Oh Brian!

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Found thanks to a MacGyver tip over at Lifehacker.

Two interesting articles.

The first one is about why Boeing is dropping out of the wireless Internet on airplanes business. It seems that in the end the secret is power. How can the airplane hope to power all the PCs that passengers are now going to want to bring along and use for flights that often last longer than the batteries in the PC? Adding more power generation to airplanes is impractical; especially now with the price for oil (and jet fuel) rising higher each day.

The second is a little doodad that I will buy and use all the time. This adapter let's you power (trickle charge?) a USB device from an airplane seat headphone jack. Brilliant!

What if rather than using airplane power to charge the batteries in a laptop we use gadgets that just trickle charge the battery so that it will discharge slowly. If PC battery could be extended through this technique from the current 2-3 hours to something more like 6-8 hours - this would be a very viable idea. Hmmm.

Livescience dot com has a great article (slide show) on emerging environmental technologies. Very interesting stuff with links to some of the companies that are working on the different ideas. I found this via digg.