As they have spread their products across iPhone, iPad, Android and Kindle Fire … could the Nook Tablet have been far behind? Of course not! According to Marti Miernik, Head of Communications of G5 Entertainment and all around cool person: “Mobile gaming has taken off! The continued growth of smartphone and tablet sales and increasing app downloads – all point to a bright future for the industry. With tens of millions of gamers already part of our gaming network, the demand for G5 games is continuing to accelerate. We’ve got an amazing line up of games ready to share with our gamers. We’re very pleased to extend our offerings to Nook platforms.” So now we are getting the first three games in what is sure to be an onslaught of Nook Tablet games from G5: Stand O’Food, Supermarket Mania and Mahjongg Artifacts. Here is the press release: By popular demand, leading casual games publisher G5 Entertainment, today announced that it will extend its game offerings to Nook Color and Nook Tablet. In the coming weeks, G5 will release Stand O’Food, Supermarket Mania and Mahjongg Artifacts, with many more games to be released in future months. These award winning games have [...]

For many years, Android lovers have suffered. Apple’s iPhone and iPod had these wonderful speaker docks that allowed their owners to enjoy music without ear buds; plus many of those docks also included a remote that could be used to control the music from across the room. Finally Android users can breathe a sigh of relief, thanks to Digital Innovation’s new Speaker Dock for Android.  I was lucky enough not just to receive one to review, but to also give feedback through its early development stage. Is it as good as some of the better iPhone docks?  Let’s find out.

We are all feeling the financial pinch! Blue Plate Special is a weekly review of bargain apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Nothing over $.99. That’s right, its baaaack! After a short hiatus, the Blue Plate Special is back! I will be tweaking the format a bit to hopefully bring you more applications more often. Some of the apps may be on sale and require immediate download for the low price and some posts may contain several apps. Get your phones, iPads and iPod touches ready and check back often for the best deals in the app store! Without further ado, let’s get to saving! There are tons of options for everyone to get news and blog posts on a daily basis. Just look up RSS readers in any app store and you will find pages of solutions to gather just about any kind of post or story you are interested in. We will save hashing out which ones are the best for another day, but however you decide to do it, reading tons of stories is simple. When I discovered Squrl on my iPhone, it never dawned on me that the same could be done with videos. Squrl [...]

Welcome back to another weekend of game deals for you to enjoy! Things seem to be cranking up again on the deals, headlined by the awesome 75% off sale on the Neverwinter Nights collection at GamersGate. If you have ANY interest in Dungeons & Dragons, the RPG genre, or great games in general … grab the entire collection for $10.18! As a reminder, I have refocused on only those sites I feel bring great deals AND great customer experience to the table, including Amazon, Beamdog, Desura, DotEmu, GamersGate, Mac App Store and Steam. I have two ‘featured’ games from Get Games because they activate on Steam, so you avoid their silly install limits. Also, I am more tightly focusing on deals of 75% off or more, with occasional 50% sales, but in addition will also be trimming back to fewer than 25 deals per site to keep the list under control. I am continuing my ‘top weekend deals’ section where I grab my favorite 5 or so deals of the week and provide direct links! For these games I select based on how good the game is as well as how sweet the deal – but each week there are [...]

While there are many who simply don’t ‘get’ dubstep/electronica music in general and folks like Skrillex or Deadmau5 in specific … there can be little debate at the massive impact they have had on music this year. Having been to a Skrillex concert with one son and a relatively high profile rap concert with my other son this year … the difference in the energy, commitment and enthusiasm in the largely 18-24 year old audiences was stunning. The dubstep crowd was simply on fire the entire time, and Skrillex and his ‘Mothership Tour’ (not to be confused with P-Funk’s Mothership Connection’) responded by putting on an amazing show.

Digital textbooks are a bit like alchemy. Everyone wants to find the magic formula, but the experiments just come out as useless lumps, rather than shiny bits of gold. Even iBooks 2 has many skeptics, despite Apple’s deep pockets and impressive publishing contacts. But the best illustration of how tangled and inefficient the eTextbook market is can be seen in the fight between Cengage (a publisher) and Kno (one of the 49,000 services trying to cash in on digital learning).

Admittedly, this winter for Ohio has been a bust where snow is concerned. However, living where I do winter inhabitants are occasionally bedeviled by ice storms or significant ice accumulation. Late January for me was one such episode where we received between 0.25″ to 0.5″ of ice accumulation and a dusting of freezing sleet. Walking in such weather on untreated or partially treated surfaces can be very tricky. Fortunately for me as a Christmas gift I received two pairs of Snowtrax 2 slip-on cleats that made all the difference on that treacherous day.

Watch how my thought process goes … 1. We have a Beta fish named Brad; he lives in a goldfish bowl that sits on our credenza, and every chance she gets, our cat Avah likes to drink water from his bowl. She’s not trying to eat Brad, or at least we haven’t seen her try, but she seems to love his fish flavored water. This bothers me, because she has been known to lap his water down to less than half a bowl when we have been away. 2. In order to really see Brad I have to bend down, because the credenza is counter level and not eye level. This means I don’t enjoy his fiery colors nearly as often as I would like to. Those are two of the arguments I’m using to justify purchasing the Synthetik Park Wall Aquarium. Pretty convincing reasons, right?

I absolutely loved Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars HD on the iPad and really found it the best overall version of the game that I found more enjoyable than GTA 4. I was also pleasantly surprised at how well the classic GTA 3 translated to the iPad. If you haven’t gotten both of these games – now is your chance! From now until February 20th both games are on sale for $0.99 each! Grand Theft Auto 3 for iPhone/iPad (normal price is $4.99): Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars HD for iPad Only (normal price is $9.99) Sale lasts through Monday, February 20th, so head to the iTunes App Store and grab them now!

I was driving in the car and a tune came on that was awesome. It wasn’t familiar and I wanted to make sure I could hear it again so… at the stop sign of course, I pulled out my iPad, fired up SoundHound, and I searched for the song.

If you are contemplating signing up for a streaming music service, or are unhappy with the one you are using, chances are one major consideration is the music library. While ‘music discovery’ is all well and good, ultimately we all want to just want to listen to music. Now we hear of a new service developed by Matt Montag called ‘Music Smasher’. As the screen at top shows, you simply enter some terms and the site searches across all of the major streaming services. According to Montag: “I developed it to simplify the task of searching across Spotify, Rdio, Grooveshark, MOG, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp to find out who has the music you like,” writes Montag. “Results are almost all linked to playable tracks.” And that is definitely true – when I clicked on ‘Snowfall’ on Rdio or ‘Joy Spring’ from Grooveshark it brought me either into a playing stream or right to the play button. Of course, my search of Emily Remler also revealed something else. Sadly, only ONE of her seven albums is still in print, 1988′s ‘East to Wes’. There are a few songs available on collection CDs, but that is it. The wonderful ‘Retrospective’ 2-CD set that [...]

I had just written about the cool activation credit and price drops from U.S. Cellular, and now they have announced a massive push to expand into 3600 cities with their new 4G/LTE markets this year! Here are the details: U.S. Cellular (NYSE: USM), in conjunction with its partner, King Street Wireless, announced the next markets that will experience high-speed 4G LTE services. In the second half of 2012, customers in more than 3,600 additional cities and towns in urban and rural areas will have access to 4G LTE speeds that are up to 10 times faster than 3G and similar to a cable Internet connection. In addition, the Samsung 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot will join the Samsung Galaxy Tab™ 10.1 and Samsung Galaxy S® Aviator™ smartphone in U.S. Cellular’s 4G LTE device line-up in the spring, and the company will launch a 4G LTE modem and additional 4G LTE smartphones throughout the rest of the year. By the end of 2012, 54 percent of customers will be able to enjoy the faster 4G LTE speeds. The additional markets include select cities in Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin. [...]

Today’s deal brings us the 15.6″ Dell Inspiron 15 Core i3 Laptop plus “a FREE 6-month trial of the Blockbuster Total Access 1-disc plan” for under $400,. Yes, you read that right, a 15.6″ laptop AND 6 months of movies for under $400. The laptop has an Intel Core i3-390M 2.66GHz, 4GB DDR3 memory, a 500GB Hard Drive, an 8X DVD+/-RW, 802.11n WiFi, a VGA Webcam, a 6-cell battery and more. Normally it would run $519.99 but our Gear Sponsor has found it for $120 off. That brings the laptop AND the six months of movies down to a price of just $399.99. AND, it will ship for free. Details and ordering can be found here on the deal page. Gear Deal Dell Inspiron 15 Core i3 15.6″ Laptop plus 6-month Blockbuster trial via LogicBUY

 “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” -  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Yes, space IS big, but that is only one side of the coin of the known Universe—there are items known and believed to exist that are incredibly small. Cary and Michael Huang have created a fascinating web page, The Scale of the Universe 2 that permits the scientifically voyeuristic to view a large number of items in the Universe to scale relative to each other. Think electrons are small? Think your house is large in the scheme of things? Think again!

  Image courtesy of StarTech Those of us in the IT business know that you simply can’t have enough tools to get the job done. Anything to make life easier, and give you more time to for other things is usually worth it’s weight in gold. StarTech makes some of the coolest and hard to find computing equipment on the market. Almost everything I have used from them works exactly as they said it would and stands up to the harshness of the IT worker lifestyle. Today we are taking a look at one of my favorite products from StarTech, the 4 Bay eSATA USB 3.0 to SATA Hard Drive Docking Station. That’s quite a bit of connectivity compared to most on the market. The best part about this dock is that all 4 drives can be used at the same time through a single connection. The dock has a port multiplier so a single USB 3.0 or eSATA connection will allow you to hot swap 4 drives simultaneously all day long. For those of use who commonly image, format, deploy, or manipulate hard drives, this is great news. Let’s take a look and see if this drive station holds up [...]