8 Ways to Use Tech on Thanksgiving

HDTV Sports

You DVRed some of your games, but are watching others live. Not on any old screen, but the biggest HDTV in the house. The only question is--how long do you politely sit at the Thanksgiving table before dashing to the living room, plate in hand, to witness an amazing over-the-shoulder catch?

Finding Black Friday Deals Online

You've stuffed yourself silly and now it's time to wake up at 2 AM and lineup outside your nearest Best Buy, all so you can get first dibs on all those amazing Black Friday deals. Others, though, take a more casual and technical approach. They get up after sunrise, pad downstairs in their PJ's and slippers, find a cushy spot on the coach, open their laptop and surf for the best online deals. It's so much more civilized.

Buying Gadgets

You have a few days to kill and jars of change you've been saving since 2002: What better way to give thanks--to yourself, apparently--than buying some cool piece of technology? The stores will do their part: opening early Black Friday and offering insane deals. If technology wasn't a part of your Thanksgiving this holiday season, it will be after this one.

The Beloved Electric Carving Knife

These knives are pretty low-tech by PCMag's standards, but they're such a time-honored Thanksgiving Day tradition in some homes that we simply couldn't ignore them. They're loud, fast and somewhat scary--your call if we're talking about the knives or Thanksgiving gatherings in general.

Cooking Digitally

Lots of folks get their Thanksgiving recipes from the web, but some bring the digital world right inside the oven. Digital thermometers give you perfect meat temp readings and some can even receive their temperature updates wirelessly. No more raw turkey!

Skyping Friends and Family

Try as we may, it's almost impossible to get the entire family together every year for Thanksgiving (or virtually any other holiday). Video-conferencing is the next best thing to being there. We suggest you grab a laptop and prop it up on the Thanksgiving table, launch Skype and dial in your favorite relative. Grab a few laptops and multiple accounts and you can have a table full of virtual holiday dinner guests.

Source: pcmag

Tech Support

You'd be surprised how many people spend half their holiday providing tech support to a loved one. It could be as simple as cleaning out an over-stuffed hard drive ("What are temporary files?!") or as time-consuming as vacuuming out the inside of a dust and dog-hair filled PC chassis. You do it all--in between the giblets and gravy--because you love them, and they love you right back for it.

Football on TiVo

Two things are guaranteed on Thanksgiving: Turkey and Football. In fact there's so much football on TV that you probably can't watch all the games at once. For many families, TiVo-ing at least one of the games has become a yearly tradition. Don't worry, every-day cable-provider DVRs work just as well for capturing all those victory dances in the end-zone.