an extra minute to four extra hours.

It's hard to believe, but you can click here for a free downloadable cup holder.

If you find yourself in an AOL chat room and don't fit in, relax! The AOLer Translator will change your English into the language of an average 12-year-old AOL user.

Take a walk down Windows Memory Lane with the Microsoft Windows History web site. Screenshots take you back to the days of yore -- before Windows 95, before Windows 3.1, yes, before Windows 1.0. World domination was merely a gleam in young Bill Gates' eye and advanced features like overlapping windows was the stuff of science fiction.

Finally! A web site that tells you how to convert those old floppy disks into exact replicas of the Star Ship Enterprise.

The Geobytes IP Address Locator Tool tells you where an Internet server is physically located.

You can find picture gallery web sites on any subject these days, even sites featuring pictures of trucks stuck in the mud!

You can also find a "museum" for just about anything. Even Mouse Pads.

Here's a list of all the many amazing Things Computers Can Do In Movies.

A thesaurus catalogs relations between words. The Visual Thesaurus shows you.
 

Twisted Games

Save Them Goldfish 

S.F. Cave

Locate Lenny

Doom Funnel Chasers

Snakeman Steve

The Pond

Air Balls

Colin's Crazy Carrera

Spacerunner

Spinning Plates

Nun Lander

Bloodbug

Cyborg Hefers From Outer Space

Frog Mania

Last Week's Mystery Pic

No, it's not "Barbie's Apple," a "Commodore 64 in drag," or even a "combination laptop/waffle maker" as suggested by some readers. In fact it's a prototype fuel cell laptop built by NEC. The portable PC runs on methanol fuel and was shown at the Nano Tech 2003 trade show. NEC's goal is to achieve 20 hours of battery life with the technology. Congratulations to Lance Ulanoff of New York, New York, for being first with the right answer. (I'm not sure if this is fair, by the way, as Lance is senior executive producer for PCMag.com and someone I used to work with at Windows Magazine back in the 90s. Still he was first and right, so: Kudos, Lance!)

Mystery Pic o' the Week

What is it? Send YOUR guess to mysterypic@mikeslist.com (be sure to say where you live). If you're first with the right answer, I'll print your name in the next issue of Mike's List!

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