The biggest technology and gadget show, CES, just kicked off in Las Vegas, and as usual much of the talk surrounds Apple:

Apple is the only company that consistently gets big buzz out of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas - without even attending.

This year will be no different.

Connected TVs - TVs that connect to and can access content from the Internet - will be a big part of CES this year. And just about everyone in tech expects Apple at some point to launch such a television - an iTV - that easily consumes and shares with other Apple devices content served from the company's media-storing iCloud.

Microsoft made news earlier by saying this was the last year they would attend CES/ Why attend if Apple gets all the buzz anyways? Maybe Microsoft should focus on new products instead of protecting its Windows/Office cash cow? Or maybe not . . .

The holiday season is here, and today is Cyber Monday so it's time to go searching for deals. There are a ton of gadget gift guides out there, and Bullz-Eye.com has a gadget section in their 2011 Holiday Gift Guide. The WOWee One Slim Portable Speaker is one of the featured products.

You'll be amazed when you plug this tiny gadget into your MP3 player or phone and turn on some music. Of all the gadgets we've tested recently, the WOWee ONE Slim Portable Speaker is one of our favorites. It's about the size of a deck of cards and easily plugs into any device with an audio jack. All of a sudden you can have a party. The WOWee turns flat, solid surfaces like tables, counters, bumpers, hoods and truck beds into bass-filled sound systems using patented gel technology. The sound changes depending on the type of surface and you can really feel the base on some surfaces. It's perfect for events like tailgates as it provides about 10 hours of tunes and can turn your grill/cooler/hood into a high-end sound system for the whole parking lot. It's also great for impromptu parties as it can fit in your pocket, computer bag or glove compartment. Take it on a trip and have parties in your hotel room or by the pool. The possibilities are endless and kids will love it as well. It seems like everyone listens to music alone these days with their headphones, so the WOWee makes it easier for everyone to share and enjoy music.

There are a ton of gadget gift guides out there, so do your research and you'll find some great stuff. You can start with the ones from USA Today and CNET.

Whether you have a business or just do your printing at home, inkjet cartridges can be very expensive. This is where the printer manufacturers make their money, and you can burn through a lot of money if you do a lot of printing.

The tips for saving money all involve common sense. The first has to do with your printing habits and your printing policies in the office. When possible, print in black at lower quality as opposed to using color at maximum quality. This alone will save you a ton in inkjet fees.

Next, you have to shop around. If you just spend some time online, you can find the lowest price for your cartridges, even the brand name cartridges. One problem is that people wait till they run out if ink to get new cartridges. Then you're in a hurry and it's easier to just go to the local store and pick one up. If you plan ahead, you'll save a ton of money and get in the habit of always keeping a supply.

If you need one right away, look for stores like Cartridge World. They have deep discounts and you can punch in your zip code on their web site to find a store near you.

Another option includes refilling your ink or purchasing off-brand cartridges. This is a matter o preference based upon quality issues. It's not a bad option, but you can save on the brand cartridges if you follow the steps above.

I spent a solid 18 or so of my last 72 hours traveling and I was shocked to see how many tablets are out there. I knew that tablets were likely doing well, but in every airport it seemed there was always one in my field of vision. Tablets, for the most part, are fairly affordable devices, but Samsung wants to offer something for the people with deeper pockets.

At the Millionaire Fair (a concept so deplorable I could puke), Samsung announced that it would offer a Luxury Edition of its Galaxy tablet that would run roughly $1,000. Now, a grand isn't all that bad for a piece of tech, but it is still a tablet, and it's still running Android, which doesn't charge for licensure. I suppose if you have piles of money to swim in, a $1,000 tablet doesn't seem so bad. The Luxury Edition will be limited, available only until the end of January.

The device is expected to launch on Wednesday.

If you're having trouble coming up with the perfect holiday gift this year, we have something that could help you out. Our annual Bullz-Eye Holiday Gift Guide is out, including a section (written by yours truly) specifically devoted to gadgets.

Of course, you can also check out the rest of the guide, which includes games, movies, and virtually any other category of gift you might need help with. Happy shopping!

According to Google's CEO, Chrome OS won't be ready to go in notebooks until after the holiday. It's a bummer, really, because the OS release could produce a glut of development from app makers looking to make web versions of their current software.

The OS was originally supposed launch well before the holidays, then it was pushed back to late November, now it's looking like we won't see it until next year, outside of beta anyway. Google says it will have more to share later in the year. Guess what, guys. It is later in the year. It's very late in the year in fact, so just tell us it won't be ready until next year. That's all we need to know.

Several manufacturers have held a "no comment" status on launching Chrome netbooks. That can't be a good thing. I figured there would be some excitement about a slim new OS that won't have the crazy licensing fees of Microsoft products. Really makes me wonder why the OS has caught a delay. Is Google having trouble partnering with manufacturers? Did they back out after agreeing to support the platform a year ago?

This is seriously cool. All you wannabe home computer builders can feast your eyes on this feat of human engineering. That's right. Your desktop isn't as cool as you thought. You want a cool computer? Dump the LED fans and build that bitch on your wall.

Via: Reddit

It's no secret that internet technology advances much faster than most people can keep up. If you asked your average internet user, you can bet they would have no idea what HTML5 is, why it's important, or what it means for the mobile web. Hell, they might not know what mobile web means.

That's why this chart from Pingdom.com is so crazy. Look how many people are running the current versions of their browsers. Even though Chrome is a notoriously geeky browser, the 90 percent current version stat is impressive. I'm not willing to give credit to the users for most of this. I think we can all admit that the numbers would be much lower if users were totally responsible for the updates. Developers, on the other hand, have done a great job of encouraging updates or even background updating.

For some people, that's a problem, but as technology gets more advanced, it becomes increasingly unlikely that the general population will understand it. Until we hit some sort of soft wall, where the next great leap will be like that of the silicon chip, we won't likely see a general population of users who actually understand what the machine they're using does. Why do you think your parents call you all the time about pop-ups? It's because they click things without thinking and don't understand that the "Whack the Fly!" game is actually an advertisement or a wormbait.

Well, it looks like MG Siegler over at TechCrunch called it. Yesterday, Apple announced the new line of Macbook Air laptops and they'll ship with the little number you see in the picture. That's right, that's your recovery drive.

It's a miniature USB stick, packed with the data that would normally come on an Apple recovery disc. This isn't a huge surprise - more like the natural evolution of data storage. DVDs replaced CDs a while back for their superior storage. Flash drives have long since surpassed DVD storage, but they're still more expensive to make. By stripping away a lot of the plastic and limiting storage, I'd imagine the cost will come down enough that we'll see this option more and more often.

Aside from the new recovery method, the new Air line is looking pretty good. It comes in 11-inch and 13-inch models and is ridiculously thin. Both models have the unibody design and now sport the multi-touch trackpad present on the Macbook line. For me, 11-inches is way too small, especially if it's widescreen. My current 13-inch MB Pro often feels too small, if only because of resolution.

I read this article over at TechCrunch the other day about the eventual demise of the optical drive. It rung home, not because I haven't used my optical drive, but because I just used it this past weekend.

I had traveled back to Ohio for a friend's wedding reception but ended up staying for more than two weeks as my girlfriend lost her grandmother. In the part of Ohio that she's from there isn't much to be had in the way of reliable internet. That meant no Netflix and no access to video I have stored on my network drive. I had to...watch DvDs. It was awful.

Seriously, though, using an optical drive can be kinda brutal. It's hot, loud, and drains your battery much faster than spinning a hard drive does. It can't be too long before we'll see widespread adoption of driveless laptops like the Macbook Air. There is still something about that specific machine that makes me a little nervous, but I treat my current laptop with such care I don't think a change would be too scary.

If you've ever had a laptop stolen or watched a hard drive melt, you know how devastating a data loss can be. A Swedish professor almost had the displeasure of discovering that feeling when his laptop was stolen. Then, a week later, he got a thumb drive in the mail, containing all of his data.

Yes, the laptop thief loaded all of the stolen data onto a drive and sent it to the victim. On the day of the theft, the thief also left behind the professor's credit cards and some cash, all of which was in the laptop bag from which the computer was taken.

When asked about the incident, the professor simply told Swedish press, "this story makes me feel hope for humanity."

The title of this post is a little misleading. USB 3.0 has been out for a while, there just haven't been many peripherals to support it. Several firms finally released USB 3.0 products today, and though they are certainly cool, certainly fast, I certainly won't be buying any of them.

Why? That's my question, actually. Why would I? There is precious little I need to drop onto a thumbdrive these days. Even the raid arrays that launched today are fairly unappealing. My main storage device is attached to my router, and I do nearly all of my backups over the air, which USB 3.0 isn't going to improve. Documents? Pictures? I have Google, Flickr, Facebook, insert-cloud-storage-of-choice. The days of carrying around the few things I really need on a thumbdrive are long gone, replaced by the convenience and security of offsite backups in duplicate or triplicate.

Don't get me wrong, USB 3.0 will be around and become increasingly prevalent over the next several years, but my guess is the general public will hardly notice. The one thing consumers understand about the new transfer technology is price, and it's a price that's hard to justify when it only gives you faster transfer rates on hardware connected devices.

Kingston's new 16GB thumbdrive is $89. The 64GB, a whopping $270. A USB 2.0 64GB stick can be had for half that price, and when the holidays roll around, likely a fifth. I can think of precious few consumer applications that would require the 60Mbps write speed that USB 3.0 will provide. So few, in fact, that I couldn't even name one.

...this. See what I'm talking about? How about that 799 Euro price tag. That's like $1,000 people. For a tablet. For an unproven tablet running Android (which doesn't cost anything to license, by the way) that's one hell of a price tag, and it points to one thing: contracts.

A Samsung exec told the Wall Street Journal that the Galaxy would cost somewhere between $200 and $300, which means the rest will have to be covered somehow, presumably via contracts. There is the remote possibility that Amazon got the price wrong - way wrong - but I doubt it. If Samsung is really going carrier contract for the Galaxy, you can bet the only people buying will be very serious Android enthusiasts, likely people hoping to root the device (which could justify the price tag for some).

It's settled. I'm keeping Facebook. I know it sounds a little conceited, as though you were all sitting around twiddling your thumbs while I decided whether or not I would keep my Facebook. I was thinking about getting rid of it, though, and the reason I decided to keep it is actually kinda cool.

I read an article on TechCrunch just before I moved about 'social media fatigue' and what it means about your involvement in your favorite social networks. The author's basic premise is that fatigue comes when you're using social media too much, spreading yourself too thin over too many useless relationships.

I really appreciate that, mostly because I've always seen Facebook as little more than voyeurism. Yes, it has helped me stay in touch with friends from college, but to this day I get friend requests from people who were never my friends and with whom I haven't spoken in a decade or more. I can't stand that stuff, but when one of them has been my friend, I tend to let everyone in, and I shouldn't have. So today I did my diligence and deleted everyone that I don't know, everyone that I don't talk to on at the very least a semi-regular basis, and anyone I don't want looking at my pictures, my info, my posts.

It's not just keeping Facebook - I want to get good at Facebook. Better, at least. I want to make better use of the tool for the thing I care to use it for, which is keeping in touch with the people I care about. When it stops serving that purpose, it's gone.

Of all the things in the world to be able to lay claim to as "the longest," email addresses probably wouldn't be the first to jump to your mind. For Peter Craig, though, it's a badge of honor. He currently holds the URDB (Universal Record Database) World Record for the longest email address at 345 characters. Here's the full address:

contact-admin-hello-webmaster-info-services-peter-crazy-but-oh-so-ubber-cool-english-alphabet-loverer-abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz@please-try-to.send-me-an-email-if-you-can-possibly-begin-to-remember-this-coz.this-is-the-longest-email-address-known-to-man-but-to-be-honest.this-is-such-a-stupidly-long-sub-domain-it-could-go-on-forever.pacraig.com

Why you would want such a thing is completely beyond me, and this is probably the easiest WR to own. Want to beat Peter? Buy a domain, make an absurd subdomain, and voila! Three hundred and forty-six characters here I come.

Source: Laughing Squid