lifestyle

eBay is attempting to carve out a piece of Groupon's action with its own daily deals special.

Dubbed Lifestyle Deals, the new service is being tested in several cities across the U.S., including New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. And it works much like the daily deals offered by Groupon.

eBayers in one of the participating cities can choose from a variety of deals each day. New Yorkers who spend $19 can win a walking tour of Central Park. Those in San Francisco can get their dogs walked for a full hour for just $12. And … Read more

When it comes to certain diseases -- think heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers -- some basic lifestyle changes are the best preventive medicine.

And while most of us know to eat a balanced diet, exercise, and abstain from smoking, it can be far more motivating to make healthy changes if we also know we're prone to certain diseases.

Enter Zuum, a free new iPad app that estimates your risk of common diseases and personalizes tips to prevent them and improve your overall health.… Read more

Just about every home audio manufacturer is getting into the sound bar business, and Bose is no exception. Bose has released two sound bar home theater systems, the Lifestyle 135 and CineMate 1 SR, each sporting a wireless subwoofer and programmable universal remote. They're the first sound bars ever released by Bose, and prices are entirely Bose-like: $2,500 for the Lifestyle 135 and $1,500 for the CineMate 1 SR.… Read more

See that beauty to the right? That's my boss new D20 tattoo. It shows my love for D&D--for life.

And remember last week when I asked you, Crave readers, to send in your own geeky tattoos? No? I did. And you've sent in some highly awesome specimens that we can't wait to share. But we know there have to be even more of you with permanent graphical proof of your geek lives out there, so this is a last call.

In the next few days, we'll be posting a badass gallery of our readers' … Read more

Originally dubbed a "Lifestyle PC," Sony's Vaio P was an odd hybrid of Netbook and UMPC. Sony went out of its way to not call the original version a "Netbook," but its Intel Atom processor and small size made it hard to consider it anything but that. We ended up admiring the design and ingenuity that went into creating this envelope-size machine, but balked at its anemic performance and awkward input tools. At the time, we said, "Sony's upscale Atom-powered Lifestyle PC has the components of a cheaper machine but the design of … Read more

It used to be said that mamas shouldn't let their babies grow up to be cowboys.

In olden times, mamas were right. A cowboy's life can be lonely. You often commune more with animals than people. And then there's the problem of riding a horse in very tight Wranglers.

However, these days, cowboys don't merely pick blackberries, they send raunchy texts on them, too (on BlackBerrys, that is). So some enterprising bejeaned geniuses came up with CowboySyndicate.org.

It's an odd choice of name, sounding as if John Wayne and Marlon Brando had gotten drunk … Read more

Shopping is supposed to be fun, dangit! But it's invariably a hassle-filled experience, especially at this time of year.

That's why I never walk into a store without these three iPhone apps at the ready. They're all free, and they make shopping faster, easier, and sometimes even a little less expensive.

CardStar Newly updated with an improved interface and support for 75 additional merchants, CardStar replaces various discount, reward, and membership cards in your wallet. To digitize a card, just enter a merchant name and your barcode number. When you get to the checkout, pull up the … Read more

I'm not a big fan of small speakers or subwoofers.

They tend to sound, well, small, and most of them squash the life out of films and music.

Thing is, people like tiny speakers and subs, so lots of speaker companies make, and sell tons of iffy-sounding 5.1 systems.

But they're not all bad, I've cherry-picked three truly exceptional alternatives from Definitive Technology, Energy Speakers, and Mirage. My complete reviews are all on CNET, but I'll run down the highlights here.

The Definitive Technology ProCinema 600 System is a six-piece package with four 7-inch tall satellite speakers, one 10.5-inch wide center speaker, and a minisubwoofer. The injection-molded mineral-filled polymer cabinets have more of a high-end feel than your typical plastic or fiberboard cabinets. Can you say "rock solid?"

The subwoofer is a conventional, matte-finished medium-density-fiberboard box. It measures 13 by 10.3 by 13 inches. Its side-mounted volume control is a convenient design touch.

The satellites are two-way designs with a 1-inch aluminum-ceramic dome tweeter and a 3.25-inch midrange driver. Ah, but the midrange driver is acoustically coupled to a 3.25-inch pressure-driven planar low-frequency radiator on the top panel (so when the midrange driver moves in, the passive radiator moves out, and vice-versa).

The passive radiator effectively doubles the bass radiating area of the tiny midrange driver. The same technique is employed on the center channel speaker; it has a pair of 3.25-inch midrange drivers flanking a 1-inch tweeter--and there's a 3.25-inch radiator on each side of the speaker.

The subwoofer's 8-inch polymer cone woofer is acoustically coupled to a bottom-mounted 8-inch passive radiator. The combined radiating area of the driver and radiator is almost equivalent to a single 12-inch woofer. This little sub kicks butt!… Read more