More Ways to Amuse Yourself in an Airplane...

I did the flight from YYZ to BOS this afternoon--travels went smoothly, except for getting stuck in a traffic jam due to a boat coming off somebody's trailer on the 401.

Anyway, the Air Canada planes that make this flight have these fancy in-flight entertainment centers--you can select which movie you want to watch, TV shows, music, etc.:


Anyway... hey, wait.. that's a USB port next to that...


I wonder if it has power? Hey... I guess it does!


After doing some research on the intarweb, it seems that the plan is for USB to become the new power/charging standard on board planes. However, after doing some more web research, I couldn't find anything set up to actually charge your laptop. Probably would work for small peripherals that draw power from USB.

Anyway, I wondered what might happen if you hooked up your laptop to that USB port... would it recognize it as a peripheral?



Uh oh... it's trying the generic driver instead... agh... it's not an nVidia video card... stop stop!

It also gave me the idea of sitting down next to a relatively gullible looking person on an aiplane, plugging in my laptop to this USB port, starting up Microsoft flight simulator, and start to pretend to fly the plane. Then crash my machine, slap my laptop shut, and start to look really worried...

Either that, or start up the simulator, look at my seatmate, and say, "So hey, I guess you're the copilot today!... man... these airline cutbacks are getting out of hand..."