🔥 The battery mistake grounding flights

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🤯 WOW! A laptop caught fire on an American Airlines flight from Atlanta last month, with 130 people aboard. The crew smothered it in a fireproof containment bag. One passenger went to the hospital. It’s one of 56 battery smoke-and-fire incidents on planes this year. That’s more than one a week.

The Short Version: Lithium batteries ride in the cabin, never in checked luggage. A hot, swollen or dropped device stays home. And if you smell smoke, speak up instantly. Safety rules below, plus the three chargers I’d board with.

📖 Read time: 3 minutes

Picture this. You’re 30 minutes from landing in Dallas. Tray table up, shoes back on, thinking about how long until you’re home in your own bed. Then smoke starts pouring from a laptop a few rows ahead of you.

I’m not going to play it cool here. I would be so scared. You’re in a metal tube at 30,000 feet and something is on fire. There’s no pulling over.

This happened on an American Airlines flight from Atlanta last month with 130 people on board. The crew smothered the laptop in a thermal containment bag (a fireproof pouch built for exactly this). One passenger went to the hospital with burns.

There have been 56 battery smoke-and-fire incidents on U.S. flights this year. More than one a week. The FAA handles over 45,000 flights a day, so your odds are tiny. But unlike turbulence or a mechanical issue, this is a crisis inside the cabin.

Nearly every device in your bag runs on a lithium-ion battery. Damage one, overheat it or hit a manufacturing defect, and it can go into thermal runaway. Plain English: The battery cooks itself, each cell igniting the next, and it doesn’t want to stop. A big share of these fires start with cheap, no-name power banks. The $9 mystery brick you grabbed at checkout.

Location is everything. In the cabin, a trained crew can grab a smoking device in seconds. In the cargo hold? Nobody’s down there to notice. That’s the whole ballgame.

FYI, the legal line is 100 watt-hours without airline approval. Every pick below clears it.

🛍️ Kim’s carry-on trio (name brands only, because knockoffs can ignite):

One more habit I want you to steal from me: Charge devices where you can see them. Seat-back pocket or your lap. Not zipped in a bag, not buried in the overhead bin.

Do a 60-second bag check before your Labor Day flight, friend. Because “my laptop died” should only ever refer to a battery. Otherwise your carry-on becomes a carry-out.

🎯 Send this to someone who flies this weekend with a power bank buried somewhere in their luggage. They’ll dig it out before they zip up.

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Robots can draw blood on their own. Another uses a kiosk to print eye prescriptions in 90 seconds or less. No humans needed. 

Watch now before everyone else is talking about it. 👇

▶️ Doctor robots to the rescue →

🚘 Florida blocks Flock: Florida’s Department of Transportation revoked permits for Flock Safety plate readers on state highways (paywall link), giving the company 30 days to remove them. The catch: That’s only 150 of roughly 7,500 statewide. The rest stay up. Still, Florida’s the largest state to pull back. Federal ban bill around the corner, too. Somewhere, 150 cameras watched their own eviction notice arrive.

Toll troll text: Think of the person most likely to fall for this, and give them a call. Fake DMV texts are everywhere, and investigators traced the scam wave to one operation known as the Smishing Triad running roughly 194,000 malicious domains(!) that steal card details and identities. The messages threaten tolls, fines or penalties unless you tap immediately. Don’t. Open the agency’s real website yourself. Delete the text. One tap means canceled cards, credit hits and paperwork.

🚜 Tractor trust fall: Picture a farmer asking John Deere’s AI how to squeeze out more profit while the bot studies the tractor’s fuel, field and operating history. That’s the JD assistant being tested. Deere made 10 promises, including no data sales or commodity speculation. After years of repair disputes, though, trust may require more than 10 corporate commandments and a friendly dashboard. The tractor is your new business consultant, minus the loafers and the steakhouse expense report.

Dropbox dropped box: Remember Dropbox? Crooks recently broke into some accounts through a silly sign-in flaw. A hole let the hackers register your email, and Dropbox linked that new login without ever asking for your password. Dropbox says files weren’t touched, sessions are revoked and the hole’s plugged. If you’ve still got it, open Dropbox security settings, kick out sessions you don’t recognize and change the password. Trust, but verify. Then verify again.

🎮 Grand theft autumn: This is how grown-ups do game launches now. GTA VI comes out Nov. 19, and parents, workers and even soldiers are clearing calendars (paywall link) like it’s Thanksgiving with car theft. A software engineer and dad of three booked five days, planning to hide in his cave. An Army battalion offered a four-day pass for reenlisting. Imagine joining to serve your country to spend four days stealing Jet Skis from fictional retirees. Historians will call it the Great Thanksgiving Withdrawal.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Ever wonder what total strangers see when they land on your Facebook profile? Find out. In the mobile app, tap your profile photo > three dots (top right) > View As. Boom. That’s your public face: Posts, photos, the works. Do this every few months. You’ll be shocked what you thought was private. (That 2014 beach album? Yeah, everyone can see it.) 😱 

One earbud in? You’re missing half the song. Stereo splits audio between ears, so vocals or instruments can vanish when one ear is on real-world duty. The fix takes 10 seconds. On iPhone: Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Mono Audio. On Android: Settings > Accessibility > Audio adjustment or Hearing enhancements > Mono audio. Everything plays in both ears, no matter which one’s listening. Your podcast, fully heard. Your kids, half ignored. Balance. 

🎧 The only earbuds in my bag: I’ve tried them all. The $300 pair, the $200 pair, the ones that promised to change my life. (They didn’t.) Raycon’s are the ones I keep coming back to. Hours of battery, rich sound that’s not tinny and noise cancellation that actually works on a plane. All for a fraction of what AirPods cost. I’d tell a friend. I’m telling you. Grab Raycon earbuds and get 20% off today.* 

Kindle’s built-in reading ruler: Eyes keep losing their place in long paragraphs? Kindle has a fix hiding in the settings. In the app, open a book and tap Aa > More > Reading Ruler. A colored strip follows along line by line, like a bookmark that keeps up. You can tweak the size and color. Easy. 

🐾 Cat keeps starting the Roomba? (It’s always the cat.) Open the iRobot Home app > your robot > Settings > Child & Pet Lock. That kills the buttons on the vacuum itself, but you still have full control from the app. Need to unlock it later without your phone? Power the robot off, tilt it, then press Clean three times. Crisis (and 3 a.m. vacuuming) averted. 

🚗 CarPlay got free upgrades: No new car required. Baseball fans can pull up the MLB app to see live and upcoming games, then tune straight into their team’s radio broadcast. Storm Radar shows weather where you are AND where you’re headed, with alerts and automatic rerouting around the nasty stuff. And Meta AI is popping up in limited testing. Free features for the car you already own? I’ll take that W, no extra innings needed. 

Bad news for anyone who paid $86 for a tiny statue in a museum gift shop.

A growing stash of museum collections can be downloaded as 3D files and turned into physical replicas at home. The British Museum, Smithsonian Open Access and The Met have 100+ high-resolution models (filter with “has 3D image”), most available to download. 

Your printer can manufacture ancient culture between dishwasher parts and a little plastic dragon. One guy uses Claude to clean up and modify the models, then 3D prints and hand-paints them into beautiful decor. 

Check out the prints in action here. What song is played in museums? “U Can’t Touch This.” But now you can!

🎓 What you learned today: Lithium batteries belong in your carry-on, Florida is yanking Flock cameras off state highways, fake toll texts are getting nastier, Dropbox got hit and museum treasures can become 3D-printed home decor. Not bad for one email. Thinking about buying an iPhone, Apple Watch or AirPods? Don’t do it yet. Tomorrow, I’ll go over Apple’s big September reveal that could change prices, trade-in values and deals fast. 

🖐️ The answer: C) 2,617. Taps, types, swipes and scrolls, all day, every day. Heavy users? They more than double that, blowing past 5,400 touches a day. Your thumb has a stricter work schedule than most finance interns. 

What did the finger say to the thumb? I’m in glove with you. (Ouch, that one even hurt me!)

⏰ Snoozed on this one? The Echo Spot is back at its lowest price in over two months.* It’s part alarm clock, part Alexa helper and part tiny smart display for music, reminders, weather and smart lights. At $70, it’s a smart little grab.

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

🏆 THE KIM CHALLENGE: Forward this to ONE person who needs to hear it today. Pick the person who popped into your head while reading. You know who it is.

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Amazon Echo, TruSkin, Govee, @boyboycattcat via Instagram

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