So are you interested in obtaining a copy of Beatles: Rock Band?  Well, don’t pay full price; Amazon’s got a deal for you.  Specifically, the Deal of the Day.

The Beatles edition of Rock Band is on sale:  PS3, PS2, Wii, Xbox 360… whatever system you want the game on features a version of the game that’s on sale.  There’s both a deal on individual games and on the bundle packs, the limited edition bundles, and, well… pretty much every hard copy version of the game has seen its price slashed for this daily deal.

When I say daily, I mean daily.  This deal expires at Midnight Pacific Time tonight, so if you’re interested, you’d best hop on board.  I’ve not played the game yet, but at this price it’s definitely interesting.  I still wish I could pick up the guitar only, though.

If you’d like to save a little electricity, then there’s really only one option.  You’ll have to build your computer yourself, from the ground up.  Any collection of stuff stuck in a tower by a normal company won’t be the most energy efficient (or best) parts you can find.  That’s just how the system works.  If you want a good machine, it’s all on you.  Fortunately, Bit-Tech has a great energy-efficiency square off.

If you went with the most power-efficient parts on the list, then you’d shave off 104 watts of power usage without sacrificing any computing power!  The parts are more expensive than the standard bits, and you have to put it together yourself, but if you’re looking to shave off a little bit off your monthly electricity bill, then it might be worth the investment over the long-term life of your computer.

Sadly for an AMD fan like myself, Intel seems to rule the power-saving roost.

As part of the ongoing dumbing-down of society, there’s now a keyboard that will help you avoid using actual words during the process of communication!  Srsly!  They’re called Fast Finger Keyboards, and they features an incredible array of time-saving shortcuts for such common online phrases as L8R, LOL, THX, and TTYL.  There’s even a handy shortcut for www. (and I’d imagine one for .com, too).

I have no doubt that this is going to catch on as people get more and more used to TXTspeak and auto-fill-in features.  The company made their big debut at the 2010 Toy Fair in New York a few weeks ago, and the Fast Finger keyboard is going to be everywhere one of these days.  I mean, it’s bound to the F-row keys, and those are rarely used anyway, so why not make them a little more useful by adding some shift-text options?  Or, I guess alt-text options.  I’m not sure how it works for those higher-up keys.

If my keyboard had an LOL button, I’d still not use it.  If I can’t bother to type in LOL by hand, obviously it wasn’t that funny to begin with, IMHO.

Image: Full Size via MAKE.

It’s no secret that I love a good, free piece of software.  If there’s some program I feel like I have to pay to use or purchase, I’d much rather find a program that will do it for free.  Call me crazy, but money is tight and I can’t afford to buy a new license for Office every time I need to move it to a new computer.  Plus, I lost my install CD and the product code years ago.  So, to fill that gap on my desktop, I installed the totally free (and excellent) Open Office.

However, that’s not all that can be used to replace pay tools.  Open Office replaces Office; Paint.Net replaces Photoshop, and all is well and good.  But, that’s not the future.  All those programs take up precious hard drive space, and the future is cloud computing.  That’s why Maximum PC has put together a list of 30 incredible (and free) web apps you need to try immediately.

No matter what you’re doing, from making how-to videos to planning a budget to writing a paper or just reading articles online, you can do it with one of these apps.  You name it, there’s an app for it on this list.  Cooking?  You betcha.  Interior design?  Got it covered.  From music to meals, there’s an app for that.  You may never need to install something onto your hard drive again after all this!

Google offers all sorts of services, from Buzz to Wave and everywhere in between Google’s products are an incredible treasure trove of goodies for products for the needy Internet user, website owner, and all number of other people.  However, not all Google products have gotten the big launch that Buzz did:  here are 10 Google products that you didn’t know existed.

So, will these Google products be any use to you?  Well, there’s no telling.  It depends on what you’re doing and what you’re hoping to use Google for.  Still, there’s a lot of stuff out there, and a lot more stuff coming down Google’s development pipeline that might turn out to be your next favorite program, gadget, or cloud-computing service.

Now that I’ve started using Google’s stuff, it’s hard to go back to the way things were in the old, pre-Google Everything days.  What Google innovations have taken-hold in your life that you can’t live without?  For me, it’s Gmail and, of course, Google Reader.

It’s an interesting idea in theory.  Basically, you’re recycling wasted indoor light (or light from the window sill) and using it to power your gadgets.  It’s called the CubeTube, from Solar Road Technologies, and it’s designed to fit comfortably over the top of the outlines of your average cubicle and turn your average fluorescent overhead lighting into energy.  Well, back into energy, I guess.

However, like the poster at TreeHugger, I don’t see just how much it could possibly gather, aside from eventually filling its small battery and maybe being a decent trickle charger for a cell phone or rechargeable battery device.  Maybe, if you’re lucky, you could gather enough energy to power a USB device.  I’d rather see one made to sit on top of a computer tower, or a computer monitor rim.  That’d be a flatter surface, and one that could support a whole lot more photovoltaic panels than the rim of a cube wall.

Still, I’d give it a shot.  Something is better than nothing, right?

I don’t know about anyone else, but I love the Olympics.  Summer Games or Winter Games, if it’s on I’ll watch it.  For some events, like hockey or curling or snowboarding, I’ll specifically search it out to watch it.  Otherwise, I’ll tune into the network coverage and just watch whatever’s on, even if it’s ice dancing or biathlon.  However, thanks to the wonderful NBC Olympics website, I don’t have to wait for them to show what I want to see on tape delay.  They have full video coverage of every event, including preliminaries, training runs, and more!

However, all is not perfect.  The Boss Button isn’t very effective, so if you’re going to partake, I suggest you either do it at home or be able to alt tab out of the browser in a hurry.  Other than that, this is a treasure trove of Olympics videos, image galleries, news stories, blogs, and more.  It’s amazingly cool and the video streams perfectly, so check it out!

In a world of increasing stratification, the competition between search engines, social media websites, and operating systems are fairly decided.  You’ve got Google, Facebook, and Microsoft Windows.  Sure, there are other choices out there, but the people who use Yahoo and Bing are few and far between, MySpace is slowly dying, and Apple and Linux are nowhere near threats to Windows (at least, not yet).  There’s not much chance of any of those things changing any time soon, yet there is change in the air.  Facebook is trying to become a search engine.

Increasingly, users are turning not to Google to search for things online, but Facebook, and Facebook is making this service more and more useful by tweaking their privacy settings to make more and more of your information, pictures, etc., searchable to their users.  Facebook, the social media giant, is taking on Google, the search engine giant, on Google’s own turf.  As we’ve seen from Google Buzz, Google isn’t afraid to take on Facebook, either.

This is an interesting transition.  Will Google be able to fight off their most serious challenger?  Will Facebook users revolt at the prospect of becoming search-engine fodder en masse?  What will Microsoft do to revitalize MySpace, MSN, Bing, and their struggling new media operations?  Things are going to get very interesting, very soon.  I know I wouldn’t want my private Facebook information as part of some sort of Facesearch.  How about you?

RIM has fallen behind in the smart phone wars.  They can’t compete with Apple and Google and whoever else is launching a handset, so they’re concentrating on their core business of professional users while trying to appeal to the average buyer whenever possible.  Here’s one thing you can say for the Blackberry:  They certainly are tough.  An Ohio woman found this out the hard way when her Blackberry saved her from a bullet.

The 22-year-old woman was in a bar with her boyfriend, who had a gun.  While handling the gun, it discharged and he shot her in the leg.  Or thought he did:  as it turns out, the Blackberry gave up its life to protect its user.  Try finding that kind of loyalty in an iPhone!

Of course, the device wasn’t alone.  It was aided by the denim and a neoprene or plastic-looking protective case.  Either way, that’s pretty impressive that the handset was able to deflect, or at least slow down, a bullet to the point where the person getting shot wasn’t hurt.

Image: Engadget