Stuck for a Christmas Gift for the student or techie in your life? Consider a LiveScribe pen. This handy gizmo makes note taking a blast. Using a special paper that contains nearly invisible gridlines you can take notes while also recording the audio from your meetings or school lectures. Later when you return to the computer (Windows and Mac supported), attach this pen via USB cable and your notes (complete with audio) can be uploaded to the LiveScribe web site for sharing. As you view your written notes (they are displayed on a white background and resemble a PDF document) use the pen to click anywhere in the page. Your Livescribe automatically begins playing back notes taken as you were writing the words you’ve clicked. There are two models – a 1GB and 2GB capacity for $149 and $199 respectively (before 10% discount code). Discount code PulseBTS10 takes 10% off through December 15.

Livescribe

Have you ever wanted to see the exact route you had taken when driving to your relatives for the Holidays?  Or have you ever had your speed demon of a teenager get a ticket?  During a vacation have you ever wanted to Geotag your pictures?  Well if so, then the Visiontac VGPS-900 may be just the device for you.

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I’m presently in Seattle attending Mobius with a group of 20-something other bloggers. I am not sure how much of the discussion will be NDA or open for posting, but I will update as possible…

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Today’s HP Magic Giveaway site is Student Bloggers. Bear in mind that each site will have their own requirements for the giveaway, and they may also have their own rules that will not apply on other sites.

Here’s a quick synopsis of today’s giveaway site’s details…

Student Bloggers:

This is finals season (I bet you thought it was the holiday season) so that’s what you’re going to tell me about. The first requirement:

Tell me your best finals story. What’s the craziest, funniest, most poignant, most surprising, shocking or just plain interesting thing that happened to you during this week that we all look forward to with equal anticipation and dread? I will then share some the best ones (winner or no) on the site at the end of the contest. This can be the time the guy next to you fainted in the middle of an exam, you aced a test because of a fact you heard on Jeopardy, or the time your computer crashed while on the last paragraph of your paper. If you do write about some computer crash story it had better be good. We’ve all heard a ton of those. Keep it fairly short (2-3 paragraphs).

To read Student Blogger’s rules and enter their giveaway, click here.

As always, if you enter on another site we would appreciate you letting them know that we sent you. We would also love to hear back if you are the winner; we love “happy ending” stories!

Popular online one-deal-per-day shopping site Woot! is having one of their popular Woot-Offs today. Instead of offering one deal for the day they are offering up one item right after another. Some deals are better than others – but they all require just $5 in shipping (no matter how many you buy). The site has a very active comment section where loyal Wooters gather to comment (or ridicule) the current deals. The offerings are a combination of factory fresh and refurbished items ranging from electronic gadgets like GPS units to household items like vacuum cleaners. Part of the fun of Woot! is reading the product descriptions which are always hilarious.

Woot!

Yesterday Google add in a new experimental Labs feature to track tasks from within Gmail. If you’re a Gmail user, you’ll love this new capability. From within any email you can now create a To-Do item that opens in a small window in the lower left of your Gmail screen. Tasks can be added by turning on keyboard shortcuts within Gmail and using the shift+t shortcut. First you must turn on tasks which happens in the Settings tab of Gmail. Click on Labs, select Enable next to the Tasks feature and then click on Save Changes at the bottom of the screen. I plan on using this as a simple way to track daily tasks that I need to add into my full time To Do list which I keep online at Toodledo.

Gmail Tasks

pauladrum showed up in my Twitter feed this morning commenting about our story on the Intuit Turbotax additional return printing fee increase (sorry, I’m not buying that this will be cheaper for most people). She pointed out that TaxCut from H&R Block didn’t raise prices and includes 5 e-files for free and no charge for printing. Great information! I only wish she’d been up front in both her profile which makes no mention that she’s VP of Marketing for H&R Block as she mentions casually here. The moral of the story is beware of online comments. Even those which are helpful, such as pauladrum, there can be undisclosed bias. I actually really like following the folks who are passionate about their company and are helpful to others. I just don’t like it when their profile is misleading. If you’re shilling a product in public – you’re profile should show it – and listing “Wife, mother, internet geek, social media advocate aka smore” doesn’t really scream “HR Block Employee” to most people. It’s a jungle out there. Yes, a quick Google (and a sixth sense) quickly led me to Paula’s identity – but how many new users of Twitter (or other Social Media) bother to investigate this? If you’re online making comments in support of any particular company – disclose it please.

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