If you’re lucky enough to get to travel abroad, you know it’s getting easier and easier to use our phones and other gadgets to translate for us. So why not do so in a way that makes sense to you? This little gadget seeking funds on Kickstarter looks right up my alley, offering quick transcription and recording – plus music playback, like an iPod Shuffle with superpowers.

The ONE Miniis not that complex of a device – a couple of microphones and a wireless board in tasteful packaging – but that combination allows for a lot of useful stuff to happen both offline and with its companion app.

You activate the device, and it starts recording and both translating and transcribing the audio via a cloud service as it goes (or later, if you choose). That right there is already super useful when you have meetings to transcribe, or you’re meeting one-on-one with someone who doesn’t speak English.

Recordings are kept on the phone because there is no memory onboard the device. There’s an option for a cloud service, but that probably won’t be necessary, considering the compact size of these audio files. If you’re paranoid about security, this probably isn’t your solution, but for everyday stuff, it should be just fine.

If you want to translate a conversation with someone whose language you don’t speak, you pick two of the 12 built-in languages in the app and then either pass the gadget back and forth or let it sit between you while you talk. The transcript will show on the phone, and the ONE Mini can speak the translation in its little robotic voice.

Right now, translation is only available online, but the company plans to offer offline translation for specific language pairs that have reliable two-way edge models, probably Mandarin-English and Korean-Japanese.
It has a headphone jack, too, which lets it act as a wireless playback device for the recordings or your music, or to take calls using the nice onboard mics. It’s lightweight and has a little clip, so it’s probably better than connecting directly to your phone in many cases.
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There’s also a 24/7 interpreter line that charges two bucks a minute. Though most people won’t use the service, in an emergency, it could be pretty helpful to have a panic button that sends you directly to a person who speaks both the languages you’ve selected.
Right now you can buy a ONE Mini for $79. They’ve already passed their funding goal and are planning on shipping in June, so it shouldn’t be a long wait.

Flying cars do sound cool, but whether they’re a good idea is up for debate. Fortunately, they do seem to have some benefits, among them, improved efficiency – at least on long trips.

Air travel takes an enormous amount of energy since you have to lift something heavy into the air and keep it there for a good while. This is often faster but rarely more efficient than ground transportation, which lets gravity do the hard work.

Of course, once an aircraft gets up to altitude, it cruises at high speed with little friction to contend with, and whether you’re going 100 feet or 50 miles, you only have to take off once. So, University of Michigan researchers thought there might be a sweet spot where taking a flying car might actually save energy. It turns out there is – kind of. The team published their resultsrecently in Nature Communications.

The U of M engineers made an efficiency model for both ground transport and electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, based on specs from aerospace companies working on them.

“Our model represents general trends in the VTOL space and uses parameters from multiple studies and aircraft designs to specify weight, lift-to-drag ratio, and battery-specific energy,” said study co-author Noah Furbush in a U-M news release.

They looked at how these various theoretical vehicles performed when taking multiple numbers of people different distances, comparing energy consumed.

As you might imagine, flying isn’t efficient for going a mile or two, since you use up all that energy getting to altitude and then have to come right back down. But at the 100-kilometer mark (about 62 miles) things look a little different.

For a 100 km trip, a single passenger in a flying car uses 35% less energy than a gas-powered vehicle, but still 28% more than an electric vehicle. The flying car is better than the gas one starting at around 40 km. But it never really catches up with the EVs for efficiency, though it gets close. 

To make it better, they had to adjust the numbers a bit, assuming that flying taxis would be more likely to operate at full capacity, with a pilot and three passengers, while ground vehicles were unlikely to have their average occupancy of 1.5 people change much. With that in mind, they found that a 100 km trip with three passengers barely beats the per-person efficiency of EVs.

That may seem like a bit of a thin victory, but keep in mind that the flying car would be making the trip in a quarter of the time, unaffected by traffic and other issues. Plus there’s the view.
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It’s all theoretical right now, naturally, but studies like this one help companies looking to get into this business decide how their service will be organized and marketed. I think we’ll see these alternative forms of travel and sooner than many planners thought.

Nobody likes to pay sales tax and until recently, most of us shopped online to avoid our local sales tax.
Nearly one year ago, the Supreme Court ruled that out-of-state retailers must collect sales tax on internet sales. 

One retailer many of us use for those “have to have” gadgets is B&H Photo Videoin New York City. This past week they announced a new credit card called Payboo. This is a traditional credit card that has one extra feature: when you buy anything from B&H and use the Payboo card, they will instantly refund you the sales tax before you finish the purchase. And at B&H, instant means instant – no expiring points, credits, or coupons to worry about. This new Payboo card provides an additional discount equal to your sales tax rate, and B&H will still collect and remit state sales tax in accordance with state sales tax laws and regulations.

​While none of us needs another credit card, this may be worth it.

Travelers might finally be getting a break from the ever-frustrating airport security rules. Thanks to the introduction of new carry-on baggage scanners called CT (Computed Tomography), travelers won’t have to take electronics or liquids out of their bags. The TSA announced the rollout of this new technology, which would ultimately cut down on long security lines and make the airport experience much smoother.

The new machines can create 3D images of a bag’s contents and automatically detect and scan items you are currently required to remove. This includes electronic devices like laptops and even liquids. According to Bloomberg Government, 300 of these new machines have been ordered by the TSA so far, and they will begin to appear in airports this summer. Eventually, the goal is to replace all current X-ray machines with these new CT scanners. The TSA has been testing these machines since 2017, and once airport employees become comfortable operating the new equipment, shorter security lines are expected.
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The list of airports that will receive the new CT machines has not yet been released, though they are currently being used at the following airports:

• Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL)
• Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI)
• Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD)
• Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG)
• Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW)
• Houston Hobby Airport (HOU)
• Indianapolis International Airport (IND)
• John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)
• Logan International Airport (BOS)
• Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
• Oakland International Airport (OAK)
• Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX)
• St. Louis Lambert International Airport (STL)
• Washington-Dulles International Airport (IAD)