Are you ready to cook me some big meat? Maybe you're not! Here, we will tell you what to buy to make the magic happen.

What a wonderful world we live in that computers from 3 years ago that cost a gazillion dollars are no faster than today's cheap laptops under $500. Few writers review cheap laptops but one thing is clear: HP consistently beats other companies when it comes to making nice ones. I like HP's G4t, their 14 inch one.

I'd get the one configured with a second generation Intel Core i3 processor. They start at $479 at the moment.

Are you tired of living in filth? Have you had enough of the dust and dinge all around you? Do something about it! Also, you pretty much have to read anything that contains the inarguable statement, "Six hundred dollars is a lot to pay for a vacuum cleaner."

I asked Lorie, who has been an explorer almost her entire life, to tell me a story. She told me about a recent expedition she went on to find dinosaur bones.

“Around 73 million years ago the Grande Prarie region of Canada was a tropical seaside rain forest. However, as I made my way to Pipestone Creek bonebed, their was little to resemble the former more tropical swampy marshes. We made our way through dense brush and conifer forests under the steady downpour of frigid rain, which made the steep, rocky terrain even more difficult to navigate. Alternatively, sometimes its clay consistency served as an unexpected vice precariously locking [...]

Okay, we had our launch fun. Now The Wirecutter, our always-updated guide to the best tech available, is also pretty to look at.

"Did you know today is the most important day of the year if you like new iPhones? Yes. You probably did because because people can't stop writing and reading about this sort of thing; articles guessing what the new iPhone is All About make about are literally as popular as stories about Osama Bin Laden's assassination and the Japanese Tsunami. At last! No more guessing! And no more patchwork articles about the guessing!

If you want to bear witness to the spectacle in a real time 'play-by-play' sports-nnouncer kind of way, you have come to the most incorrect place on earth.* I will be merely keeping a brief, dispassionate log [...]

If I wanted a fan to help keep my office or any other full-sized room cool this summer, I'd grab the $90 Vornado 660.

Granted, when it comes to cooling actual people, all electric fans work the same way, creating what's essentially a wind chill effect that evaporates sweat on your skin making you feel… cooler. Of course, a good fan can also be used to promote air circulation if placed in the right location. The air stream that a sufficiently powerful fan produces can either help equalize the overall temperature of a room (i.e., eliminate hot and cold spots), or be used to move cooler [...]

There's a whole laundry list of disclaimers attached to it, but my pal (and Pulitzer winner) Matt Richtel writes about a Stanford research report that suggests that spending considerable amounts of time on technology can make us unhappy.

In his words:

The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls aged 8 to 12, finds that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens.

I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers [...]

Hello! I just found a handful of wonderful technology in Las Vegas, an oasis in the desert, at CES, the country's biggest electronics show.

There are over 100,000 people here to see roughly 20,000 gadgets brought to the light of day in less time than it takes for a rattlesnake to shed its skin.

Without hype, these are the gadgets that will be worth knowing about in 2012. I found about 9, with the help of my friends.

Hey, you know when you are lying in bed and you're freezing or boiling to death? There's nothing worse than stepping into your slippers and dragging half way across the house to your thermostat! That's over with this new thermostat called Nest that you can control from your phone, AKA while snug in your blanket.

I think it’s worth waiting until the reviews hit to put the iPhone 4s on the leaderboard. But I know a lot of you guys have ants in your pants and just NEED TO PREORDER this thing. I figured I’d throw together some notes so you weren’t going in blind. It’s complicated, but I think I have some solid, albeit tentative, advice.

Is it generally worth upgrading over the iPhone 4? Every major component has been improved. And early hands ons look promising, although we haven’t seen reviews yet. I’m going to give it a cautious yes based on the fact that this is a revision of a base model. Read [...]

The new iPad is coming in a week. It is the same size and design as the current iPad. The biggest deal about it is that the new iPad will have a high definition screen (that will look as crisp as the one on the iPhone 4) with more pixels than an HDTV so that text in e-books and photos should look sharper. The new iPad will also have a faster internet connection in the 4G model so you can watch streaming video streaming without any of that loading/waiting. That's about it.

P.S. Here's where to sell your old one for the most money possible. I'll probably hang onto mine for [...]

Apple's getting into digital textbooks, which is a good thing for you if you are a broke student or pay for the livelihood of a broke student. Instead of buying textbooks for hundreds of dollars each like I did, digital textbooks could cost around $15. Yes, iPads are expensive, and it'll be a while (if ever) until most textbooks are available like this. But college is much more expensive than an iPad. Also, old textbooks cannot play angry birds as well as an iPad.

Yes, even if they do well, Apple's tablet textbooks won't fix the fact that teachers are underpaid, and kids are way dumber these days because we [...]

One night, a friend visiting from Rome got really upset and started cursing in Italian, which is the most spectacular romance language for profanity. When I asked him what was wrong he told me other friends were taking him to Italian restaurants, night after night. And although he was too polite to say he wanted something else–which he did, because the pasta was cold and soggy and the bruschetta was covered in all this extra stuff–he was surprised that no one was aware enough to say, “Hey, maybe this guy has had his fill of Italian food since he's from Italy?” So, I took him to the dirtiest, most delicious, [...]

The Lytro looks like a little rectangular spy-glass. Inside is a new type of camera that doesn't just record a picture, but all the rays of all the light in a photo. Why? So you can alter a shot to be of its best instance later on. In other words, if you take an out-of-focus shot, you can fix it later.

I met Steve Jobs while I worked at Gizmodo. He was always a gentleman. Steve liked me and he liked Gizmodo. And I liked them back. Some of my friends who I used to work with at Gizmodo refer to those days as the Good Old Days. That is because those were the days before it all went to shit. That was before we got the iPhone 4 prototype.

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The first time I met Steve was at the infamous D conference where Walt Mossberg interviewed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Ryan Block was editor of Engadget and it was a pretty fierce competition. Ryan was a veteran, and [...]