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Achieving an attractive sub-$100 price point, Amazon’s new $79 Kindle and $99 Kindle Touch still sport e-ink displays for reading books and other content, while ditching the physical keyboard found on previous models.

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Google went through a lot to buy ITA and its travel software, and we saw the acquisition first bear fruit in the form of Mountain View’s web-based Flight Search. Now the partnership has produced version 1.2 of the OnTheFly airfare booking app for Android, iOS and BlackBerry. What’s new? Flexible date searches that let you peruse departures 35 days at a time, plus a price graph that shows the most fiscally prudent times to travel. Additionally, globetrotters can access their itinerary search history and see price changes for those fares throughout the year. Nice job fellas, now let’s work on bringing bargain-basement fare finding for the final frontier in the next revision.

Google and ITA’s OnTheFly app update puts flexible flight planning in your pocket originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

Kate writes in: I love to cook, and one of my favorite things to make from scratch is chicken stock. I know making it yourself saves money, but I would love for you to go over how much it actually saves. If you’d like to factor it in, I also save vegetable scraps (carrot peels, potato skins, vegetables in the fridge that are starting to look a bit mushy) and chicken bones when I cook and freeze them, so it cuts down on the amount of vegetables and chicken I have to buy to make the stock. That might be a tip to pass along to readers, apparently this is something only I do among people I know who like to cook, and it has spread since.

We sometimes make stock ourselves out of leftover vegetables. Before we made the switch to being vegetarian, we also used to make stock out of chicken bones and spare vegetables, much as you describe.

Typically, we make about four quarts of stock at a time. We use our crock pot for this and simply dump in about two or three quarts of various kinds of scraps, fill up the crock pot with water, turn it on low, and let it cook gently for several hours. When it’s complete, we simply strain the liquid and store it in quart-sized containers in the freezer.

Our crock pot runs at about 100 watts, so we use roughly $0.12 of energy when making a batch of stock. This adds about $0.03 per quart for energy. The amount of water used is negligible.

At the store, I can easily find (somewhat) comparable stocks for approximately $3 per quart. This means that my crock pot produces about $12 worth of stock at the store price. There’s also the option of buying broth, which is thinner and a bit less flavorful, at a lower price ($1.50 or so a quart).

The value of the stock really comes down to the cost of the ingredients that you use to make it. If you use nothing but the scraps left behind by other meals and view homemade stock as a “bonus” of sorts, stock is incredibly cheap and an enormous bargain.

The question of value comes into play when you start looking at actually buying things to supplement the stock. It doesn’t take a whole lot of purchases to add up to the value of the stock itself, so you have to be very careful when making purchases.

For example, if you’re making chicken stock and purchase a whole chicken, you’re sinking $6 into the stock (ideally, you can still use the chicken for other purposes here, but not always). If you buy even a few vegetables to go along with it, you’re quickly approaching the cost of just buying stock at the store.

For me, given the extra time invested and the cost of the ingredients, stock is really only worth it when you’re using scraps, such as leftover vegetable pieces and/or bones.

Our method for accumulating these scraps is to simply save the uneaten and unused remnants of meals. For example, if we cook too many green beans, we’ll toss the remainder into our “scrap bag” in the freezer with the intent to use it someday for stock. When we reach a certain amount (usually a few quarts), we use it as the basis for vegetable stock.

Another possible option for making stock occurs if you have a free source for the needed ingredients. For example, if you’re facing an overabundance of garden vegetables, you might want to make some vegetable stock using some of them. If you’ve suddenly acquired a large amount of chicken or beef for free or for a very low price, you may want to use some of the meat for stock.

Stock is simply an effective way of using materials that don’t have a direct food use without these items going to waste. Using items directly for stock isn’t a big money saver, but using items indirectly for stock in the form of scraps can indeed save dollars.

Follow this link: Saving Pennies or Dollars? Making Your Own Cooking Stock

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It’s nights like this when insomnia is not so bad after all. Samsung has decided to give us a late night treat: a showing of what’s to come during the Samsung Unpacked announcement at CTIA in San Diego. And it is big. Yes, loyal readers, it looks like we finally have the Nexus Prime‘s first official glimpse, straight from the manufacturer.

Samsung has just released a commercial for their announcement at CTIA, and for a few seconds at the end of the video, you can see a device with a curved screen (like the Nexus S). We are quite sure this is the insanely anticipated Samsung Nexus Prime, which made a supposed appearance this morning, courtesy of Mr. Blurrycam.

Aside from the curved screen, we can also see some pin connectors, which could be for a dock. No other major details are given in the video, but now we know what to expect! Taylor and I will be right there covering this event, so definitely stay tuned for more details coming next week (October 11).

Like us, you have to be excited after all those long months of waiting. Hit the comments section to express those feelings! We know many of you are about to explode.

Update 1: Our own Dustin chopped up some images to compare the Nexus family below.

Update 2

Samsung has recently updated the video to show a couple extra scenes. One of them is another “perfect combination,” which displays a bride and a groom.

There is also a new comment at the end of the video. It states: “Always ahead of the curve.” We assume that this is a play on words with the Nexus Prime’s curved screen and the fact that it is “better” than a certain device that was just announced yesterday – the iPhone 4S.

Throwing “curve” balls, aren’t we, Samsung? Check out the new video posted right below, and let’s hope that the video keeps being updated. Hopefully next time with more details about the device!

Read the rest here: Video: First official look at the Nexus Prime (Video Updated)

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Apple’s domination of the digital media marketplace is more of a threat to movie companies than piracy, according to Miramax CEO Mike Lang.

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The composition of the Earth-Moon system indicates that the Moon probably formed from a collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized body. That collision was incredibly violent, and left the Earth hot enough that its atmosphere would primarily consist of vaporized silicate rock. Once it solidified, those conditions would have left the planet very dry, with our current water largely delivered by smaller bodies that have impacted the Earth since. So far, only a single type of meteorite has been found to have hydrogen and oxygen isotopes that matched those found in the oceans. But researchers have now checked a comet derived from the Kuiper belt, and showed that it also is a good match for the Earth’s oceans.

Most hydrogen comes in a form in which its nucelus consists of a single proton, but there’s also an istope called deuterium that contains both a proton and a neutron. In the Earth’s oceans, only about 1.6 in every 5,000 water molecules contain deuterium, so if we’re looking for sources for our planet’s water, we need to find bodies that have a similar ratio. We’ve looked at six comets that originate in the Oort cloud (the distant-most bodies associated with the Sun), and they have ratios about double that found on Earth. That left enstatite chondrites, a type of meteorite, as the best match for Earth’s water.

Now, using the ESA’s Herschel observatory, researchers have gotten a good reading on the comet 103P/Hartley 2, which orbits near Jupiter but probably got its start in the Kuiper belt, just outside the orbit of Neptune. And it turns out that the deuterium/hydrogen ratio is nearly an exact match for that in Earth’s oceans. That means a large population of comets have just become candidates for seeding our planet with water.

That’s the good part of the results, but there’s a confusing part as well. The models of the dynamics of the early solar system indicate that we should see higher D:H ratios as we get further from the Sun, but 103P/Hartley 2 has a ratio that looks similar to that of the inner planets. The authors suggst that the best way to explain this is through a model in which material in the disk around the young Sun was more thoroughly mixed than we thought. We’ll have to wait and see if the people who model the formation of the solar system agree.

Nature, 2011. DOI: 10.1038/nature10519  (About DOIs).

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Google hopes to upset JavaScript’s dominance by introducing a new language, Dart. Dart is designed to be simpler, more familiar, and faster than JavaScript, and Google one day wants to see it everywhere: in the browser, on the server, and maybe even on the smartphone. Those are big ambitions, but before we take a look at Dart and at Google’s plans for it, it’s worth taking a closer look at JavaScript itself. Why exactly doesn’t Google like it?

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View post: Feature: JavaScript has problems. Do we need Dart to solve them?

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wiredmikey writes “Here’s an interesting read on the state of privacy and how technology, along with government and social media have changed the idea, and reality of privacy forever. The article takes the reader through a typical day, and highlights many of the privacy issues that we face, from our mobile phones, Internet at local coffee shops, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, all the way down to cars equipped with OnStar, public cameras, facial recognition technology and more. The author concludes everyday we make compromises in the face of Privacy, and none of us will ever have as much privacy as we want.”

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Read the original here: A Day In the Life of Privacy

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The Droid RAZR Caught Hiding In Plain Sight originally appeared on AndroidGuys.

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Samsung and Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich event is tomorrow — get your liveblog here! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 22:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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