Wondering where to park your browser during the Apple event today? Here’s an easy list for your clicking pleasure. The action starts at 10:00 am Pacific, 1:00 pm Eastern.

Live from the Apple ‘latest creation’ event – Engadget
Apple Tablet Event Liveblog – Gizmodo
Apple January 27 “Latest Creation” Media Event Live Coverage – The Apple Blog
Apple’s “Latest Creation” Live Event Coverage – Apple Insider
Live From The Apple Tablet Event – TechCrunch

And don’t forget to hit Apple.com after the announcements for official beauty shots and specs.

If all of the retail Black Friday deals just wasn’t enough shopping bliss for you you can rest assured that this year’s Cyber Monday has got the deals you want with internet merchants trying to steal sales from each other.

Here’s a short list of retailers offering Cyber Monday deals:

Amazon Cyber Monday 2009 Deals
Best Buy Cyber Monday
Dell Cyber Monday
HP Cyber Monday 2009
Newegg Cyber Monday Sale
Walmart CyberWeek Sale

Ah the holidays. Getting the right gift for that special someone is tricky, getting one for your computer/gadget fiend family member is a maddening experience. Sure you could go the gift card route but that doesn’t exactly give you that certain sense of satisfaction when you see their face light up once they open a finely wrapped gift.

We’ve created a bit of a shopping list containing some of this year’s hottest computer gear and gadgets you may just want to keep in mind should you be buying for the technology purist.

Read more…

Apple isn’t known for their door-buster savings, and this year’s Black Friday sales event is no different. According to ComputerWorld, low-end iMacs and MacBook Pros will get price reductions of about 8 percent. The quad-core iMac gets a 5 percent price cut while the iPod Touch can be had for 10 percent less.

Overall, they’re OK (some bordering on meh) discounts on Apple gear. As the article points out, there are other places to score better pricing such as a current Best Buy promotion that ends tomorrow. Amazon’s Authorized Apple Reseller page is also a good place to score some savings, oftentimes year-round.

You have to hand it to Intel, their Light Peak fiber optic connection technology has caught the attention of many people due to its insanely high speed capabilities and the possibility of making those future-chic optical cable runs a dream come true.

CNET has a writeup on the technology and why it may become USB’s replacement in the future:

But do we really need to go all the way to optical now? High-speed electrical communications is hard–wires can cause electromagnetic interference, for example, and USB 3 cables can only be 3 meters long compared to 5 meters for USB 2. But technology for transferring data over copper wires, like technology for shrinking computer chips, has defied predictions that it will run out of gas.

Here’s hoping they figure out a way to pipe power along side those fragile pieces of fiber.

Every year Intel likes to gather up lots of interesting bits of technology they’re working on and showcase them at their very own Developer Forum. This year sports the usual dizzying array of nifty technologies from the company and other vendors using their products.

Here’s a collection of links offering in-depth coverage:

World’s First Larrabee Demo, More Clarkdale, Gulftown – AnandTech
Intel Shows off 22nm & 32nm, Sandy Bridge Demoed – AnandTech
Intel Developer Forum Day 1 Coverage, The Continuum – Hot Hardware
IDF 2009: Keynote with Paul Otellini – Legit Reviews
Maloney keynote and first Larrabee demonstration – PC Perspective

If you’re the security conscious type, the sort of person who believes the world is out to get them or at the very least likes to protect their business, or other properties, you might want to check out what the Sports Museum of Los Angeles has done with many D-Link 2-way Audio Internet Cameras and some D-Link Power over Ethernet adapters.

An interesting usage of commodity hardware to protect some very valuable sports memorabilia.

Hit the break for the full PR.

Read more…

The long, and strange, pitting Microsoft and Yahoo corporate interests against each other are over. The two companies are teaming up in order to counter Google’s massive stake in the search engine and advertising business.

Reports state that Yahoo will be using Microsoft’s Bing search engine as a replacement to their own while the company will beef up its advertising network and attempt to lure in more web traffic. Fittingly Yahoo (via AP) has more:

A 10-year deal announced Wednesday gives Microsoft its best shot yet to show its new search technology, Bing, is as good as or better than Google’s. Microsoft also hopes to use Yahoo to divert sales from Google, which generates more than $20 billion a year from ads.

Gaining access to Yahoo’s audience would instantly more than triple Bing’s U.S. market share to 28 percent. That’s still a far cry from the remarkable 65 percent of U.S. searches handled by Google, according to the research firm comScore Inc.

The combination makes for an interesting pairing but who knows how well the web portal and software maker will work together.

Kingston is running a bit of a contest where they’ll be giving away Blizzcon 2009 tickets to 10 lucky entrants. BlizzCon is Blizzard’s gaming convention which encompasses all things…well Blizzard. So you can expect to get your fix of Diablo, StarCraft, and yes World of Warcraft fix at the show which runs from August 21st to the 22nd. It’s only open to US residents.

The company will also be exhibiting their products at the show in Hall C which is nice given that you’ll likely need a memory upgrade anyway if you plan on taking on Diablo III or StarCraft II, those dozens upon dozens of on-screen enemies use up valuable memory space you know.

If you’ve ever been in the unfortunate position of having to return an expensive piece of hardware, under warranty, for repair you might just be feeling the sort of bewilderment that techPowerUp!’s Darksaber is feeling.

His woes begin when his monitor refuses to play nice with his computer and turns from a quoted 10 business day (two week) repair into an almost month long ordeal for the writer. That’s nothing compared to other nightmare repair stories but it does bring to mind some previous experiences of my own.

Hardware repair has been outsourced to so many middle men that your hardware probably won’t get back to you in a short amount of time. Sure most of the time you aren’t paying for enterprise class hardware so you’re going to be suffering from some delays but consumers tend to put up with too much despite most of their hardware being easy repair or replace jobs.

One has to wonder if companies truly wanted to cut down on support costs why they’d have products shipping between middle men before hitting the repair room.