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I bought the Philips HN060/37 Noise-Canceling Earbuds for a recent trip. For a relatively low price (US$50+) headphone, it did a pretty good job of delivering sound while reducing the background noise while on a plane. It comes with three sets of buds in different sizes. None really fit my ears well. But, they fit well enough for use. I wouldn’t be able to run or exercise with any of the buds though. They tend to fall out (unlike the Sony earbuds I usually use in non-noisy settings). The neckstrap is handy when stuck in a plane for a long time. But, the cords to the buds tend to get tangled up a lot when taking the headphones out of its pouch or putting them away. The 124 ratings of it on Amazon gives it 3 out of 5 stars. I tend to a agree. It is a relatively decent earbud headphone. It would get a lot better rating for me if the earbud fit well in my ears and if the strap didn’t get so tangled up so often.

Google Mobile seems to have changed quite a bit since I mentioned it last October. If you browse google.com, it automatically redirects to a mobile device friendly page google.com/m. Unlike the full-sized personalized page, the mobile friendly version can only have up to six page modules added (weather, movies, news sources, etc.). There aren’t any links to other mobile friendly Google properties, but other Google sites redirect to mobile friendly pages too. gmail.com and news.google.com look fine on my Windows Mobile Pocket PC. One nice touch is that GMail can be used over an SSL encrypted session on a Pocket PC or Smartphone by using https://gmail.com instead of http://gmail.com.

After spending an intense week at the Microsoft MVP Global Summit, being faced with a 12 noon hotel check out and a 5:20pm flight out of SeaTac, I decided to spend a bit of change to purchase a one-day pass that lets me hang out in an airline club lounge that provides a work desk, A/C outlets, and WiFi access (and snacks and soft drinks too).
The person at the lounge’s front desk handed me a WiFi brochure. My MacBook didn’t need any special instructions to connect. It simply told me that my preferred access point was not available and asked if I wanted to connect to one that was. After approving that action I was online.

Looking through the troubleshooting section of the brochure turned out to be interesting. It seems that Linksys 802.11G and Dell TrueMobile (1300 and 1400) WLAN Cards. I found it interesting that products that, I would guess, are in a large percentage of notebooks would be problem cases.

With all the discussions about WiFi safety, we sometimes forget that the other wireless protocol, Bluetooth, needs to be secured too.

I was trying to pair a new Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse with a MacBook over Bluetooth this evening in my hotel room. I was a bit surprised to see someone else’s Bluetooth enabled notebook show up in addition to my new mouse. I shouldn’t have been, of course, Bluetooth has a 10 meter range (or greater depending on the hardware used) and can penetrate walls. And, this person left his notebook’s Bluetooth radio in Discover mode. Since 10 meters is a bit larger than 30 feet and these hotel rooms are not larger than 30 feet long, I could see the notebook.
The moral to this story is to check your devices: Notebooks, PDAs, phones, etc. Then, make sure Discover mode is turned off except when you need to have the device probed by some other Bluetooth device for pairing.