Traxo: Plan your trips with a little help from your friends

Manhattan's Port Authority bus and subway terminal at 41st Street and 8th Avenue is always a hub of action. Now through late September, a "pop-up" shop called Areaware Design To Go is open on the ground floor of the north terminal. It features design products with a travel bent. Some cute items include first aid kits by Help Remedies (the compact, lightweight, and biodegradable containers have bandaids, allergy tables, and so forth), travel journals, canvas bags, and some funky souvenir items, like the "We Are Happy to Serve You" mug. Or, give that special someone a real piece of NYC—a pigeon feather in a glass vial. Areaware, curator of the shop, is a New York-based manufacturer of design products. So there are some other fun things, such as a orange elephant wall-hanging. Areaware also features a few things from up-and-coming artists in the American Design Club. Curious? Check it out through Sept. 26. The space, called Blank Sl8 (it's a partnership between the Times Square Alliance and the Fashion Center Business Improvement District), has a rotating schedule of retailers, so you never know what you might find. About Port Authority: Roughly 200,000 people pass through it on the average weekday. Redevelopment on all sides in recent years, including the Renzo Piano-designed New York Times building, has made the once seedy center a pleasant and safe place to visit.

Tomorrow (Thursday), Bose puts on sale its new QuietComfort 15 noise-canceling headphones, which aim to be the "gold standard" of such devices. The price is $300. The new device replaces one of the company's previous high-end models, the QuietComfort 2. It adds an external microphone to each ear cup, providing additional information to help cancel out more noise. It also improves upon the device's processing power as well as the design of the leather-and-foam ear cushions. I tested the QC15s this morning under the supervision of Bose staff people. Stereos blasted a recording of a jet plane mid-flight. A sound pressure level meter measured a 90 decibel reading, well above an approximately 50 decibel reading for the ordinary noise level in a city store. I found that the QC15 headphones dramatically reduced the sound of the jet plane noise, noticeably more so than with the previous version of Bose headphones, the QC2. Audio quality and headset comfort are what distinguish Bose's products from comparable high-end products. In a test of the QC15, sound reproduction of a song was note perfect, and the earcups rested gently around the ears rather than push down on the ears itself. The headphones are iPhone-compatible out of the box and are powered by triple-A batteries tucked discreetly into one of the earcups. [Bose] ELSEWHERE Gizmodo's review

I rarely get this excited about tech gear, but this morning at a Samsung press preview, I didn't want to let go of the new DualView TL220 ($300). Due out next month, the 12.2-megapixel "smart" camera has two LCDs: a 3-inch touch-screen on the back and a 1.5-inch front display. The front screen lets you take better self-portraits while on vacation or when updating your Facebook profile. (Oh, the vanity!) When you turn on the self-timer, the screen goes black and bright blue numbers count down "3, 2, 1." Now if you want to get in the shot, you don't have to run back and forth. Plus, none of your friends can claim they weren't ready. To make kids look at the camera, the child mode on the front screen shows an animated clown cartoon. (For kids who are afraid of clowns, Samsung will have other downloadable videos to swap out.) Also new is the TL225 ($350), with a larger 3.5-inch LCD screen. As with the TL220, the touch-screen technology means you can delete pictures simply by drawing an X with your finger. Both versions record HD video, and have a 27mm wide-angle lens and a 4.6x zoom. Ships to major retailers the first week of September, but Sears.com is taking pre-orders. Personally, the last time I was this thrilled about a camera was when Nikon streamlined its swivel-lens technology on the Coolpix back in 2002. MORE DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY Shoot Like a Pro

I could probably think of something I like better than a chocolate chip cookie that's just come out of the oven, but it would take me a long, long time. Which is why I think the new Warm Cookie Radar on the Specialty's Café and Bakery website is perhaps the most genius idea I've heard in months. The concept is simple: Click on the Warm Cookie Radar link, and a map pops up with little pulsating cookie icons at all the locations where cookies have just been baked. True, I don't live anywhere near the cities where Specialty's has its shops—the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle, and Chicago—but to my mind, the promise of a freshly-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookie is reason enough to schedule a trip.