See we live in an age where internet shopping is easily the best alternative to shopping in a retail store and it’s surprising that so many people get suckered into buying at the store instead of shopping online for a better price. As you can see this cable from amazon is $25 cheaper than the store brand cable that you can buy at Best Buy (Dynex is best buy’s own brand in case you didn’t know) and it’s the same quality.

I’ve been trying to figure out how these companies get away with charging such a high price for items that can be bought for significantly cheaper online. You’d figure that they would be forced to change their prices but they don’t.

I just wanted to help you all save some money the next time you buy a new printer by avoiding the cables at the retail stores and instead buy them online.

On a side note J.K Rowling’s new book is ready for pre-order so get yourselves over to your nearest bookstore or pre-order it through amazon to guarantee your copy

• Cache and cookies, two things we love in real life and hate on the internet.
• 5 tech gifts for the holidays: #2 Harmony 1000 & #3 Palmsize RC Helicopter
• Local Computer Tech Support
• The Problem with Windows System Restore
• 5 tech gifts for the holidays: #4 Pleo Dinosaur & #5 Nintendo Wii

#4 Is the Pleo Dinosaur. This little guy has sensors all over the place and will react to you when you pet him, tug his tail, or scratch his chin. The Pleo Dinosaur will walk around on his own and explore his surroundings, or he will look for attention from you if you scratch him and interact with him often. This is a great gift for anyone who is interest in robotics, AI, or just a plain old cool tech toy. You can order your Pleo Dinosaur on Tuesday December 18th so be ready, these are going to sell out very fast.

This is definitely a step in the right direction for AI. The Pleo Dinosaur learns as he interact and can even express simple emotions. This will be one of those toys that people will be talking about for years to come. Ugobe has done an excellent job in creating a lifelike creature that can react to touch and respond to its environment.

So if you’re really into robotics, or just want a companion the won’t make a mess around the house, the Pleo Dinosaur is what you want to get.

And finally, the #5 tech gift for the holidays, the Nintendo Wii. This is still one of the hardest tech gifts to get. The Nintendo Wii is one of the most innovative game consoles ever created. With party style and family oriented games, a sleek design and motion sensing controllers, the Nintendo Wii is above all the other game consoles out there. People of all ages can enjoy the Nintendo Wii and everything it has to offer. This is also the best game console to own if you have a lot of parties, because most of the games offer multi-player for up to 4 people.

This system is very hard to find, so you might have to shop around a bit but I’ve provided the best place to search with the best price I’ve found.

So there they are, my final 2 tech gifts for the holidays, the Pleo Dinosaur and the Nintendo Wii.

So to recap, the 5 tech gifts for the holidays are:

1. Canon PowerShot SD850
2. Logitech Harmony 1000 Advanced Universal Remote
3. Palmsize RC Helicopter
4. Pleo Dinosaur
5. Nintendo Wii

Happy Holidays to everyone and keep checking back because you never know what going to be on the site next.

• 5 tech gifts for the holidays: #2 Harmony 1000 & #3 Palmsize RC Helicopter
• 5 tech gifts for the holidays: #1 Canon SD850
• Cache and cookies, two things we love in real life and hate on the internet.
• Overpriced Printer Cables

The #2 item on my top 5 list of tech items is the Logitech Harmony 1000 Advanced Universal Remote. This sweet all-in-one remote has a color touch LCD screen, rechargeable battery, and hooks up to your computer via USB cable. This baby is fully programmable to turn on all your media devices, dim your lights, and even activate certain remote controlled fireplaces. All of this is done through an intuitive computer program that comes with the remote. You just enter your device models and the remote control does the rest. As someone who used to do home theater installs, I highly recommend the Logitech Harmony 1000 Advanced Universal Remote for any media centric person.

This is a staple item for anyone that has multiple pieces of home theater equipment that they need to turn on to enjoy their favorite show or movie.

Next up we have one of the hottest tech toys for 2007.

#3 is the Palmsize RC Helicopter. This little guy has some impressive aerial stunts it can perform, as well as a decent flying time per battery charge. I work at a company that allows people to play with toys throughout the day and I see several grown men playing with this as well as a few women.

The Palmsize RC Helicopter makes a great gift for anyone who is interested in flight, geek gifts, or just a plain toy fanatic. And while you’re at it, you can check out all the other interesting things that ThinkGeek.com has to offer.

They have some of the most interesting tech toys around and they’re definitely on my top list of places to buy new things from.

And there you have it folks, only 2 more gifts remain on my 5 tech gifts for the holidays list. Check back soon to catch the final 2 tech gifts of the 5 tech gifts for the holidays list. If you’re not a holiday person or just aren’t in the spirit, check out some of my other posts.

• 5 tech gifts for the holidays: #4 Pleo Dinosaur & #5 Nintendo Wii
• Easy Tech Talk’s Holiday Gift Pick
• 5 tech gifts for the holidays: #1 Canon SD850
• Is technology becoming a burden?
• Cache and cookies, two things we love in real life and hate on the internet.

First up we have a something that no techie should be without these days, a digital camera. The Canon PowerShot SD850 delivers a sharp 8 mega- pixel picture, and has all the extra features like preset camera modes and shot timer, along with everything else one would expect to come with a digital camera. The research has been done for you already, so no searching around for the perfect digital camera at the right price, this is a great digital camera at a reasonable price. So why not buy that special tech person something that they can use to take photos of your family members acting all weird during the holidays.

Come back soon to see the rest of the list, also keep an eye on your RSS feeds so you don’t miss a single post. If you don’t have the RSS feed, you should subscribe to it so you don’t miss anything that goes up on the site.

• 5 tech gifts for the holidays: #2 Harmony 1000 & #3 Palmsize RC Helicopter
• 5 tech gifts for the holidays: #4 Pleo Dinosaur & #5 Nintendo Wii
• Overpriced Printer Cables
• Cache and cookies, two things we love in real life and hate on the internet.

First of all, cookies are not dangerous pieces of software that steal user data.  To quote Wikipedia:

“Cookies are also subject to a number of misconceptions, mostly based on the erroneous notion that they are computer programs. In fact, cookies are simple pieces of data unable to perform any operation by themselves. In particular, they are neither spyware nor viruses, despite the detection of cookies from certain sites by many anti-spyware products.”

So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s see what cookies do.  Cookies are pieces of data that a website sends to your computer to keep track of certain user settings or preferences about the current website. Sites like Amazon.com use cookies to keep track of the items that you place in your shopping cart, that way when you check-out, your items are still there and accounted for.  Think of cookies as the settings you use in your BMW or Mercedes to maintain your steering wheel and seat positions.  They’re not so bad now are they?  Let’s move on to cache.

There are a few different kinds of  cache that get stored on your computer, but they all use the same principle of functionality.  Cache is a temporary storage area that your computer uses to hold certain pieces of data that will allow it to run faster the next time you load a webpage or launch a program.  Imagine you have to hand out 100 flyers, 1 to every person that walks through your front door.  If you had the pile of them on a desk and had to walk to that pile everytime to hand them out it would take a long time.  Now take the pile and hold it in one hand, now you can hand them out as people walk in, that’s how cache works in a simple sense.  The computer stores what it needs for each webpage and program locally either in RAM or on the HDD so it can fetch that data faster than it could re-query the webpage for the data..  Remember those terms?  If not click on either of them to re-read the definitions.

That’s the basic definition of cache and cookies so hopefully you have a little bit of a better understanding of these terms.  As always you can leave comments or feedback and let me know if you want to know more or if something wasn’t quite clear enough.

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• 5 tech gifts for the holidays: #1 Canon SD850