Steve Greenberg, author of Gadget Nation www.gadgetnation.net shows us what we need for back to school and where to get it:
Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2009
www.microsoft.com/learningspace
Computrace LoJack for Laptops
Motorola ROKR E8
Capresso H2O Plus Water Kettle
College Survival Kit by Ms. & Mrs.
iHome IH9 Black Alarm Clock with iPod Charger
www.bedbathandbeyond.com/product.asp?order_num=-1&SKU=15041412
Alarm Clock with Bed Shaker
As kids get older, the drudgery of homework and exams may start to put a damper on their excitement about school. But introducing a few cool tools and concepts can help rekindle your child’s passion for learning—and allow both you and your child to have a lot of fun as well.
Prove to your kids that science isn’t just for “nerds” with the cool experiments in Scientific Explorer kits. Your kids can concoct their own soda pop and bubble gum, freak out their friends with realistic coagulating blood and edible eyes, or customize their own perfumes, lotions and bath gels. (Maybe first place at the science fair isn’t too far behind!)
Leapfrog’s Fly Fusion pentop computer has practical applications in the classroom—your child can use it to take notes in class, then upload their writing to the computer, where it’ll be automatically translated to text. But this cool tool offers so much more: It plays MP3s and games, and if your child draws a piano keyboard or a calculator on the page, your child can then use the pen to create their own music or figure out the tip at the restaurant. (Consider picking up an extra one for the adults in your house as well.)
Encourage some more quality time with your kids before they hit their teens with the cool ideas you’ll find in the new book Creative Family: How to Encourage Imagination and Nurture Family Connections by Amanda Blake Soule . It offers suggestions for more homespun activities you can all do together, from crafting your own toys out of objects found in nature to painting your own artwork to frame on your walls. The bonus—you’ll have fun right along with them!
—Lisa Milbrand
The textbooks for a single semester at college can easily cost more than a solid laptop computer. But your college-bound student can skip the long line at the bookstore (and the exorbitant prices) and find bargains galore online. Here’s how to teach your aspiring student a little economics 101.
Buying Books
Start your search on Half.com, eBay’s media-superstore partner, where regular folks (and some full-time booksellers) list their old books, DVDs and video games for sale. Four out of our six sample books were cheapest here. The downside? You’ll likely be buying books from several different sellers—and you may need to wait a bit longer for them to be shipped via media mail.
Both big-name bookstores, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com offer textbooks sold new at a discount, or used through authorized booksellers. Of the two, Barnes & Noble was generally cheaper, though only if you spring for the $25 annual membership.
Textbooks.com also offers bargains, but often seems to have a more limited selection than the other three (some books were not available on their site).
Selling Books
After you’ve fulfilled your Chemistry 101 requirement, odds are you won’t be browsing that book on spring break. So consider selling them to recoup some of your cash—both Half.com and Textbooks.com allow you to offload old texts.
Half.com is the potentially more lucrative (but more time consuming) option—you’d list your books on the site, wait for them to sell, then send them out individually. It involves more trips to the post office and a longer timeframe (who knows when someone will purchase your book), but a better chance of getting most of your money back—especially if you purchased it used and kept it in good condition.
Textbooks.com is the no-fuss option. Punch in the ISBN codes from your books, and they give you a price quote. They’ll send you a mailing label (shipping’s on them), and once they receive your books and look them over, they’ll send a check. Quoted buyback prices were about 20 percent of the full listing price, but nearly 50 percent of the cheapest prices we’d found, so it’d be a good option for quick cash. (And if you bought your books here, they guarantee a 50 percent buyback fee.)
We have stuff crammed into every nook and cranny in our house—and even as I try to get rid of the things we don’t use, we still seem to be more cluttered than ever. But there are some cool new tools that can help you simplify your life—and free up some valuable real estate.
Amazon Kindle - On this 5 x 7 literary marvel, you can download your favorite books, newspapers, magazines and blogs wirelessly right to the device in just a minute within the US, or onto a computer and passed on via USB cable if you’re overseas. While the memory on the Kindle itself can accommodate more than 200 books (with a SD storage card, you can easily store a sizeable library on the device), Amazon keeps track of every book and subscription you buy—so you can read the Kite Runner and clear it from your Kindle—then redownload it to your machine when you want to revisit it. You can also easily transfer your own documents for reading on the go, access Wikipedia and an embedded dictionary, and add notes to books as you’re reading, so you’ll remember that point you wanted to make at your next book club. While you won’t be able to entirely clear your bookshelves (Harry Potter, for instance, isn’t available), you’ll be able to cut back considerably on your book space.
Apple TV
Apple TV has been trying to do for movies what the company’s ubiquitous iPods have done for music—enable easy downloads of movie and TV rentals and purchases, so you won’t have to worry about your dog eating a DVD (it happened to us), or make room for all those jewel boxes. Connect this simple white square to your TV, and use the remote to browse iTunes for shows and movies you want to watch from their ever-growing library (currently at about 2,000 movies and nearly 1,000 TV shows). Rentals start at $2.99—you have 30 days to watch a movie after you rent it, and once you start watching it, it disappears after 24 hours (though you can let your kids watch Finding Nemo as many times as they want in that 24-hour span). And movies start at $9.99—cheaper than all but the bargain-basement titles on DVD.
Audiovox Home Base - Scrap the clunky bulletin board and array of picture frames with this clever all-in-one gadget, which lets you showcase up to 120 photos on a slideshow, keep track of future events and current to-dos with audio (and on some models, video) memos that can be tagged to certain dates, and even leave old-fashioned notes for loved ones with the dry-erase marker or post-its.
—Lisa Milbrand
If you are insulted by the Obama cover on this week’s New Yorker magazine then you are not familiar with the publication. It is read by people who keep up with national and international issues and who understand that Obama has been misrepresented by some as a radical Arab terrorist. The cover publicizes that conceit and if they (Conde Nast) happen to sell more magazines with it, then so be it. It is not intended to disparage the Obamas at all. In fact, it is very likely that the majority of the New Yorker’s readers actually support Obama.
Nikon COOLPIX P80
Nikon COOLPIX S550
Sprint Instinct
Ubisoft’s My Weight Loss Coach for Nintendo DS
Panasonic SC-BT100 Home Theater in a Box (Blu-ray Player)
Panasonic VIERA LCD TV TC-32LZ800
Arrow Backpacker Pontoon Boat
Fremont Pontoon Boat
Steve’s Book GADGET NATION
You can’t hit the road these days without packing thousands of dollars of electronics, and opening yourself up to a serious loss. But there are some easy ways to protect your belongings—and help recover them if they disappear.
If you’ve ever left a cell phone or digital camera in a cab or on the subway, you know how tough it can be to find it again. Make it easier for a Good Samaritan to return your belongings with a system like GadgetTrak. They supply heavy-duty, metal stickers to place on your treasured belongings, each with a unique code and an 800 number and website address the finder can use to connect with you and reunite with your gadget.
Laptop theft has become a huge problem—nearly one million of them will be stolen this year alone. But there are a few ways to trace your computer and get it back, with a little help from law enforcement. Computrace’s LoJack for Laptops installs software to your hard drive that can trace your computer when it’s logged into the internet again—and will pass on its location to law enforcement. If you’re more worried about protecting sensitive files on the computer than the computer itself, consider Laptop Cop. The software not only tracks the laptop’s location, but it enables you to log into your computer remotely (and surreptitiously) to access your files, copy them to another computer and then delete them from the stolen laptop.
Of course, there’s the constant problem of missing luggage. But if you throw a Zoombak A-GPS Universal Locator into your bag, you can log onto the Internet or call customer service and get real-time information on where your bag ended up—though odds are, you’ll be hard pressed to get an answer from your airline as to why your bag ended up in San Diego instead of Santa Fe. —Lisa Milbrand
I took about 500 pictures in the first 30-odd years of my life—and about 3,000 in the last three, thanks to the ease of digital photography (and to my photogenic daughter). But managing several gigabytes worth of priceless memories can be a challenge—especially when most of us end up leaving the images right on the card in the camera.
Usually, I can muster the energy to get the images onto my computer—I use a Mac, so once I plug my camera into the computer via USB, iPhoto automatically opens and with a single click, the images are downloaded. But if that’s too much effort, you can always get an Eye-Fi - an SD card that automatically uploads your images to your computer and your favorite photosharing site (including Flickr, Kodak Gallery and Facebook) once you hit your Wi-Fi network at home. The latest incarnation, Eye-Fi Explore, takes it one step further, allowing you to automatically upload photos on the road from Wayport Wi-Fi hotspots (you’ll find about 10,000 scattered around the US).
Generally, though, once a photo makes it onto my computer, it stays there. I’ve made several cool photobooks and slideshows using the iPhoto software—our favorites are the wallet-sized softcovers, which allow doting grandparents to whip out pictures of the little ones and show them to anyone within sight. Kodak Gallery also offers mini brag books, as does Flickr’s Qoop.
I aspire to make the rich scrapbook pages and cool, easy-to-embed blog slideshows I’ve seen produced by Smilebox, but their software is PC only at the moment. Photobucket also offers some cool slideshow options—and lets you store up to 10,000 photos for free—an excellent backup in case you ever experience a hard-drive failure.
But why stop at slideshows? Moo cards, available at Flickr, are pint-sized business cards that feature your favorite images on the back. (They’d be perfect “personal cards” to hand out to fellow mommies at the playground to set up future playdates.) Or turn a favorite image into actual art—Photowow will blow up a high-resolution image and put it onto canvas for you. They can even turn your portrait a Warhol-esque pop-art masterpiece. —Lisa Milbrand
The Saudis are opening the spigot to the tune of another 500,000 barrels a day. Yoo Hoo!
But the experts agree it will have little effect on gas prices and the first hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico will blow away any savings we’ve been able to wring out.
The Saudis are concerned that continued price escalation could cut demand and impact the world’s economies. Price escalation also makes alternative energies more attractive and would adversely affect their profits.
Rather than drilling in the environmental zones like Alaska and continuing our dependence on oil why don’t we take this opportunity to put our full weight behind alternative energy that is cleaner? We can’t walk away from oil overnight but any drop in imports will make the oil we do import cheaper. Inflationary pressures will ease and we will all be able to breathe a little easier.
Wouldn’t it be great if the mark of a successful post-fossil fuel country would be its beauty?
I like Obama. And I see that some people are hurting. They are making choices between gas and food. A million homes are in foreclosure. The war is draining our resources. Businesses are laying people off.
Fortunately Obama wants to cut taxes for the people who need it most. And this past two months’ history shows those people will likely put that money right back into the economy by spending it. (Unfortunately, it won’t go as far as it would have if they weren’t paying $4.50 a gallon for gas.) And that’s great for Wal-Mart and the other value stores but what about Macy’s, Nordstrom’s and others? The economic pick-up is limited and what does that mean about its sustainability? When the stimulus checks have all been cashed, what then? What happens next summer?
Experts recognize that the credit markets will continue to sort themselves out through ’09 (and likely into ’10) and although the cost of oil may pause and even dip world oil demand will increase by 70% by 2050. Any relief in the near-term will be temporary. Our economic problems are not going away.
Will we continue to get stimulus checks throughout 2009? Not likely. Then what will happen to those who need it most? At that point, will there be more people who need it most? Logic says yes.
The BEST thing we can do for those who need it most is to create jobs. Why not make it advantageous for business to hire? Don’t just cut the corporate tax but cut it in direct relation to the size of the company and the number of employees being hired.
