With the economy in tough shape, the Today Show asked me to come up with four back to school tips that won't break the bank. I decided this was an opportunity to include free, top-notch, open-source software, a topic that has rarely gotten major play in the mainstream media. You can see the video here.

I’ve never enjoyed a word game more than Word Thief. The object of the game is to make words from cards. When a word is made of all one suit, the cards are removed from the game. However, if you put down a word made with an “A” of hearts and a “T” of spades, then your opponent might steal that word and its points and use them in combination with the cards in his or her hand to make a new word or words.

Diddy Kong Racing DS shows just how far portable gaming has come in the past few years, demonstrating incredible wireless networked gameplay in a form factor that would have been unthinkable until only recently.

Kudos goes to Microsoft and its developer Bizare Creations for PGR4, a must have racing title and reason enough to buy an Xbox 360 (if Halo 3 wasn’t enough).

Among my friends there are the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter geeks. I am definetly in the Star Wars group, and less so Lord of the Rings. For whatever reason, I have never had more than a passing curiosity with Harry Potter.

We’ve seen games transformed into movies (almost always a disaster). Can a DVD based board game go in the other direction and become a video game?

Comedy and creativity meet in this music game for the Wii that has players dance, sing karaoke, and even produce their own music videos using 38 songs mostly from the 70's 80's and 90's. The characters and locations have a cartoony space-age theme, and the characters' back stories (which are revealed in story mode) are funny.

Carl Sagan would have hated Sierra’s brilliant war game, World in Conflict. Sagan spent a great deal of effort trying to convince us to think of the Third World War as something different than all the wars that have come before: It was a war that no one would survive. We boomers grew up in fear that someone would decide to test Sagan’s notion that the superpowers were like two men sitting in a lake of gasoline threatening to throw a match at the other.

In an age of bloated utility suites, I've noticed that too often performance tends to get cut, not enhanced by jack-of-all-trades packages. The once indespensible Norton Utilities have been banned from my computers for several years now. So have most of the others. Diskeeper remains as one of the first programs I install on every new computer I build.

From digital cameras cometh digital photos – lots of them! Adobe’s Lightroom is an attempt to bring some automated control and streamlining to the mundane processes of digital developing and organization. Not intended as a replacement for Photoshop’s layered approach to digital editing, Lightroom is designed, not for the “heavily edited” masterpiece or mulit-image collage, but for the ordinary grind of getting pictures from the camera, organizing, adjusting, and then sharing them.