Hello, my geek-alicious readers! It's been a big week for tech news, so let's do a roundup, shall we?

TiVo and DirecTV have kissed and made up, which is great news for everyone who has been made to suffer with the DirecTV DVR. It's not quite as awful as Comcast's proprietary P.O.S., but it was pretty bad, with it's tiny little menu screen and TV Guide-ish schedule.

TiVo -- a shining beacon for what every DVR should strive to attain -- has a fabulous UI and best in class service. I don't know how it knows when Lost extends a little past 11 p.m., but I've never had my TiVo miss that minute, where as I spent quite a few night contemplating throwing my HD-DVR from DirecTV out the window when it failed to catch Jack's closing revelations. Anyways, welcome back TiVO -- we've missed you so much!

Also, Dell has finally debuted its teensy little laptop, the Inspiron Mini 9. At only 2.3 lbs, the computer can fit inside a purse for easy writing on the go. It's a great idea for aspiring writers who get little plot bunnies and need to get them into writing before the ideas hop right out of their head. I wouldn't use it as a primary computer or writing too -- the tiny keyboard will make you scrunch up uncomfortably while typing. Memory, though, shouldn't be a problem -- the laptop uses flash drives, which helped trim it down to its diminutive size during RnD. The best part is the price tag: The laptop hits the ceiling at $450 for a fully functional version running a Windows OS with more memory and a bigger hard drive than the $350 Linux version.

Also, a fresh deal from Dell starting today -- buy an normal Dell laptop and get a Mini for $99 -- that's almost too goo to pass up! Visit www.dell.com for details...

Remember Microhoo -- the blogosphere's name for Microsoft's proposed buyout of Yahoo? Haven't heard much about it lately, right? Well, no news is apparently bad news for Yahoo, whose stocks have taken a huge hit since the just before the unsolicited Microsoft offer. It's been reported that Yahoo stocks have hit a 52-week low of below $17 a share. What was the Microsoft offer back in January that Yahoo's CEO say undervalued the company to the point of being almost insulting? Oh yeah, $31 a share. Hmmm someone isn't looking too good right now, are they, Yang? Yah-hOOO-ooo-OOO!

And, last but not least, the online book world has been buzzing all week about the online leak of Twilight author Stephenie Meyer's unpublished companion novel Midnight Sun, which tell the Twilight tale from the perspective of Edward, the vampire boyfriend. No really, I swear this is a big deal. According the Meyer's site, she distributed a very limited number of copies of her unfinished manuscript to outside people for comments, one was leaked, and now she has completely stopped writing the book in disgust. I read it, and it was impressive for an unedited copy -- a feeling I have for all of her books, actually, though those have supposedly been edited by someone somewhere along the publishing process, but I'll be stuffed if I can tell you where.

Anyway, the implications are big surrounding this leak. She decided to keep her fans honest and posted a copy of Midnight Sun on her site (which I read the first night it was released), but also posted a note saying how betrayed she felt. I'm trying to feel badly for her, I really am -- that's a horrible breach of trust and it's extremely embarrassing for a writer to show what she believes is substandard work without her consent (I would know) -- but there is a small part of me that thinks she is being a bit of a whiner. Sorry. If you are interested in the obsession that is the Twilight series, this partial manuscript of Midnight Sun is not to be missed.

Until next week, my fellow geeks!