Today’s HP Magic Giveaway sites are The Gadgeteer, GottaBeMobile, and istartedsomething. 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 sites’ details…

The Gadgeteer:

1. Create a completely original piece of gadget inspired techie artwork that includes the word gadgeteer somewhere in it. The artwork can be a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, a carving, whatever you might consider to be art. The sky is the limit, but please be as creative as possible.

2. Take one digital picture of your artwork. Make sure the image is at least 1024×768 resolution. Images smaller than 1024×768 will be disqualified.

3. Email your image to contest@the-gadgeteer.com

4. In the subject line of the email type: HP Magic Giveaway

5. In the body of the email type a short description of your artwork. By short, I mean 10 sentences or less.

6. I will be putting these images up on my flickr stream, so you’ll all be able to enjoy them.

Read the rest of The Gadgeteer’s rules here.

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Here’s the latest from Nokia. Introduced today in Barcelona at their Nokia World 08 conference, the Nokia N97 is a touch screen with flip out keyboard that on the surface beats the iPhone in several features. Here’s what Nokia N97 does that the iPhone doesn’t -Keyboard, Video capabilities, 5 megapixel camera, copy/paste, replaceable battery. What it doesn’t have? 10,000 available apps, iTunes sync. Look for it to start playing catch up in the second quarter 2009.

Nokia N97 Tilting Touch Screen, QWERTY Keyboard

Twitter look alike Pownce has been bought by Six Apart and put’s it out of it’s misery and will shutdown on December 15th. Pownce was started by Leah Culver and Daniel Burka and backed by Kevin Rose for a time.  The story is really interesting and you can see more on that at Valleywag.

What’s interesting, if you even care what you put on Pownce, you can export it by follwing the instructions in the press release.  So will the two of you save all of your little messages about what you were doing while witing inline on Black Friday please export your important data…

Today’s HP Magic Giveaway site is HackCollege. 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…

HackCollege:

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!

Some days in my office the temperature isn’t cold enough to justify heating the whole space. Especially if I’m the only one in the office working or if I expect to leave quickly. For those times I have a small space heater that I use to control the temperature. The problem is that I have to place the thermostat all the way up so that it heats me across the room. Here’s a cool new heater from Vornado. It includes a thermostatic remote control that can be placed anywhere in the room and senses the heat in the immediate area around it. The heater is rated for 5118 BTU/hr and draws 1500 W maximum. There’s also a touch panel right on the heater that controls the temperature for those times when you’ve misplaced the remote.

Vornado TVH 600 - $199

This holiday season GiftCertificates.com launches their first free iPhone application that allows customers to purchase gift cards from their iPhone without having to visit an outside web site. This could be handy in situations where someone “surprises” you with a gift and you have nothing to give them in return. Now you can excuse yourself to the bathroom and purchase a gift certificate for electronic delivery. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like you can store an image of the gift certificate on the iPhone so you’ll still need to use either have a gift certificate shipped or obtain an electronic code. Available now for free via the iTunes App Store.

Top Sellers Include:
Barnes & Noble
Bed, Bath &U Beyond
Gap
Land’s End
Macy’s
Old Navy
REI
SportsAuthority.com
Williams-Sonoma

GiftCards (iTunes link)

Call me what you will- Apple-Fan-Boy, Mac-Convert, Lemming- regardless, I have happily been using Apple products pretty much exclusively for a little over a year now. It started with my Gen 1 iPhone in August of 2007 and it has been downhill (uphill??) ever since.

That “gateway drug” led me to a white 2.2 ghz MacBook.  That in turn led me to a 20 inch iMac. When the MacBook died shortly after getting it (yes Apple’s “it just works” is a distance memory) I used Apple’s willingness to replace it as an opportunity to upgrade to a black 2.4ghz MacBook. Thanks to my frequent visits to eBay to sell lightly used gear, there have been an assortment of Mac notebooks ever since. My current Apple arsenal includes an iPhone 3G, Touch (for reviewing apps for www.whatsoniphone.com) a 24 inch iMac and a new 13 inch unibody MacBook. It all works nicely and the sheer enjoyment I get from using devices built with an eye to both form and function is tremendous. The integration between devices is pretty nice, too. Yup, Apple had me at “Hello”.

So how is it that I a started this post last week from seat 24D on Continental flight 1638 to Aruba on… a 10 inch HP MiniNote 1000?

It all started a week ago when I realized that vacation would be a great time for me to catch up on some posting. (Happy hour margaritas, a nice view of the ocean and a bit of blogging… not a bad way to spend a week.)  Thing was, I haven’t had a chance to put an InvisibleShield on my shiny new MacBook and since I have no illusions that it will likely be part of my on-going serial-notebook ownership, keeping it in pristine condition was a must in order to get top dollar when it eventually makes it to eBay. Add to that the fact that I would have to schlepp it everywhere with me since the safe in our timeshare is not large enough to hold the 13 inch notebook and it didn’t make sense to bring it.

Apple may well come out with a netbook at MacWorld this year (Sir Steve is protesting a bit TOO much!) but that is still the stuff of rumor and wishful thinking. Add to that the fact that, as proficient as I am with typing on my iPhone, it is still not nearly in the same league comfort, speed and accuracy-wise as typing on a keyboard or using voice recognition and I was left with only one option… get a netbook. (Editorial note- as I posted over on whatsoniphone, I ended up using my Touch far more than planned.)

I had a brief flirtation with one of the original EEEPCs last year but found that while it was groundbreaking it was ultimately unusable. I hated the trackpad, it was painfully slow and, to be honest, I’m just not a Linux kind of geek. You get what you pay for but, for me, even if it were free, the eeePC wasn’t something I would ever use.

NetBooks have come a long way since then so I figured it was worth another try.

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This Cedar wood postcard comes completely blank with room for you to carve your message permanently into the back. Imagine the delight when your significant other receives this postcard with your personal message hand etched onto the face. Forget for a moment those hours you spent in the emergency room getting 4 stitches to close the wound caused by that slipping knife. For even more fun bring it to the post office and ask them to measure the card for postage. Happy Holidays.

Prezzybox - carve your postcard

Mark/Space advertises their Missing Sync for BlackBerry with an image of a BlackBerry Bold on their home page. They also issued this press release on November 11, 2008 pronouncing “full synchronization support for BlackBerry Bold”. So you’d think that the product would synchronize data between a BlackBerry and a Mac Address Book (also prominently displayed on their home page).

Wrong. At first it looked as if my contacts were synching up just perfectly. Unfortunately after my second and subsequent synchronizations the contacts on my BlackBerry Bold doubled. And apparently there’s no way around this except to walk through a time consuming workaround (Note: Who buys synchronization software only to require time consuming workarounds?!). I’ll show you the problem and the suggested “fix” from Mark/Space on the next page.

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I rarely buy extended warranties. Mostly I’ve found them to be full of exclusions and loopholes that the provider uses to keep from paying off. So I was a little surprised to be having a conversation last week with my college roommate about extended warranties. He’s a heavy eBay seller and buyer and someone that I expected would avoid the extra expense of warranties like the plague. He told me that he generally does avoid them - except for one warranty provider. Plus he had a secret tip for me that I’ll use to enroll most of my gadgets at a big savings.

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