Baggage Fees Soar, One Man’s Solution

Recent stories in publications such as Wall Street Journal stress how airlines, particularly Spirit and Allegiant, are adding on so many fees their low prices don’t look quite so low to the untrained traveler.

Brent Hopkins, a 25 years old guy, who has flown Spirit for years decided the time had come to design a bag that could fly free on Spirit – meeting all their size dimensions and fitting under the seat in front.  This meant precise design, and clever features.  He did it, and is now marketing the product via a website.  Here is the address

http://www.carryonfree.com/products/tan-copper-trolley  $69  and has wheels and a collapsing handle. And is good looking.  This good looking color is on back order until June of 2014.  But other bags are available (see website).   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv6fbH8w36A    25,000 people have viewed this video to see how to pack in order to avoid Spirit luggage fees.  The new Carry Free bag above helps solve this problem. The bag being packed in this video might be available at WalMart, or there’s another type of small carry on bag called Kavu Happy Hauler (try Amazon or other) .  It appears to be smaller than the FlyFree bag.

Important New Smart Phone Health Monitoring Tools+Apps

 
Primary Source Material for this Blog Post:  BloombergBusinessweek  -- current issue:

http://www.scanadu.com/

Scout Medical Tricorder might be the big breakthrough we have all been looking for.  Does much of what a doctor would do on an office visit – checks heart rate, temperature, blood pressure and more.  Put it to your head and it picks up all the readings and transmits them to a smart phone for storage and other purposes.  $199,but not available until 2014.  It raised $1.7 million on a crowd funding website, Indiegogo, and that set a record for a new product on that funding site. .

http://www.alivecor.com/home

EKG ECG check, $99.   Cardiac Designs , data can be shared with doctors, like an EKG in your pocket.  Slips over an I Phone for the time you are checking your heart.  

http://cardiacdesigns.com/  It says it is the only FDA approved cardiac checker for this application ! 

 

http://cardiacdesigns.com/

Telcare Blood Glucose Monitoring system, first for full use with telephone, they say.  Check this out.  $150.  Allows remote monitoring by doctors.

http://www.fooducate.com/

Scan food in stores for nutrition information in detail.  Grades the product based on science and took first place in the US Surgeon General’s healthy app competition last year.  Free for basic $4.99 for advanced.

http://propellerhealth.com/

Leading mobile sensor for snapping onto inhalers.  It will track when and how often asthma and other respiratory conditions use their medications and can be shared with a physician.

https://www.getairo.com/

Wrist band for health and fitness monitoring – an entrant in a very crowded field. Tracks sleep, activity and calories. But it is also a heart rate monitor that vibrates whenever the wearer is stressed.  There is also a spectrometer that breaks down the nutritional value of foods.  You will have to wait until 2014 for this one, but watch for it to, perhaps, make a big splash in that crowded wrist monitoring market.  $150, taking pre-orders now.

How Safe Is Digital Media For Long Term Data Storage

Apparently, not so safe. Popular Science Magazine, Dec. 2013 issue, says that odds are low that saving our digital photos on CD’s and hard drives (like backup removable, remote, hard drives) will be safe for the next generation.  The initial thinking was a CD would be good for 100 years, now they are re-thinking it because many fail in 10 years.

Old fashioned paper has done very well by comparison. Early paper (the acid free kind) is still going strong after 100 years.  A typical spinning hard disk drive has a problem I didn’t know about :  If you don’t use it, you lose it. “You’ve got to have it spinning regularly or you are not going to be able to play it”. Says Howard Besser, archivist, NYU.

An even greater problem than the durability of our thumb drives, CD’s, and hard drives, will be the decoding of them sometime in the future, when the software is no longer around that created them. Think Windows 95.  Think Newton. Think CPM.

This is a distressing thought, since I think we all are planning for our children’s photos to last forever in a closet somewhere on a never-used hard drive backup device. Personally, I am trying to convert my VHS tapes of my children to DVD format, and sometimes the tapes will not play.  Or break easily.  And now the wisdom seems to be that the DVD isn’t an eternal format either.  With BlueRay and whatever else follows, DVD players might become like Beta-max video recorders.  I still have one, but wouldn’t know where to buy another if it broke.  I have Beta tapes from 1982.  With valuable things on them. History if you will.  Maybe we should have taken Kodak photos instead ?  But wait, where is Kodak? 

Massive Free Shipping Day Coming December 18

1,000 on line merchants are offering one day of free shipping for orders placed on December 18 --- and they guarantee arrival by Christmas if ordered on that date. 

www.FreeShipping.org     search for what you want among the 4,000 listed merchants who offer free shipping and discounts through the site.

Then, use a price comparison site, such as Amazon or PriceGrabber.com to see whether another retailer offers a similar item at a lower price.  Try www.JR.com  or www.BHphotovideo.com or www.tigerdirect.com as but two or three examples of sites I use for price checking and useful information.  These, plus Amazon, EBay, and sometimes WalMart on-line will almost always give you plenty of electronic comparisons and additional useful buying information. 

Then go to  www.freeshippingday.com   that lists the retailers who, on that day only, will ship free, with no minimum order … that’s a deal, for sure (unless they raise prices for that one day).   A Staff Favorites portion of the site will show which merchants they think offer the best discounts in addition to free shipping. 

Mobile version will also be available (check for dates and APP names later).

Will this replace “Black Friday” as the largest on-line shopping day of the year? 

Remember the “tax-free-back-to-school” day (or two) we used to have in SC? No sales tax that day, or those days?  I think they are going to eliminate that in 2014.