Airline Replaces Pilot Manuals with iPads

Pilots on Alaska Airlines are replacing 40 pounds of airline manuals for the whole thing with an iPad version. Pilots think it is great – safer and more efficient – now that everything is in one place. It also cuts down on weight on board and makes sure pilots have the most up-to-date information. The FAA approved of the use of iPads in the air in March.

Sports Tracker App – Way to Keep Kids Off the Couch?

A new, free entry at the iTunes App Store for the iPhone might be a way to help keep your teens off the couch this summer. The Sports Tracker App helps make training more social and lets users track and analyze their performance, share workout data and photos with friends, and as well as data on calories burned. With an active community of millions of users in over 200 countries around the world, Sports Tracker has been used to track more than 90 million training kilometers (58 million miles) in the past year alone.

Slang Writing Creeps into the Classroom

Teachers are complaining that social networking abbreviations and slang are creeping into student writing in school and on assignments. Some analysts see this as an evolution of the language, but others worry it is a dumbing down of communication. Either way, this is some kind of transition period and kids are going to have to learn to adapt to what is expected of them. College essays for example, are one place that texting lingo is seen as a real no-no. How to help kids to figure out what is appropriate where seems to remain an issue, however.

Google’s Chrome Browser Set to Search by Voice or Image

Google users will soon be offering the ability to search by talking to a computer or by dropping an image into a search box when using Google’s Chrome browser. Searching by image is pretty useful and will let users upload vacation pictures with important landmarks and help them figure out where they have been, for example, but not with whom. The new feature will not use face recognition except when the picture is of a celebrity and already exists on the public Web. Got to wonder if face recognition is coming though and what fire storm that will bring… Just another reminder to look over those privacy setting on Facebook and your photo sharing service one more time.

Facebook Privacy Checklist

If you are one of those people who keep putting off checking your Facebook privacy settings or you’ve been meaning to get around to talking to your kids about theirs, check out this helpful article on 5 things to check right now. There have been some recent changes so unless you have looked at your privacy settings in the last week or so, it is worth viewing what’s there.