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Glenn Beck is a performance artist of the highest order. Whenever I have happened upon a little clip of him online, I feel that he has studied just about every successful TV evangelist. He seems to mimic their hand gestures, their little eye rolls. And just like the finest TV evangelist, he also seems to succeed in making a lot of money.

But for how much longer can his act be lucrative? Tax-preparation software company TurboTax on Wednesday became the 120th company to take its ads away from Beck's variety show on Fox.

Companies such as Kraft, Mercedes, Geico, … Read more

The Android mobile app for game-like "check-in" app Gowalla is now live, as Mashable noted over the weekend. Launching its first non-iPhone app is an important step for the start-up as it competes fiercely with several other location-based mobile companies that are all trying to break away from the pack.

Additionally, Gowalla is set to announce a partnership with the Travel Channel for its series "Food Wars," a competitive reality show that pits chefs against one another in blind taste tests. When a Gowalla user checks into a "Food Wars"-featured restaurant, they'll … Read more

I'm a big proponent of stereo home theater, but I'd quickly concede that most home theater buyers are looking for multichannel systems. Of all the available multichannel options--11.1, 9.1, 7.1, 6.1, and 5.1 --that last one is the most popular, but that hasn't stopped most manufacturers from only offering 7.1-channel models. Budget-priced models are the only 5.1 receivers you can buy.

And in 2009, Dolby Pro-Logic IIz, which featured two additional "height" channels, bumped the total for some receivers to 9.1 channels, even though our listening tests here at CNET … Read more

We've seen a lot of Internet TV players, and the quality varies widely. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block for programs of this sort is the quality of the links that are included; more often than not we encounter programs that link to plenty of different streaming TV channels but then find that half the links don't work. Unfortunately, My Internet TV suffers from this problem: although it offers hundreds of channels from around the world, a lot of them simply don't work. We acknowledge that not all channels are on 24 hours a day, but we don'… Read more

FDRLab's anyTV Pro provides an impressive array of media. While it gives access to online entertainment from around the globe, the unexpected appearance of off-color content may cause concern.

The program's interface is incredibly simple to operate, breaking down its commands into intuitive icons. It's much like an MP3 player or movie viewer, except with a long, scrollable list of stations offering an array of television, radio, and video. Each station offers hundreds of choices, ranging from home shopping to sports, news, and entertainment. The wide range of choices might be confusing since some entries don't … Read more

I'm not a big fan of small speakers or subwoofers.

They tend to sound, well, small, and most of them squash the life out of films and music.

Thing is, people like tiny speakers and subs, so lots of speaker companies make, and sell tons of iffy-sounding 5.1 systems.

But they're not all bad, I've cherry-picked three truly exceptional alternatives from Definitive Technology, Energy Speakers, and Mirage. My complete reviews are all on CNET, but I'll run down the highlights here.

The Definitive Technology ProCinema 600 System is a six-piece package with four 7-inch tall satellite speakers, one 10.5-inch wide center speaker, and a minisubwoofer. The injection-molded mineral-filled polymer cabinets have more of a high-end feel than your typical plastic or fiberboard cabinets. Can you say "rock solid?"

The subwoofer is a conventional, matte-finished medium-density-fiberboard box. It measures 13 by 10.3 by 13 inches. Its side-mounted volume control is a convenient design touch.

The satellites are two-way designs with a 1-inch aluminum-ceramic dome tweeter and a 3.25-inch midrange driver. Ah, but the midrange driver is acoustically coupled to a 3.25-inch pressure-driven planar low-frequency radiator on the top panel (so when the midrange driver moves in, the passive radiator moves out, and vice-versa).

The passive radiator effectively doubles the bass radiating area of the tiny midrange driver. The same technique is employed on the center channel speaker; it has a pair of 3.25-inch midrange drivers flanking a 1-inch tweeter--and there's a 3.25-inch radiator on each side of the speaker.

The subwoofer's 8-inch polymer cone woofer is acoustically coupled to a bottom-mounted 8-inch passive radiator. The combined radiating area of the driver and radiator is almost equivalent to a single 12-inch woofer. This little sub kicks butt!… Read more

Instant access to real-time local weather information is one of the Internet's underrated pleasures. There are Web sites, feeds, gadgets, widgets, e-mail and IM alerts; just about every Net platform has brought you the weather at some point. Free desktop utilities that import weather conditions and usually display the local temperature in the system tray are perhaps the most popular Web-based weather-watchers. The Weather Channel is perhaps the most trusted name in coast-to-coast cable TV weather forecasting and related information. Put the two together and you have The Weather Channel Desktop, a free utility that does what the other … Read more

Readon Free TV and Radio Player is a basic program that gives users access to a large number of international television and radio stations. It's nothing fancy, but it does contain links to a staggering amount of content.

The program's interface is simple, with its content types--TV, radio, movies on demand, and live sports--arranged in four tabs. TV and radio stations are organized alphabetically by country and genre, and drop-down menus allow users to filter results. Users simply click on the content that they want to access, and it plays either within the player itself or in the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--For some of the nearly 100,000 followers of "MythBusters" star Adam Savage's Twitter feed, communicating with him has proven to be more than just your average back-and-forth. For some, it's been a way to submit ideas that he and his Discovery Channel show costars have used for actual episodes.

On October 7, Discovery will begin airing its fall collection of new "MythBusters" episodes, and Savage said that he and costar Jamie Hyneman have taken at least four ideas that have come directly from Twitter users and implemented them on the show.

Among … Read more