General

Save big on textbooks at Chegg

While I sit here rotting--er, working happily--in the Cheapskate Labs basement, the lovely Mrs. Cheapskate is busily pursuing a degree in nutrition. That means lots of chemistry classes, which, in turn, means lots of insanely expensive textbooks. And I mean insanely expensive: for some classes, the books cost nearly as much as the credit hours!

Fortunately, we've discovered Chegg, which allows us to "rent" textbooks for significantly less than buying them new--and, in many cases, for less than buying them used.

For example, when Mrs. C needed Macroscale and Microscale Organic Experiments, 5th Edition, for an organic-chemistry … Read more

Print news is fading, but the content lives on

It's been about 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on the back of the Internet. For more than a billion people on the planet, the Web today is an alternate, digital universe that is gradually overtaking the analog, physical world as a source of information and connections.

Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press conducted a survey that rendered two obvious conclusions: the Internet has overtaken newspapers as a source of national and international news, and television, led by CNN, continues to serve as the main source.

According to the Pew survey, … Read more

Four last-minute gifts you can print!

Need a last-minute gift for an office party, your trusty mail carrier, a beloved blogger, or anyone else on your list? As long as you have a printer, you can churn out something special in a matter of minutes. Here's a list of four stores that let you print your own gift certificates for in-person giving:

Amazon.com On any Amazon page, click the Gift Cards link, then choose Print at Home. The minimum amount is $5, but you're not limited to increments: Your certificate can be in the amount of $10.57, if you want. Gifts.com … Read more

Five dirt-cheap tech gifts for the holidays

Two-week warning, folks. That's how long you've got left until the fat man sings. (Chanukah-celebrators have even less time.) If you're still shopping for stocking stuffers, secret-Santa gifts, fifth-night-of-Chanukah trinkets, or whatever, look no further: I've got five guaranteed-to-please gift ideas:

Buy.com has four HP-branded 4GB USB drives for $29.99 shipped (after a $10 mail-in rebate). That works out to about $7.50 per drive. Knock out four stockings with one purchase! Buy.com also has a refurbished 4GB SanDisk Sansa e260 media player for $37.99 shipped, though you must pay with PayPal … Read more

Track price drops with ShoppingNotes.com

Want to know when there's a price reduction on that PS3 you've been eyeballing? Or the Amazon Kindle? Or just about anything else sold online?

ShoppingNotes.com tracks individual products and sends you an e-mail alert whenever there's a price drop.

There are two ways to use ShoppingNotes. First, you can copy and paste a product-page URL into the site's Web form, then enter your e-mail address for receiving alerts. Alternately, you can install the ShoppingNotes bookmarklet, which greatly simplifies the price-watch process: when viewing a product page, just click the bookmark.

You can also sign … Read more

Cyber Monday roundup: My favorite deals

TGIM!

After a weak and disappointing Black Friday as far as deals go, we've arrived at Cyber Monday, when stores pony up their online-only deals.

And guess what? The pickins? They're not so slim. Here's a list of some decidedly worthwhile bargains:

Newegg has the Jawbone 2 Bluetooth headset for $79.99, plus 4 bucks or so for shipping. That's at least $20 less than I've seen it elsewhere. Best Buy has an Insignia Internet-connected GPS for $199.99 shipped. A built-in cellular modem lets you tap Google local search and other nifty features. One … Read more

Black Friday roundup: My favorite deals

Wow, what a colossal disappointment this Black Friday has been. I've spent the better part of the morning looking for eye-popping, never-before-seen, gotta-have-it deals, and you know what I've come up with (besides a sentence ending with a preposition)?

This: Amazon has a 16GB iPod Touch (1st-generation) for $199.99 shipped. Whoop-de-do. I mean, that's pretty good, but I just couldn't muster much excitement for anything else. There's Guitar Hero: Aerosmith Edition for $59.99 (Xbox 360 or Wii). Yeah, OK, not bad. But everything else? Meh.

Now, if you were crazy enough to pitch … Read more

Lifestreaming in Obamaland

Barack Obama will be the most shadowed president in history, and it won't be just the Secret Service and press corps surrounding him.

Citizens and paparazzi armed with camera phones and a variety of other multimedia devices will chronicle every movement he makes in public and post it online.

Obama's visit on Friday afternoon to Manny's Cafeteria and Deli in Chicago was treated as a major event. Some footage was recorded by the Associated Press (see below), and in the background you can see employees, as well as a horde of press members, pointing their cameras at … Read more

Rising from the dead: The paid-for online model

Guest post: Frédéric Filloux, editor of Monday Note, which covers media, tech and business models, explains why death reports of paid-for models on the Internet have been greatly exaggerated and how Facebook might need subscription fees to survive in the current economic climate.

Death reports of paid-for models on the Internet have been greatly exaggerated. Granted: the network's genome carries the "free" nucleotide. As in both freedom and free goods and services. Like it or not, its publicly funded origins (universities and the Pentagon) led to the emergence of widely adopted services such … Read more