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Working from home used to be an extraordinary concession in extraordinary times—namely, the Covid-19 pandemic that kept us all in our jammies for at least the better part of a year. While many of us have returned to the office to some extent, some vestiges remain. That includes the enduring popularity of at-home walking pads. They’re compact, affordable treadmills that you can slide under a standing desk to rack up some miles and improve your focus while you work.

I’m a recent convert, mainly because it’s so easy to just check if I broke 10,000 steps that day and hop on a walking pad for 20 minutes while watching some holiday rom-com. So it is with great pleasure that I report that our best walking pad, the Urevo CyberPad for Home, is now an unbelievable $139 off.

Unlike most affordable walking pads, the CyberPad has a 14 percent incline. That’s steep enough for a pretty solid workout, even if the speed does not exceed 4 mph. Reviewer Kristin Canning said that she found it smooth and responsive, and her knees didn’t hurt even after hours of walking. It also comes with a Bluetooth remote as well as an app (iOS, Android). You can control the pad with either, and it also has a display screen on the front of the pad that shows speed, incline, time, distance, and calories.

It also has some fun features that you might not see on other, even more expensive pads. With the app, you can control lights that run along the rails of the CyberPad. For well under $500, this is a sturdy, versatile addition to your home office.

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Airlines have averted the threat of major global travel disruption after rushing to fix a software glitch on Airbus A320 jets caused by intense solar radiation. 

Carriers worked through Friday night and into the weekend after aviation regulators said they must fix the problem before resuming flights.

American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Air India were among those that said they had completed software updates by Saturday, along with European low-cost operators Wizz Air and EasyJet.

Data from flight tracker FlightAware showed most big airports reporting good traffic flow, although some had minor problems. 

In the US, where the glitch threatened to disrupt the busy Thanksgiving travel weekend, transportation secretary Sean Duffy said in a social media post on Saturday that carriers had “reported great progress” and were “on track to meet the deadline of this Sunday at midnight to complete the work”. 

Some airlines, however, were harder hit. Colombia’s Avianca said on Friday that more than 70 per cent of its fleet was affected and that it was halting ticket sales until December 8. 

In Asia, Japan’s ANA said on Sunday that it had completed the software updates on all the affected aircraft but that the work had resulted in a “significant number” of domestic flight delays and cancellations over the weekend. The carrier cancelled 95 flights on Saturday, affecting about 13,200 passengers. 

Guillaume Faury, chief executive of Airbus, apologised to airline customers and passengers for the “significant logistical challenges and delays”. The manufacturer’s teams were “working round the clock” to enable carriers to “get planes back in the sky”, Faury wrote in a social media post on Saturday. 

Airbus on Friday had warned that a “significant” number of its A320 family of aircraft, the world’s most widely flown commercial jet, needed an immediate software update after finding that intense solar flare radiation could corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls. 

About 6,000 aircraft, half of the global fleet in service, were affected. Most of the jets have been able to undergo an uncomplicated software fix by reverting to a previous version — a process that takes about two to three hours. But about 900 aircraft require a change in hardware, which will take longer.

Airbus discovered the issue after a JetBlue Airways flight between the US and Mexico suffered a control problem and a sudden drop in altitude, which forced an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida.

The investigation traced the problem to a flight system that sends commands from the pilot’s sidestick to elevators at the rear of the plane. Those elevators control the aircraft’s pitch or nose angle.