2009 December | World's Geekiest Dad

Best Goal-Tracking Tool? [Hive Five Call For Contenders]

December 31, 2009 By GeekDad

It’s that resolution-time-of-year again. We want to hear about your favorite tool for tracking and measuring your goals.

Tracking progress towards a goal is a powerful motivator. This week we want to hear all about your favorite tool for tracking your goals and keeping yourself focused on them. What makes your tool effective? Tell us all about it in the comments.

Hive Five nominations take place in the comments, where you post your favorite tool for the job. We get hundreds of comments, so to make your nomination clear, please include it at the top of your comment like so: VOTE: Favorite Goal-Tracking Tool. Please don’t include your vote in a reply to another commenter. Instead, make your vote and reply separate comments. If you don’t follow this format, we may not count your vote. To prevent tampering with the results, votes from first-time commenters may not be counted. After you’ve made your nomination, let us know what makes it stand out from the competition.

About the Hive Five: The Hive Five feature series asks readers to answer the most frequently asked question we get: “Which tool is the best?” Once a week we’ll put out a call for contenders looking for the best solution to a certain problem, then YOU tell us your favorite tools to get the job done. Every weekend, we’ll report back with the top five recommendations and give you a chance to vote on which is best. For an example, check out last week’s Five Best Wallpaper Sites.

Filed Under: Lifehacker

The Mobile Decade: Greatest Gadgets From 10 Years of Innovation

December 31, 2009 By GeekDad

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Others may look back on the years 2000 to 2009 and remember elections, wars, global warming and Michael Jackson, but for gearheads like us, this was the decade that mobile tech grew up.

During the first decade of the 21st century, we saw a whole slew of new mobile technologies capture the public imagination: the smartphone, the MP3 player, the USB stick, touchscreens, Wi-Fi, 3G wireless, pocket camcorders, digital SLRs and more.

Thanks to these inventions, people got increasingly plugged into an always-on, totally portable, always-connected existence. Where we stand now, notebooks outsell desktop PCs, people spend more on mobile phones than on landlines, and portable game consoles outnumber the ones plugged into your TV cabinet.

The products on this list exemplify that trend. While not every gadget here is portable (and many of them are gaming consoles — sorry, we can’t help it if the most exciting hardware innovations are poured into the videogame industry), the arc of the decade clearly reflects an increasingly mobile world.

From the PlayStation 2 to the Kindle 2, what follows are the best gadgets of each year in the “oughts.”

2000: PlayStation 2

Console gaming in the late 1990s kind of sucked. Sure, there was the Nintendo 64, the Sega Dreamcast and, of course, the original Sony PlayStation. But none of these rigs possessed the trifecta of deep game libraries, awesome graphics and multimedia functionality.

Then, at the turn of the millennium, Sony dropped a 100-megaton bomb it dubbed PlayStation 2.

Rich catalog of fun titles? Check. Top-notch graphics? Double-check. Multimedia functionality. Hello, hat trick. The PS2 also flaunted backward compatibility for OG PlayStation games, and it had easily upgradeable memory. Even mass shortages at launch couldn’t hamper the system’s popularity: Folks shelled out more than a thousand bucks for them on eBay.

A decade later the PS2 is the highest selling console in history with more than 138 million units sold. And it’s still growing, even though it’s technically obsolete. Case redesigns, price drops and seemingly unstoppable game-library expansion have virtually assured that the console will remain fresh for years to come. Hell, we just might ask Santa for a slimline PS2 this year. – Daniel Dumas

Gadget Deals of the Day [Dealzmodo]

December 31, 2009 By GeekDad

Cop these bargains before the calendar clicks into the next decade. Get an eMachines 22″ monitor for $99, check out the Sony DSLR with extras for $700, and snag an Ani DiFranco MP3 to groove to this evening.

Top Deals:
• 22″ eMachines E211H Monitor for $99.90 plus free shipping (normally $138).
• Sony a380 14.2 MP DSLR with extras for $700 with free shipping (normally $800).
• Red Letter Year by Ani Difranco (MP3) for $0 (download here).

Hobomodo:
• Coffee at White Castle Jan 1st $0.
• Draw ‘n’ GO! (iPhone) for $0 (normally $.99).
• Red Letter Year by Ani Difranco (MP3) for $0 (download here).
• Amazon Prime – 3 Months for $0 (use this form).
• Blockbuster Total Access 4 week Blu-ray & DVD movies rental for $0 (use coupon code face1m)

If a deal looks too good to be true, investigate the store and see if it’s a good, reputable place to buy. Safe shopping!

[Thanks TechDealDigger, Dealzon, Logic Buy, GamerHotline, Cheap College Gamers, CheapStingyBargains and TechBargains.]

Filed Under: Gizmodo

Time Warner Cable’s Genius Solution to Possible Fox Outage: The Internet! [TimeWarner]

December 31, 2009 By GeekDad

PSSSSST! Hey, Time Warner Cable! If you tell everyone how to watch Fox shows from their PC, they’ll probably start doing it for all your other programming, too! Self-defeating bitterness really is the perfect way to say goodbye to 2009.

The spat between Time Warner and News Corp has been escalating steadily this week, with the latter threatening to pull their content at midnight tonight unless the two sides reach an agreement on subscription fees. Thus far, Time Warner Cable’s main response has thus far been to produce silly full-page ads, but now they’ve pulled out the big guns: spilling the dirty little secret that’ll some day put them out of the TV business.

You could watch their how-to video below, but for a full explanation I’d recommend our own Giz guides to living without cable or satellite TV and home theater PCs. In the meantime, let’s all just sit back and enjoy watching two corporate monoliths greed themselves to death.

[Time Warner Cable via All Things D]