Black Friday is right around the corner. Not to offend anyone, but going to brick and mortar stores for sales is sort of ridiculous. Getting up in the middle of the night, standing in giant lines, jockeying for position, standing in more giant lines…all for the sake of saving money on a set amount of big ticket items. The marketing is blatant…‘while supplies last’ is likely to mean that there will be roughly a dozen of the cheap LED LCD TVs that look so attractive on paper. You probably got up and did all of that for nothing. Take a note from my book: avoid the giant hassle and shop online. I popped over to my perennial favorite http://www.savings.com for a few ideas. As usual, they didn’t let me down. I am a pretty simple nerd. I have to buy my components on a per-project basis, so my small ticket items are taken care of. I really only have three items on my list, and savings.com has screaming deals on two of three. Item one…Android Tablet For development and general coolness, I want a tab. Badly. Item two…new Android Mobile Device Read: phone. I want a new one…also for development purposes and general coolness. Item three is the new Zelda game for Wii. I have a feeling Katie will get me that…but chances are good that she could save some loot by checking savings.com first. Anyhow…take a look and save yourself a trip.

Have a spooktastic Halloween…. …from your favourite craptastic tech blog

Really, I need to get some glasses. I’ve been putting it off for a long time…left eye is good, but the right eye is pretty much garbage. Insurance policy comes due in January…going to put it off for another two months. Then, time to get out and grab some sweet spectacles. Where do you suppose a tech blogger would go to purchase spectacles? I bet a tech blogger would buy glasses online. I wouldn’t know. I spend more time talking about food than technology. But, I can tell you with some certainty I will be buying my glasses online. More precisely, I will buy them at Zenni Optical. Zenni has revamped their site…looks slick. The glasses were $8.00 per pair…now they are down to flipping $6.95. You could seriously pick up a baker’s dozen of these for less than the price of frames from the stinking mall. Check this out: The webmaster at Zenni managed to stick that feature on his site. You can select a person’s face, and superimpose any of the glasses from the site onto the top of the image. Looking for some aggressive prescription wrap-arounds? Zenni has the hookup there too, bro. Old gentleman, you look tubular. What about gear for the future? Yep…got that too. Now the old gentleman looks equipped to take on a cyborg. Bring it on. Check out that link up there to see for yourself…that app itself is worth the bump. I’m pretty sure I want some future-ass-goggles. Badly.

It would be interesting to see how the market for watches has changed in the past decade. It is reasonable to assume that fewer people are buying watches now, with cellular phones in every pocket. We spend all day starting at glowing rectangles…in the corner of nearly all of those rectangles is a time display. Mobile devices have bridged the gap between finding the time at home, finding the time at work, and finding the time in the car. Pretty much everywhere now. What do chronograph watches have that other time technologies do not? Style. People don’t exactly dole out niceties about alarm clocks. Nice alarm clock, bro. Watches come in all sorts of stylistic styles…symbols of status symbol. I would be willing to bet that watch-wearing iPhone users are checking the iPhone for the time. Very willing. That said, I stumble across some cool watches from time to time. I found this guy on BlueDial: Pretty awesome. That is the niche that appeals to me…merging technology and style. It is great to serve a function, but serving the same function cooly is worth bonus points. Every single time. Hit the link to check out my fav watch site.

You know that part of your brain that makes you do stuff unconsciously, but slowly enough that you have to wonder if it was deliberate? Case in point… You are watching TV, and some botox-faced newscaster mentions something about a stolen wallet. Your find your hand checking the contours of your pockets, making sure that your wallet is still where it should be, by your junk. You feel yourself reaching for it, and try to take control from the brain stem…take charge…you got it. Nope. That was impulse, dog. Well, I don’t rock a wallet in the traditional sense. I use a binder clip to keep my credit cards from migrating to the floor. I also have the same knee jerk reaction to computer part prices as most would have with the wallet example. Hear of a computer type product…look on Newegg. Remember that HP touchscreen tablet I was pining about a few days ago… check this out: That is 20 USD cheaper than I saw on HP’s website, and that is without a NewEgg promo code. Get a promo code and we make that twenty dollar savings from the HP site looks small. Small, like my wallet, which once again, is a binder clip. Even writing about my binder clip makes me check my pocket for my binder clip. I feel for you wallet folk. Check out Newegg…it’ll work itself out. If you feel really bad, check out Savings.com on the regular. The Newegg promo codes are just one of many that those guys toss out there. FWIW, I want that HP even more. Gutted with Ubuntu Unity…that’s the stuff dreams are made of. Nerd dreams are dreams too…nerd dreams are dreams.

Nerd cred…oh indEEd Playing GBA games on a Droid is cool. Playing GBA games on a Droid via a Wiimote is ubercool. Once I can figure out the accelerometer input, I’ll post more. In the meantime, I’ll be playing a little Mario Pinball. Suckers.

Maybe I am a bit jaded. I have spent far too many hours digging around in Dell laptops…that might make a guy sort of jaded. Maybe it is the fact that I am tired of all of the Dells sitting around my garage; time for a new toy, perhaps. Regardless of the root cause, I’ve been taking note lately to the HP discounts hanging around out there, and I really want one. Case in point. Last week at work, my home slice bjordan and I were talking about Unity, and how Ubuntu might be dropping the ball on their netbook OS. I suggested that it was pretty much designed to be run on a tablet, and that it (was) getting good reviews from some power users, even though I hate the term “power user.” Long story short, we both decided that perhaps our netbooks needed upgrades…a la touchscreens. There are kits available to upgrade the Mini 9’s screen to a touch…but, why do that, when this bad boy is on the market: The HP TouchSmart units are awesome. Especially the TouchSmart tm2t series. Imagine that bad boy, WITH WINDOWS TOSSED STRAIGHT THE CRAP TO DEV NULL, running Ubuntu 10.10 with Unity…perfect. No hardware issues, with a slick touchscreen interface. I would love to get my hands and fingers on that sucker…swivel touch swivel awesome. For the win, of course.

You are quite welcome, Chinese food container.

Looking to adopt virtual monsters and or beasts? Well, swantron dot com has you covered, weirdo. Just kidding…I had to look these things up. Curious about moshi monsters cheats, first acquaint yourself with moshi monsters: Well, those cute little guys are associated with a site that has been billed as Facebook for kids. Moshi monsters have million upon millions of users, hence, a need for cheats. Hit that link to see a YouTube video that will help to explain what is going on. I most certainly had to look these things up, in order to author this post. Turns out there is a reason they can pay for me to do this…namely, the bank accounts of the parents of 25 million users. Weird.

I’ve touched on this before, but I needed to give another shout to a true comic genius, Drew at MTTS / Toothpaste / Superpoop. Trifecta of funny…today’s Toothpaste for Dinner is amazingly good: Funny, and honest. Don’t believe me? Check out Reddit for a few minutes…the trolls are rampant. They have trolls trolling trolls, and ranking each other’s trolling abilities. It is all very confusing. Anyhow, Buy a shirt from Drew or something. He probably has some coffee mugs too…seems like that is par for the course as far as blogger merch is concerned. And check out the archive section at Married to the Sea while you are over there…very awesome.