electronics

With Thanksgiving only two days away, people are bringing out their favorite recipes for turkey, gravy, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. How do you keep your recipes from year to year? My father's method was to put his favorite recipes into notebooks that would be brought out every year. But even with laminated pages, eventually his notebooks got pretty messy. My mother used index cards to store recipes, but over time the ingredients would fade, especially if the recipe was popular with the family.

In the search for a better method through software, I discovered some good recipe database programs anyone can use. These handy apps let you store all your favorite Thanksgiving recipes (along with all your other recipes) in a searchable database which you can quickly print out for easy access in the kitchen. You can also catalog things like spices and ingredients on hand, and then search for results using those and other parameters. Some of these apps let you explore other databases online with countless recipe variations and varieties of foods to choose from.… Read more

Way down at the bottom of the electronics section on Target.com is something you'd miss if you weren't looking for it: a tab called "Pre-owned Electronics."

The retailer has been testing out selling some gadgets on its Web site only that have been returned to stores for the past month, but the company finally called attention to the experiment during its quarterly earnings call Tuesday, as Reuters reported.

So far Target is reselling used Nintendo GameCube systems, a variety of Toshiba high-definition TVs, a JVC video camera, and original iPods, as well as iPod Nanos, … Read more

Nvidia is hosting a weekend-long party to celebrate the release of Electronic Arts' Crysis, and gamers from around the San Francisco Bay Area are spending all hours competing for prizes and respect in a desolate warehouse at the former Alameda Naval Air Station.

Several hundred gamers are expected to attend and compete in tournaments playing Crysis, Team Fortress 2, and Madden NFL '08. Nvidia also unveiled a new processor for notebooks during the event at the Area 51 Events Center, which included a look at the state of the PC gaming industry.

For gamers who run out of steam, the … Read more

After years of development, a new class of weapon that uses computer-controlled electronic ignition instead of primers to fire projectiles may be finally taking its much coveted place in the U.S. military inventory.

Brisbane, Australia-based Metal Storm has delivered a four-barrel weapon to the Naval Surface Warfare Center for testing that uses a small electrical current instead a conventional firing pin to deliver stacked rounds at an astounding rate.

How astounding? Try 1 million rounds per minute. That's the rate, by the way, not the volume; still, there's no way you want to be anywhere near the … Read more

As of the end of October, Samsung no longer sells its consumer gadgets in Japan, according to the Associated Press.

The Korean electronics giant had actually pulled its products out of Japanese retail outlets a year ago, but as of the end of last month, it ended its Web presence also.

"We judged direct sales to individual consumers are less profitable than business-to-business sales," Lee Eun-hee, a Samsung spokeswoman, told the AP. Samsung will still sell flat panel monitors, LCD panels, and memory chips directly to businesses.

While Samsung is the largest provider of flat-panel televisions in North … Read more

Despite intense competition, price cuts and a shaky economy, it's going to be another good year for the electronics industry, predicts Sony's Stan Glasgow.

Glasgow, president of Sony Electronics, said that orders from retailers are strong once again this year. Consumers are snapping up high-definition TVs, but also digital cameras and video cameras. Sony's gaining ground in notebooks too: shipments are up by double digits, he said. Sony lost seven days of production out of its San Diego area factory because of the fires in the region (some right near the factory); the company, however, has already … Read more

It's happening again.

If you thought one minute past midnight the day after Thanksgiving was too early to choke out your fellow shoppers in the name of a great deal, you were wrong.

Following last year's decision to offer a $398 laptop several weeks ahead of the traditional Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), Wal-Mart is planning on slashing prices on five items--in its stores, not online--beginning at 8 a.m. this Friday. One of them will be a $348 Acer laptop with 1GB of RAM. The other four items and their prices will be kept secret until … Read more

Thanks to my good friends over at GameSpot, I can now finally let out my breath: Spore is going to come out next spring.

For nearly two years, Spore, the next title from The Sims mastermind Will Wright, was all people in the video games industry could talk about. Well, OK, maybe not the only thing, but one of the major ones.

Then, suddenly, people stopped talking about it as its launch date slipped and slipped and no one knew when, or even if, it would come out.

But according to GameSpot, Wright went on BBC Radio Five Live yesterday … Read more