Guide

Just in time for the crazed holiday shopping season, San Francisco-based GoodGuide releases the first iPhone app that lets you scan bar codes for what the guide calls "impartial" health, environmental, and social responsibility ratings of not only the products you are scanning but their companies, too.

As our Webware staff wrote in August, "GoodGuide is the reason we have awards for tech services and products: it's a small and relatively unknown service that demonstrates real leadership on the Web." And as we report in Health Tech just this week, GoodGuide is an invaluable resource … Read more

Stereophile magazine has just published its "2010 Buyer's Guide," a tell-all "book" for audiophiles on the prowl for new gear.

Sure, you can get a lot of this information on the Internet, but it's nice to have it all neatly arranged between two covers of a magazine. Inside you'll find listings for 4,000 audio products. So if you're in the market for a hi-fi,the "2010 Buyer's Guide" will save you a lot of time.

You'll find listings of turntables, phono cartridges; CD, SACD and DVD-Audio players; … Read more

The Seafood Guide is a free app from the widely respected Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program that can help you make environmentally-friendly seafood choices. Basically, it's an automatically updated, location-sensitive, and more detailed version of their popular pocket guide (30 million distributed to date). The Seafood Guide gives you an A-to-Z list of seafood for your region, which you can browse or search, all with one of three color-coded rankings: Best Choice ("abundant, well-managed, and caught or farmed in environmentally friendly ways"), Good Alternative ("an option, but there are concerns with how they're … Read more

It's rare that I get my hands on a 30-inch monitor these days, as only a handful of vendors actually make them. Not surprising given their usual prices, which can range from $1,000 up to $1,600 in some cases.

The HP LP3065 is a typical 30-inch monitor. A resolution of 2,560x1,600 pixels? Check. A number of useful ergonomic options? Check. A wide viewing angle thanks to its use of high-end panel technology? Checkeroo!

Unfortunately, the LP3065 also inherits the 30-inch monitor trend of only including a brightness setting as the sole video adjustment option. Check … Read more

Happy belated Halloween! I know, I know. Halloween is so last week! Still, Dong and I discuss our experiences of the most popular holiday that you don't actually get to stay home from work for.

Then, we move to the toilet. Or more specifically, toilet technology. Even more specifically, we talk about motion detection technology used in the toilet. And by toilet, I don't mean in the toilet, just, you know, in the washroom. Also, clam-shell packaging? Who needs it?

Then we get down to serious business with Dong detailing the WD TV Live and the first 6GBps SATA controller card. … Read more

Starting next week, the holiday season drops on us like an object of infinite mass hurled from the moon at the speed of light. Keep your eyes open in the coming weeks for a number of CNET holiday guides.

Sometimes, though a guide specific to the holidays isn't enough and you need something a bit more...all encompassing.

CNET's Monitor Buying Guide has been around for a while, but we felt it really wasn't addressing all that it could. So we revamped it. Check it out and let us know how it can be improved upon even … Read more

Keeping up to date with home theater technology isn't easy, buyers need all the help they can get.

Mark Fleischmann covers LCD, OLED, plasma displays, LED backlighting, DLP projection, 3D TV, AV receivers, speakers, connectivity issues, and the never-ending blizzard of features in his recently revised book, "Practical Home Theater: A Guide to Audio and Video Systems" (268 pages, $19.95). It's chock full of useful information.

Do HDMI connections confound you? Fleischmann delves deep into the continuously evolving "standard," from the original 1.0 version all the way up to version 1.4. THX certification is another one of those barely understood terms used in reviews, the book gets you up to speed on what THX certification entails. All of the various Dolby and DTS surround schemes are explained. There's a wealth of information about VCRs; right, some people still watch video tapes! The chapters on home theater setup and troubleshooting are excellent. … Read more

The low-cost, low-power family of laptop computers known as Netbooks have become a tempting choice, offering access to basic PC tasks for a fraction of the price of traditional laptops or desktops. But wading into the Netbook waters is not as simple as it looks. These once-uniform machines have splintered into different subcategories, each offering different features at different prices.

Our handy Netbook guide offers tips and advice for picking the perfect Netbook. Things to keep in mind include how much you want to spend, how long the battery needs to last, and if mobile broadband access is a necessity. … Read more

Oil Painting Tutorials Beginners Guide is an electronic book that offers tips for the beginning oil painter. It's not awful, but there are many better resources available online for this purpose.

First off, users should be aware that this is not a piece of software, but a 25-page PDF file. The file is password protected, and users must register with their e-mail address and wait to have the password e-mailed to them. This process also enrolls users in a series of oil painting e-mail tutorials, which we found annoying, although we did find it easy to unsubscribe. As for … Read more