Just when you thought it was safe to put away that credit card, the National Retail Federation presents its annual Cyber Monday event. If you decided to forgo the maddening crowds on Black Friday, you can still snap up some great deals today from the comfort of your cubicle, home office, or kitchen table.

The NRF's event is meant to officially kick off the online shopping season, and an estimated 90 percent of leading online retailers plan on offering discounts or free shipping today. That includes some of the major retailers and players in tech.

Book retailer Barnes & Noble says it will delay the retail arrival of its Nook e-reader by one week due to high demand issues, according to a statement posted to the company's Website Sunday night. The new date for the arrival of the Nook in Barnes & Noble stores is December 7.

The latest delay comes just over a week after Barnes & Noble announced that the Nook was out of stock for the holidays and those who ordered after November 20th will receive their device sometime around January 4th.

VHD--Virtual Hard Drive--as in the type of image file used to mimic hard drive partitions by Microsoft's Virtual PC (found in Windows 7), as well as the older standalone Virtual PC 2007 and Server 2008's Hyper-V virtual machine hosts. Free program Disk2vhd does exactly what it sounds like it will do: Turn a partition into a virtual hard drive that you can load and even boot from using the aforementioned virtual machine software.

Can't get enough Xbox LIVE out of your Xbox 360? Apple iPhone owner? Two bucks to spare? You might care to give 360 Live a look. It's a smallish 1.6MB app available through Apple's iPhone store designed to let you reach out and touch your Xbox LIVE account from just about anywhere, as well as several of the service's tracking and messaging features.

Don't expect the "glowing red eye" of Motorola's Droid smartphone to show up on your iPhone anytime soon. Apple has rejected an application called "iDroid," that would have save displayed the Droid's red eye on an iPhone and linked to information about the flagship Android phone.

You can imagine that Apple's app censors didn't speed too much time deliberating the fate of an iPhone app whose only purpose was to advertise its arch enemy. It is also hard to blame them, even though Apple really needs to find a sense of humor about these things.

If you've been looking for a way to create bootable PE flash drives that's easier than running a command line utility and hand-copying files--you've just found it. The free WinToFlash automates the transfer of your XP/2008/Vista/Windows 7 installation files to flash thumb drives or SSDs. You can also transfer PE and PE 2 (Windows PrE-install XP and Vista/7) utility discs to Flash drives. Assuming you own the discs you're copying and don't give the stuff away, Microsoft and the DOJ probably won't care.

Flash authoring tool KoolMoves is a very inexpensive way to get up and running in the world of Flash scripting. Flash is a powerful visual programming language that's responsible for all the web-based videos you watch frequently, most of the Web ads you see, and many entire websites. Normally, Flash authoring tools run into the hundreds of dollars, but KoolMoves ($49, free feature-limited demo) has positioned itself as an alternative.

Screen captures--pictures of what is on the computer monitor--are useful and fun. As software reviewers, we take screen captures of all programs that we cover, so you, our readers, can better understand what we are reporting. You might use them to show errors to tech support, to prove prices at online stores, or simply to show your friends that crazy thing you just ran across on the Web. On desktop and laptop computers, doing a screen capture is a simple matter of using hotkeys--but on Palm devices, it's not so easy. For our screen captures to go with our reviews of Palm programs, we purchased and use QuickTake ($5, 10-day free trial).

Dell has made available a customized download of Google's Chromium OS (the open-source version of Chrome OS), specifically for its popular Mini 10V netbook.

Google discussed its upcoming operating system (OS) at a recent press event, and released the source code. Since then various builds of Chromium have surfaced online.

TRACY, CA -- Black Friday customers who arrived at the Wal-Mart store here, expecting to purchase an e-Machines laptop for the $198 Black Friday price, were surprised to find the entire shipment of 37 units had been assigned to other customers the day before.

A store manager admitted that the only way for a customer to know that tickets allowing later purchase of the machines were being distributed early would have been to call the store and ask.

Japanese computer peripheral maker Buffalo revealed Thursday a new Blu-ray burner, capable of reaching impressive 12x write speeds when used with USB 3.0.

The launch of Buffalo's new external BR-X1216U3 drive continues the company's recent enthusiasm for the faster SuperSpeed format.

Faces are among the hardest things to photograph well, and the advent of high-end digital photography serves only to magnify and enhance the normal blemishes and unflattering facial details that most of us prefer not to share with the world. Faces are also incredibly hard to touch-up well, which is why Photoshop artisans who work for fashion magazines get paid the big bucks. For the rest of us, there's Luxand Glamourizer ($30, 14-day free trial).