Crave

The free Point Inside app maps your favorite malls, showing you both stores and services.

Shopping is supposed to be fun, dangit! But it's invariably a hassle-filled experience, especially at this time of year.

That's why I never walk into a store without these three iPhone apps at the ready. They're all free, and they make shopping faster, easier, and sometimes even a little less expensive.

CardStar Newly updated with an improved interface and support for 75 additional merchants, CardStar replaces various discount, reward, and membership cards in your wallet. To digitize a card, just enter a merchant name and your barcode number. When you get to the checkout, pull up the onscreen barcode and hand over your phone for scanning. Just don't toss your actual cards until you've done some trial runs, as some scanners have trouble recognizing the iPhone's screen.

pic2shop Suppose you're at Borders, about to plunk down your cash on Brendan Benson's "My Old, Familiar Friend" (good call--best album of 2009, IMHO), but then you wonder: Is this the best price? Find out fast with pic2shop, which scans product barcodes and quickly pulls up prices from thousands of online stores. The latest version offers vastly improved scanning, yet it's still a free app.

Point Inside I've been shopping at the same mall (Twelve Oaks in Novi, MI) since I was a kid, and I still get lost in the place. Where has Point Inside been all my life? This ingenious app provides maps for hundreds of U.S. malls and shopping centers. It can find the malls nearest you, list current mall events and promotions, and even remember where you parked. It's a little buggy, and missing a few major malls in my area, but definitely a great start and a must-have app for mallrats.

OK, shoppers: Those are my picks; now let's hear yours. Hit the comments and tell me about the apps that make your shopping life easier, cheaper, or just a little more fun.

(Credit: Nippon Institute of Technology)

Classrooms in Japan may soon welcome a new 4-foot-tall educational humanoid robot unveiled by Nippon Institute of Technology and other groups.

It will be used to teach software programming and hardware engineering to students, but will also be demonstrated in elementary schools and nursing homes. It will act as a "teacher" in class along with a human teacher.

As explained in Japanese in the video below, the kid-size bot doesn't have a name yet. With its boyish voice, the robot can be heard asking people to give it a "cool name." It then does some dancing and balancing on one leg.

But some details are available. It tips the scales at 33 pounds and has 21 degrees of mechanical freedom. It's equipped with sensing devices including a camera, accelerometers, and gyroscopes, and has a small projector in its head. It can be programmed with Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio.

The price tag is about $132,000, according to Robot Watch.

Its body was engineered by Tokyo robot firm ZMP, known for its small but stylish Nuvo bot. The underlying e-nuvo Humanoid platform is intended for education and research, and is priced around $77,000. The exterior was designed by Znug Design studio.

More photos at the Robot Watch page (in Japanese).

No word yet on how the robot will punish bad students.

Along with Beeker and Fozzie Bear, Animal ranks among my favorite Muppets characters. So it's great not only to see him starring in his own iPhone game, but to report that the game's a blast.

At first blush, The Muppets Animal Drummer from Disney looks like something out of Rock Band: you've got five drums that light up and change colors (and occasionally catch fire); combo bonuses and power-ups that appear as you progress; and Animal himself (itself?) banging away center-stage.

A little bit Rock Band, a little bit Simon, The Muppets Animal Drummer is all fun.

(Credit: Disney)

However, the gameplay's a bit different: Animal bangs out a series of beats using different parts of the drum set and different intervals. Your job is to play back the lick (by tapping the drums) using the exact same phrasing.

It starts off pretty easy, but quickly gets challenging (especially for rhythm-deprived individuals like myself). Even so, I find this a lot more fun than, say, Tap Tap Revenge or Rock Band, both of which reach a level of "impossible" that makes me lose all interest.

Here, you can improve your performance with practice--no superhuman levels of dexterity required.

There's also a Free Play mode that lets you drum along with any of the game's handful of songs (some of which must be unlocked by doing well in Classic mode) or songs in your iPod library. Younger kids in particular will have lots of fun with this, as it's really just noise on top of noise.

Whatever mode you choose, you'll enjoy snippets of Animal's voice along the way--icing on the cake.

And sweet cake it is. Animal Drummer may have built-in kid appeal (assuming kids these days even know who the Muppets are), but it's also plenty of fun for older players who enjoy music- and rhythm-centric games. At $1.99, I can highly recommend it.

HACK THE PLANET

(Credit: Flickr: Lavandalo)

While you're enjoying the holiday break, check out this very special prerecorded Yuletide episode dedicated to the most inaccurate cyberpunk movie ever to tumble out of Hollywood. Of course, we're talking about "Hackers," the cult classic film that first phreaked its way into our hearts way back in 1995.

Oh my.

Directed by Iain Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller, Jesse Bradford, Matthew Lillard, and Fisher Stevens, "Hackers" tells the story of Dade Murphy, aka "Crash Override," a curious kid obsessed with breaking into virtual environments with his laptop computer. After suffering a brutal punishment banning him from using a computer until his 18th birthday, Crash is forced to dust off the keyboard when his new friends discover a "truly heinous" plot to capsize a large ocean tanker.

There's a lot to be said about this movie, but the mass appeal of it is the fantasy world that the hackers call their playground. And however ridiculously inaccurate, it gave kids a visual representation of the mythical cybernetic universe. Oh, and also Angelina Jolie.

There's tons of "Hackers" trivia, bloopers, quotes, and favorite scenes in this episode, so go rent the movie and download the show!

You can give someone the gift of a Netflix subscription--complete with printed gift card.

(Credit: Netflix)

Uh, oh! Just a few more shopping days until the ho-ho-holiday. Are you scrambling for a last-minute gift for your trusty mail carrier, the kids' schoolteacher, a co-worker, or someone else on your list?

Good news: All you need is a printer. These five stores let you print your own gift certificates for fast, easy, and downright special in-person giving:

1. Amazon.com On any Amazon page, click the Gift Cards link, then choose Print a gift card. The minimum amount is $5, but you're not limited to increments: Your certificate can be in the amount of, say, $12.09 if you want.
2. Gifts.com The recipient of a Gifts.com certificate can redeem it at one or more of a hundred-plus stores and restaurants, such as Barnes & Noble, Pottery Barn, and Starbucks.
3. iTunes Obviously you can grab an iTunes gift card in just about any store on the planet, but did you know you can print your own? Just fire up iTunes, click Buy iTunes Gifts, and then choose Printable Gift Certificates. Amounts range from $10-50.
4. Netflix Netflix gift subscriptions start at $8.99 per month, and you can choose just about any duration you want: one month, three months, a year, etc. And that gift includes not just DVDs by mail, but also unlimited streaming to a PC or "Netflix-ready" device like an Xbox.
5. Restaurant.com Once again, Restaurant.com is offering $25 gift certificates for just $2 (with coupon code SANTA). Not familiar with the site? Get the details from one of my earlier posts. Even better, send a free $10 gift certificate to anyone and everyone on your list!

By the way, most of these gift certificates can also be e-mailed--perfect for last-minute gifts that can't be delivered in person. You know, for faraway relatives or, I dunno, beloved bloggers. (Usually all I get in my in-box is a lump of e-coal, sniff, sniff.)

Sending texts with explicit images to one another is a common phenomenon among teenagers.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

Remember when we were all crying about the fact that AT&T delayed the rollout of multimedia messaging on the iPhone? Well, some parents may now be wishing the feature wasn't available at all.

Sending explicit content, such as naked or near-naked photos, via text message--a phenomenon also known as "sexting"--is a familiar phenomenon among some teens, according to survey results released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

The survey, conducted from June 26 to September 24 with the participation of 800 teenagers, is part of the research center's Internet and American Life Project, which tracks the effect of the Internet on American life. It found that 4 percent of cell-owning teens ages 12 to 17 say they've sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of themselves to someone else via text. Fifteen percent say they have received such material.

Older teens, especially those who foot their own cell phone bills, are much more likely to send and receive these images. While 8 percent of 17-year-olds with cell phones have sent a sexually provocative image by text, this number goes up to 17 percent among those who pay their bills themselves. In all, 30 percent of 17-year-olds have received explicit images on their phones.

The survey also shows that while the exchange of nude images mostly takes place among romantic partners or potential partners of the same age, these images are also forwarded to non-partners or people in different age groups. And this is where things can get really ugly.

This year may have been a disaster economy-wise, but app-wise it was awesome.

I mean, consider just a sampling of what 2009 brought us: a wealth of GPS apps (most of them quite good), some way-cool barcode-scanning apps, voice-morphing, auto-tuning (still not sure what that is), and, lest we forget, bobble-head politicians--(OK, maybe that wasn't so much awesome as weird).

The Kindle app brings nearly all the e-book goodness of the real thing to your iPhone--and in color.

With that in mind, I've rounded up the 10 apps that made my year more fun, more productive, and just plain better. I'm not calling these the "best" apps of 2009; they're merely my favorites. (And I'm not including games, as I think that category deserves a list of its own--stay tuned for that.)

1. Dragon Dictation Barely a week old, this app does a shockingly good job turning dictated words into clipboard-ready text. Even more amazing: it's free.

2. How the Grinch Stole Christmas Another newcomer, "Grinch" brings Dr. Seuss to the iPhone in high style. Parents will love it as much as kids.

3. Kindle Anyone who knows me knows I love reading e-books on my iPhone, and the free Kindle app ties to Amazon's currently unmatched e-book store. A few taps and I'm reading free sample chapters or complete novels. (Note to Amazon: It's time to add bookstore browsing to the app.)

4. Public Radio App Though you can get most of the same functionality from the free NPR News, Public Radio App raises the bar with streaming-audio features like pause/rewind and a wake-up-to-public-radio alarm clock. Well worth $2.99.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

This year for Christmas, I finally decided to give my family something that they've been asking me about for more or less the past five years: I told them that I would clean my room.

No, really. I moved out of my childhood home years ago, but more or less shut the door to my room and didn't change a thing. It's sort of a late '90s-early '00s teenage time capsule. There was stuff in there that had not been touched since the Clinton administration. There were magazines with Justin Timberlake on the cover from an era when nobody expected he'd be cast as a Silicon Valley hotshot in a movie directed by the "Fight Club" guy. There were varsity letters and prom photos and model rockets and Warped Tour '01 memorabilia and pretty much whatever else you'd expect to find in the living space of a kid who came of age in the era of "Can't Hardly Wait" and "Dawson's Creek."

That inventory included one almost perfectly preserved AOL 7.0 installer disc, a CD-ROM that boasts "Faster Than Ever!" and offers 1,025 free hours of access or 45 days, whichever comes first, with no credit card required. (1,025 hours is slightly under 42 days.) On the red-and-gold packaging is the face of a Japanese anime-style character, the edges of the drawing blurred to make the marketing message absolutely clear: This is fast. This is the future.

The camera industry is in the throes of a digital photography revolution. But a new version of Nikon's 300mm telephoto lens announced this week, a $5,900 model intended for professionals, shows at least some parts of the photography market are constant even as the rest is overhauled.

Nikon's new 300mm f2.8 lens

(Credit: Nikon USA)

Digital photography is profoundly different from the film era for many reasons. Here are some: new image sensors can enable photography in conditions too dark for film. The same camera can shoot video and still shots. Cameras can record not just when you took a photo, but where you took it. It's easy to publish photos globally on the Internet or to alter them significantly with software. And steadily increasing computing power lets cameras do everything from detect smiling faces to correct lens shortcomings.

And yet islands of stability remain. The high-end lens, with its complex optical engineering and premium pricing, is one of them.

Many SLR users don't venture beyond the kit lens that comes with their camera--an 18-55mm zoom that's reasonable for indoor shooting and basic tourist photography. Those who want to photograph the kids' soccer matches can step up with a telephoto zoom--usually one reaching to 200mm or 250mm and costing a few hundred dollars.

So why all the extra price for a bit more focal length to reach 300mm?