After a two year streak of staying on the ground, I recently took a plane trip with my family. We got the major logistics right, like packing, getting through the airport, getting on the plane, and so forth. However, while we were on the plane, I found myself in an odd predicament.
The Setup
The day before flying, I took my children to Target. They could each pick out a new toy for the flight. Fortunately, I was able to steer my daughter towards this Paw Patrol watch. Not only is it portable and multi-functional, but it was also on clearance sale!
She wanted to play with it immediately, but I told her that she couldn’t until she was on the plane. I didn’t want her to be bored of it without even having started our trip.
After the children were in bed that evening, I took the toy out of the box to pack. I took out and tested the batteries, and those were fine. As such, I put the batteries back in, threw away the packaging, and stuffed it into my backpack before moving on with other travel preparations.
The Situation
After we reached cruising altitude and when she needed a break from some other activity, I asked my daughter if she wanted her Paw Patrol watch. She replied enthusiastically, so I pulled it out and strapped it to her wrist, then went back to reading my book.
A moment later, she handed it back to me because she was done. Already? What could be wrong? I pressed some buttons, and the screen lit up and showed a variety of activities that presumably were of interest.
But then I pressed some more buttons, and the same thing happened. The watch wasn’t reacting to my inputs. It was just showing the same loop of games over and over again.
The watch was stuck in demo mode.
The Investigation
After apologizing to my daughter, I cursed myself for not testing it at home and for not looking at the manual. However, I was set on figuring out how to get it working.
First, I flipped it over to look for any physical pullout tabs. No luck. Then I remembered I had checked the battery the night before and found nothing anyways.
Next, I tried different combinations of pressing and holding buttons. I figured that the combo must require some of the side buttons, but nothing was working.
This felt like guessing a password. Even worse, I could even get the combination correct but just not hold for long enough.
At that point, I knew I needed to get outside help.
The Hacker
To be clear, I could have paid about $10 for airplane wifi and found the manual online. However, I was also slightly offended that I would be paying more to get the watch working than I paid for the watch in the first place.
More importantly, this was a challenge, and I was going to win.
First, I got my laptop out and got on the wifi. Just in case they didn’t restrict access, I didn’t pay and tried to search something on Google. It came up with a connection error, so I moved on.
Next, I tried joining my personal VPN. Once, I heard that some airlines didn’t block traffic via VPN. Unfortunately, that was blocked as well. Or maybe my personal VPN was down at the time. Either way, it wasn’t working
Next, I used the most modern technology: LLMs. I had recently installed Ollama and downloaded a model. In theory, I had offline access to a significant chunk of human knowledge. I prompted it to help me and got several suggested solutions.
None of which worked.
The Solution
Finally, I looked back at the airline wifi information, and it mentioned that iMessage access was free. With only slight shame, I texted my family group chat for help looking up the manual. A few minutes later, my sister messaged back with some very reasonable instructions and correct instructions.
Final Thoughts
It’s incredible that with access to the internet, anyone has access to most public (and even some private) knowledge of all humankind. Of course, it doesn’t have specific stuff like what my mom’s favorite color is or where my coworker stores his sugar. For general things about how the world works, though, it’s kind of all there.
So it was somewhat jarring not having it accessible and knowing that the information would otherwise be so easy to get if I was somewhere else.
But on that flight, it was actually quite invigorating to need to rely on my wits.
Even if the solution in the end was using the internet to get second-hand internet access.