You can now bring your old whiteboards into the 21stcentury with Rocketbook Beacons. These four restickable, reusable Beacons convert your writing surface into a smartboard by integrating with popular cloud services in the free Rocketbook app. 

Brainstorm the next great mission with your crew, capture and share your ideas, and then take your Beacons with you to your next adventure. The Beacons Go-Pack is $15.
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• Set of 4 Beacons
• 2.5-inch triangles
• Fluorescent orange
• Restickable Yupo adhesive 
• Wash with soap and water
• Free Go-Pack carry case

Rocketbook Beacons allow you to capture, organize, and broadcast important notes, diagrams, and big ideas on any whiteboard or wall surface in real-time. Just four restickable "beacons" for any sized surface and one smartphone app that connects with many of the popular cloud services you already use.
Using Beacons involves four easy steps:

1. Place the four Beacon quadra-triangles in each corner of a whiteboard or your preferred writing area. Do your best to make it straight, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. Now document your ideas and discussions on the whiteboard the way you usually would.
2. Got an iPhone or Android? Use the free Rocketbook app to configure popular cloud services as your scan destinations. Rocketbook has partnered with some of your favorite services, such as Evernote, One Note, Dropbox, and Google Drive. You can also use regular email if you wish.
3. For crucial missions with scattered participants, you can stream your whiteboard in real-time. Switch to “Snapcast” mode, share the unique URL, and collaborate with your team anywhere in the world. Your private, real-time page is updated every time you scan your whiteboard. Or prop your phone facing your whiteboard and set the app to auto-scan every 5 seconds. 
4. Is your next mission destined for a different whiteboard? No problem. Peel the Beacons off of the board and prepare for your next voyage. Beacons have a space-aged micro-suction surface that can not only be reused over and over but even cleaned with soap and water.

Whether you love paper and pen or prefer to live paper-free, you still probably need to take notes, read PDFs, or maybe even illustrate an idea with a sketch. Smart notebooks help bring ideas typically captured on paper into a digital format. Some smart notebooks also involve real paper.

Smart notebooks don’t really conform to a firm definition. There’s still a lot of interpretation as to what a smart notebook is. That said, they are different from tablets: Tablets usually have color screens, like the Retina display on any recent iPad. Smart notebooks use some other kind of technology for the interface.

Some smart notebooks work best as digital tablets for writing and sketching. Others are paper-based notebooks with either a pressure-sensitive pad behind them to capture what you write or a companion app you use to scan pages.

Also included is one unique product that is something of an “honorary” smart notebook even though it’s a pen. It’s so smart, however, that it turns any notebook into a smart notebook.

Here are five of the best options listed in alphabetical order:

LiveScribe Echo 2GB ($179). It’s not a smart notebook per se, but the LiveScribe Echo pen turns any notebook into a smart one. This special pen has the unique ability to remember what you write or draw, the order in which you did so, and any audio that played while you wrote. That means you can take lecture notes while also recording the speaker. Or you can write your notes and dictate additional thoughts. When you’re done with your work, you can sync the memory from the LiveScribe Echo pen to a macOS or Windows computer and see all your notes reappear in the order that you took them on screen in a digital notebook.

Onyx Boox Max 3 ($859). It may seem like you need a money-is-no-object attitude to buy the Onyx Boox Max 3, and maybe you do. But the key thing to know about this smart notebook is just how much it’s capable of. It’s a big, 13.3-inch e-reader with E-Ink Mobius (making reading easy on the eyes) running Android 9 that’s Wi-Fi-capable, so you can also use it to surf the web or connect to digital libraries. About the only thing it can’t do is display color since it’s grayscale only. The Onyx Boox Max 3 is especially useful for anyone who spends hours a day pouring over PDFs and needs to make notes on the pages, mark them up, highlight passages, or even translate text. It ships with 4GB of RAM, a stylus, charging cable, HDMI cable, and protective sleeve.

reMarkable ($499). ReMarkable is billed as the digital notebook for people who don’t want to give up paper. It’s designed to feel like paper as you read, draw, and write on it. This 10.3-inch smart notebook not only feels like paper but also sounds like it when you write or draw on it with the included marker. The pressure-sensitive marker never requires charging or pairing. This notebook doubles an e-reader. The surface contains the company’s own Canvas technology, which uses black ink particles to reflect natural light. When you buy a reMarkable tablet, it ships with not only the marker but also with eight replacement tips and a cable for recharging.

Rocketbook Everlast ($32). The Rocketbook Everlast Notebook is a smart and reusable paper notebook. The predecessor version of the Rocketbook had users write with a special pen and then use a microwave oven to remove the writing. In the 2019 version, you write on special waterproof pages with a Pilot Frixion pen and wipe the pages clean with a damp microfiber cloth when you’re done. So, what makes it a smart notebook? Using a companion app, you scan your pages to turn them into digital notes. At the bottom of each page are a few icons. You assign each symbol to a destination in one of your cloud storage services, such as a particular folder in Google Drive or a notebook in Evernote. Whenever you write on a page, you put color in the corresponding icon, and the app files your pages accordingly when you scan them. The app works with Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, and email, with support for a few other services in the works. The book comes in four colors (black, red, midnight blue, and teal) and two sizes (8.5 X 11 inches with 32 pages or 6 X 8.8 inches with 36 pages).

Wacom Bamboo Folio ($199). The Wacom Bamboo Folio is for people who love to write on paper with a pen but also want the benefits of digitized notes. Wacom has long been a leader in digital tablets, especially those for drawing and sketching. The Bamboo Folio puts an exciting twist on the concept of a smart notebook, however. It’s a paper pad tucked into a little folio case, and the back of the case is a smart surface. When you write or draw on the paper, the smart surface records your marks. It stores them and later transfers them wirelessly to a companion app. You never have to scan your handwritten pages, but you get the same result as if you did.
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Wacom also sells a less expensive Bamboo Slate ($129.99). It works similarly, but it’s a slab rather than a folded folio.

Google is kicking off Cybersecurity Awareness Month by rolling out new tools that give customers greater control over their privacy when using Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Assistant. The company has confirmed that it’s launching incognito mode for Maps, which will debut on Android this month before expanding to iOS “soon.” 

When you turn on incognito mode in Maps, your Maps activity on that device, like the places you search for, won’t be saved to your Google Account and won’t be used to personalize your Maps experience,” Google’s Eric Miraglia wrote in a blog post. 

As for YouTube, Google is introducing the same rolling auto-delete feature that can already automatically clear out your location history and web data at an interval of your choosing. “Set the time period to keep your data — 3 months, 18 months, or until you delete it, just like Location History and Web & App Activity — and we’ll take care of the rest,” Miraglia wrote. Pretty straightforward.

And last, Google is letting you wipe recent voice commands or questions to Google Assistant without having to open an app on your phone. Now you can say “Hey Google, delete the last thing I said to you” or “delete everything I said to you last week” and that data will be erased. Unfortunately, you can’t delete more than a week’s worth of Google Assistant history using your voice. For that, you’ll still have to dig into the Assistant’s settings menu. 

Assistant is also now better prepared for a question like “Hey Google, how do you keep my data safe?” According to Miraglia, the answer you get “will share information about how we keep your data private and secure.”
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Alongside these new options, Google is also building a password checkup feature right into its password manager, which syncs logins across Chrome and Android. You’ll be able to quickly check if your password was compromised in a third-party breach, find any passwords you’re reusing in multiple places, or replace weak, easy-to-guess passwords you might have in place for some accounts.

You hear the warning every time you fly: Please set all devices to airplane mode. But what happens if you don't?

It’s not that long ago that airlines stopped telling passengers to keep their mobile phones, tablets, e-readers and other devices turned off throughout the flight. 

Why Airplane Mode. We’re asked to turn our devices off or to put them in Airplane Mode because of electromagnetic interference from phones, tablets, e-readers, electronic headsets, and more. Since some planes were built before these became a thing, it took a while for the industry to make sure it was entirely safe to use them.

These days, you’ll even see iPads and other tablets in the flight deck, which pilots use to store paperwork instead of lugging around big bags with actual paper in them. You’ll see flight attendants using tablets and big phones too, either instead of or in addition to those reams and reams of dot-matrix printed paperwork. All those devices have been tested extensively to make sure there’s no interference.  

That testing happened during the rigorous qualification process to enable airlines to offer inflight internet. Part of that testing process is creating enough electromagnetic interference to represent an entire cabin full of devices of a variety of sizes, including some that are malfunctioning. Pretty much every airliner-equipment combo operated by a major international airline has now been tested.

So, what happens if I don't put my phone on airplane mode? 

For years, safety regulators, airlines, aircraft manufacturers, and everyone else in the industry has known that there are dozens of devices left out of airplane mode on every flight. In a way, the fact that planes haven’t fallen out of the sky willy-nilly because someone left their Kindle on is the best demonstration that, for the most part, most devices don’t affect most planes.

But “most” isn’t good enough for aviation. Some folks don’t know that their Kindle even has 3G, or that the Bluetooth on their watch or headphones or other device counts as needing to be put into airplane mode. Some forget that they’ve packed one of those devices in the overhead bin. Some even blatantly ignore the rules, assuming that their vital email on that BlackBerry isn’t going to make their plane start to plummet. And it probably isn’t. 

The real reason to be sure your phone is put into Airplane Mode is to be sure that you don’t accidentally connect to the in-flight roaming network and get billed for time on that network. This is also true if you are in a foreign country. Airplane Mode keeps your cellular devices from roaming on a local network which could generate huge charges depending on how long you are in-country. That’s also true for cruises.
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The other big reason to use Airplane Mode while on aircraft is that the effort your cell phone goes through to keep scanning and tower hopping at fly-by speeds can drain your battery in a big way.