Steve Greenberg, author of Gadget Nation www.gadgetnation.net shows us what we need for back to school and where to get it:

Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2009

www.microsoft.com/learningspace

Computrace LoJack for Laptops

www.lojackforlaptops.com

Motorola ROKR E8

www.t-mobile.com

Capresso H2O Plus Water Kettle

www.capresso.com

College Survival Kit by Ms. & Mrs.

www.msandmrs.com/college.php

iHome IH9 Black Alarm Clock with iPod Charger

www.bedbathandbeyond.com/product.asp?order_num=-1&SKU=15041412

Alarm Clock with Bed Shaker

www.hammacher.com

As kids get older, the drudgery of homework and exams may start to put a damper on their excitement about school. But introducing a few cool tools and concepts can help rekindle your child’s passion for learning—and allow both you and your child to have a lot of fun as well.

Prove to your kids that science isn’t just for “nerds” with the cool experiments in Scientific Explorer kits. Your kids can concoct their own soda pop and bubble gum, freak out their friends with realistic coagulating blood and edible eyes, or customize their own perfumes, lotions and bath gels. (Maybe first place at the science fair isn’t too far behind!)

Leapfrog’s Fly Fusion pentop computer has practical applications in the classroom—your child can use it to take notes in class, then upload their writing to the computer, where it’ll be automatically translated to text. But this cool tool offers so much more: It plays MP3s and games, and if your child draws a piano keyboard or a calculator on the page, your child can then use the pen to create their own music or figure out the tip at the restaurant. (Consider picking up an extra one for the adults in your house as well.)

Encourage some more quality time with your kids before they hit their teens with the cool ideas you’ll find in the new book Creative Family: How to Encourage Imagination and Nurture Family Connections by Amanda Blake Soule . It offers suggestions for more homespun activities you can all do together, from crafting your own toys out of objects found in nature to painting your own artwork to frame on your walls. The bonus—you’ll have fun right along with them!

—Lisa Milbrand

The textbooks for a single semester at college can easily cost more than a solid laptop computer. But your college-bound student can skip the long line at the bookstore (and the exorbitant prices) and find bargains galore online. Here’s how to teach your aspiring student a little economics 101.

Buying Books
Start your search on Half.com, eBay’s media-superstore partner, where regular folks (and some full-time booksellers) list their old books, DVDs and video games for sale. Four out of our six sample books were cheapest here. The downside? You’ll likely be buying books from several different sellers—and you may need to wait a bit longer for them to be shipped via media mail.

Both big-name bookstores, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com offer textbooks sold new at a discount, or used through authorized booksellers. Of the two, Barnes & Noble was generally cheaper, though only if you spring for the $25 annual membership.

Textbooks.com also offers bargains, but often seems to have a more limited selection than the other three (some books were not available on their site).

Selling Books
After you’ve fulfilled your Chemistry 101 requirement, odds are you won’t be browsing that book on spring break. So consider selling them to recoup some of your cash—both Half.com and Textbooks.com allow you to offload old texts.

Half.com is the potentially more lucrative (but more time consuming) option—you’d list your books on the site, wait for them to sell, then send them out individually. It involves more trips to the post office and a longer timeframe (who knows when someone will purchase your book), but a better chance of getting most of your money back—especially if you purchased it used and kept it in good condition.

Textbooks.com is the no-fuss option. Punch in the ISBN codes from your books, and they give you a price quote. They’ll send you a mailing label (shipping’s on them), and once they receive your books and look them over, they’ll send a check. Quoted buyback prices were about 20 percent of the full listing price, but nearly 50 percent of the cheapest prices we’d found, so it’d be a good option for quick cash. (And if you bought your books here, they guarantee a 50 percent buyback fee.)

We have stuff crammed into every nook and cranny in our house—and even as I try to get rid of the things we don’t use, we still seem to be more cluttered than ever. But there are some cool new tools that can help you simplify your life—and free up some valuable real estate.

Amazon Kindle - On this 5 x 7 literary marvel, you can download your favorite books, newspapers, magazines and blogs wirelessly right to the device in just a minute within the US, or onto a computer and passed on via USB cable if you’re overseas. While the memory on the Kindle itself can accommodate more than 200 books (with a SD storage card, you can easily store a sizeable library on the device), Amazon keeps track of every book and subscription you buy—so you can read the Kite Runner and clear it from your Kindle—then redownload it to your machine when you want to revisit it. You can also easily transfer your own documents for reading on the go, access Wikipedia and an embedded dictionary, and add notes to books as you’re reading, so you’ll remember that point you wanted to make at your next book club. While you won’t be able to entirely clear your bookshelves (Harry Potter, for instance, isn’t available), you’ll be able to cut back considerably on your book space.

Apple TV
Apple TV has been trying to do for movies what the company’s ubiquitous iPods have done for music—enable easy downloads of movie and TV rentals and purchases, so you won’t have to worry about your dog eating a DVD (it happened to us), or make room for all those jewel boxes. Connect this simple white square to your TV, and use the remote to browse iTunes for shows and movies you want to watch from their ever-growing library (currently at about 2,000 movies and nearly 1,000 TV shows). Rentals start at $2.99—you have 30 days to watch a movie after you rent it, and once you start watching it, it disappears after 24 hours (though you can let your kids watch Finding Nemo as many times as they want in that 24-hour span). And movies start at $9.99—cheaper than all but the bargain-basement titles on DVD.

Audiovox Home Base - Scrap the clunky bulletin board and array of picture frames with this clever all-in-one gadget, which lets you showcase up to 120 photos on a slideshow, keep track of future events and current to-dos with audio (and on some models, video) memos that can be tagged to certain dates, and even leave old-fashioned notes for loved ones with the dry-erase marker or post-its.
—Lisa Milbrand

If you are insulted by the Obama cover on this week’s New Yorker magazine then you are not familiar with the publication. It is read by people who keep up with national and international issues and who understand that Obama has been misrepresented by some as a radical Arab terrorist. The cover publicizes that conceit and if they (Conde Nast) happen to sell more magazines with it, then so be it. It is not intended to disparage the Obamas at all. In fact, it is very likely that the majority of the New Yorker’s readers actually support Obama.