AT&T will unveil its digital television service, DirecTV Now, on Nov. 28. The company on Friday sent out invitations for a New York event with the headline, “the future of TV is now.” The telecom giant is the latest company to present a virtual alternative to cable, aimed at consumers who have checked out of …

I am aware that a watched pot never boils, but sometimes I need to know how much time remains on a download. On a Mac, there are two ways to keep an eye on the progress of a download. 1. Launchpad in the Dock For files being downloaded from the Mac App Store, the easiest way to check their progress …

Mickey Mouse turned 88 today and Twitter responded with tons of tweets to wish a happy birthday to the Disney character who started it all. While there are tons of good wishes, I decided to collect some of the original clips posted by Disney and other Twitter users so you could check them out in one place. Happy birthday, Mickey!

Now playing: Watch this: Scan old printed photos easily with Google’s PhotoScan… 2:04 Get ready to backfill your Google Photos library. Or just improve your next attempt at Throwback Thursday. Google has a new PhotoScan app for scanning old photos that creates vastly improved results over merely snapping a photo of a photo. Unlike the other scanner apps I’ve used …

CNET’s Cheapskate scours the web for great deals on PCs, phones, gadgets and much more. Questions about the Cheapskate blog? Find the answers on our FAQ page. And find more great buys on the CNET Deals page. Amazon Just the other day I wrote about free magazines for tablets, noting that the bigger the screen, the better the reading experience. …

This is too good to pass up on a Friday. Apparently, a giant blob of foam is consuming the streets of Santa Clara, California, about an hour south of us in San Francisco. People are tweeting photos and video from the scene. Officials say a malfunction in an airplane hangar near San Jose Mineta International Airport caused the foam, known …

Are you ready for a weekend of binge listening to new sounds? Here’s the latest round up of albums that caught and sustained my attention. The Beatles, Live at the Hollywood Bowl For some strange reason these live Beatles tracks from the Hollywood Bowl have never been released in any digital format, just the 1977 Capitol LP. So there’s a …

If you’re looking for holiday shopping ideas, there are some products you can get only one place — the Apple Store. No, we’re not talking about the iPhone. We’re talking about some other third-party products like the $40 Play-Doh Touch Shape to Life Studio, the $179 Roli Blocks for music creation, and the $130 Lifeprint photo printer that lets you …

Now playing: Watch this: MacBook gets Touch ID fingerprint scanner 1:00 One of the biggest benefits of having Touch ID on any Apple device isn’t quickly unlocking your phone or computer. It’s Apple Pay. With Apple Pay set up on a MacBook Pro, you can quickly complete a transaction on one of the many websites that have added support for …

Here’s a cure for “texting thumb:” Use your lips. Starting Friday, AT&T is letting its mobile subscribers dictate and send text messages over devices powered by Amazon‘s Alexa assistant. Those include the Echo and the Echo Dot. The service, known as a “Skill,” allows customers of the mobile phone network to store up to 10 contacts in the app’s memory. …