Normal teddy bears are cute, but wouldn’t you’d rather hug a creature that’s adorable and helped take down an evil empire. Starting next week at Build-A-Bear workshops in the US and the UK and online at Buildabear.com worldwide, Star Wars fans can make their own 16-inch version of Wicket the Ewok from 1983’s “Return of …
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April, 2016
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10 April
Music streaming is strong but you can’t argue with 15 years of sliding sales
The stats are in: Digital music streaming has just notched up its best year on record in Australia. But while streaming sales led to a boost in overall revenues for the first time since 2012, the bigger picture is grim. In the past decade, digital sales have simply not done enough to save the bottom line as physical sales have …
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9 April
Funko toys reveal villains in new ‘Ghostbusters’
As we already gleaned from the “Ghostbusters” movie trailer, each new member of the team has her own specialty. Kate McKinnon plays the “brilliant engineer” Jillian Holtzmann. Kristen Wiig is the quantum physics genius Erin Gilbert. Leslie Jones is Patty Tolan, the street-savvy New York expert who also owns the hearse they transform into their legendary ghostbusting vehicle, Ecto-1. Melissa …
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9 April
Wave bye
Before we get to sound base and sound bar speaker systems, let’s back up for a short history lesson. In the early 2000s packaged home-theater-in-a-box (HTiB) systems were a really big deal because they offered a simplified solution to the complexities of receiver, speaker and subwoofer matching for dazed and confused consumers. True, some HTiBs were awful, but most were …
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9 April
The stunningly beautiful Woo Audio WA8 amplifier
The Woo Audio WA8 Eclipse is big for a portable amp, but incredibly tiny for an all-tube headphone amplifier. The WA8 was in development for three years with a goal of shrinking the size to the minimum and optimizing sound quality. True, there are other portable, battery-powered tube amps, but they’re hybrid tube/solid-state designs — the WA8’s audio circuitry is …
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9 April
Raygun
You don’t want to spend hours and hours on your cosplay for the local convention and then show up with unwanted ear and nose hairs visible. Unless you’re going as Chewbacca, you might want to invest in a personal hair trimmer. And because you’re an awesome geek, you’ll want that trimmer to look like a retro sci-fi raygun. The Atomic …
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8 April
Crave giveaway: DJI Phantom accessories from Drone World
Congratulations to Tim L. of Pembroke Pines, Florida, for winning an Arccos Driver golf-performance-tracking system in last week’s giveaway. So you have a DJI Phantom 3 or Phantom 4 drone, but you wish it could travel farther from the remote than the standard 1.2 or 3.1 miles the gadgets can venture respectively. Read on. Drone World, an authorized retailer of …
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8 April
Get ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ for free
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. Free after rebate? Er, yes please! Walmart Talk about impeccable timing! Just yesterday I wrote about cashback services, and today I’ve got the …
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8 April
Find your unseen messages in Facebook’s other hidden inbox
Last year, many a Facebook user was surprised to learn of the “Other” inbox, a dumping ground for private messages from people you don’t know or haven’t friended. The big problem: You never received notification when one of these messages arrived. Later in the year, the service phased out Other in favor of something called Message Requests, but it was …
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8 April
Bot Invasion! Prepare for chatbots on Facebook Messenger, too
Don’t bother calling a 1-800 number for customer support. There’s a bot for that. More messaging apps are incorporating branded chatbots to handle customers, and Facebook is said to be adding bots to the Messenger app. Watch CNET Update below to learn how bots work, and see how other tech companies are going bot-crazy: Now playing: Watch this: Bot Invasion! …
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