Cyber Monday Shopping
The first Monday after Thanksgiving has been dubbed Cyber Monday, mainly by marketers. The idea is that after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Christmas shoppers return to work and take advantage of high-speed Internet connections at the office to find some online shopping deals. Although there are some fantastic deals, there are also some "bargains" that aren't any better than what you'd find elsewhere. I've been doing a lot of comparison shopping this year, and I've seen quite a few advertised specials that were either cheaper in a retail store or about the same price at several different sites. How do you find the real bargains? If you're shopping online,  ch

Chrome OS on Dell Mini 10v
Just a couple of days after posting that Google is a year away from releasing an easy to install version of the Chrome OS, Dell ends up doing just that. Chrome is still not ready for prime time. However, if you've got a Dell Mini 10v you don't mind potentially wrecking with an experimental OS, you can follow their instructions and download the image to an 8GB USB drive for installation. It's still not stable, and Dell i

You're Not Getting the Google OS for Christmas
As expected, Google released the code for Chrome OS, the Google operating system based on the Chrome Web browser. However, this release isn't even a beta. Google is still a year away from releasing anything that is easy to install or comes pre-installed on new computers. What's the idea behind Chrome OS? It's as simple as it sounds. The entire computer is essentially a Web browser. Nearly everything you do is stored on the Web instead of on

Google Shopping Gets Feature Enhancements
Just in time for the holidays, Google Product Search got some upgrades. The feature updates include bigger pictures for better window shopping, maps to find local stores, and better display of customer reviews.  You can even see video reviews from YouTube. The new reviews on the detail page are actually pretty slick. Not only do you get a graphical bar to show you how the rating were distributed, you can hover over one-line review summar

YouTube Will Auto Caption
If you can't hear, digital streaming video can be pretty unfriendly. Some technologies don't support closed captions. YouTube does, but having videos professionally captioned is also expensive and time consuming. Google is rolling out a new feature that will use the voice to text technology of Google Voice to auto caption videos on YouTube. The technology is less than perfect. Sometimes you get garbled results. That's still much better than nothing, and if you've ever watched the close captioning on your TV, you'll notice  humans don't always do a better