Food Budget: Check Out MyGroceryDeals.Com

I've heard good things about this site, and while I haven't joined its membership yet, a quick surf through its contents sure looked good:

Search local weekly grocery deals fast and plan healthy meals. Make a grocery list of the best specials from the flyers, visit your local store and save!

CELL PHONE SPIES - 5 SINISTER USES FOR YOUR CELLPHONE

Cellphones may be an underestimated target of spies and hackers, something of which you and your family may want to be aware:

1. First, there's an excellent article at GeeksAreSexy, which gives details on how cellphones are being used to monitor not only all your conversations (they listen in) but also ...

2. your location and your usual routines. Great for burglars and other evildoers, right? (GeeksAreSexy also has a great article on how to use your cellphone to set up a house-monitoring system for your home or office).

3. Cornell gives information on how hackers can take your information by intercepting its signal, and essentially bill your account for whatever use they choose. This is called "cloning," and it's against federal law. Call your phone company if you think you've been a victim of cloning.

4. Prime targets are cellphones with access to corporate networks, where all sorts of malware can be installed, according to USA Today.

5. Other juicy targets are folk who use their phones to shop online, or to do online banking. (Think of that nice commercial, where the financial institution is promoting online banking services by showing customers hiking, rockclimbing, etc., and stopping for a minute to do a little banking.) All that private information is much easier to access on a cellphone than through a computer these days, due to the security software that's readily available for computers but not, as yet, for cellphones.

Right now, you're at risk.

This new crime frontier is spawning all sorts of security entrepreneurs who are focusing specifically upon the cellphone market. So far, there have not been any major disasters involving cellphone or PDA breaches, but expect to hear about one soon. You know the criminals are on the job.

The NIST is working on it.

If you have some concerns or suggestions, then you have an opportunity right now to provide input into the National Institute of Standards and Technology on this topic. Just send an email to 800-124comments@nist.gov with "comments sp 800-124" in the subject line, or write NISTmedia contact Michael Baum at michael.baum@nist.gov.

(According to CNET, they were looking for public commentary earlier this month, but you should still be able to get something in, right?)

5 GOOD CHEAP RECIPE COLLECTIONS

There are some sites that discuss eating healthy, eating organic, eating frugally -- but what about some recipe collections where the food is good and the cost is almost pennies?

Here are five online recipe collections with really good and CHEAP recipes:

Miserly Moms' Frugal Recipes
Cheap Eats - $3 or Less
Budget 101's Dirt Cheap Ramen Noodle Recipes
Recession Recipes
Cheap Recipes at Gather.Com

Granted, some of the ingredients may include processed food (for example, canned biscuits in the Miserly Moms' Cheesy Pull-Apart Biscuits, Recipe No. 184) and they may include food with debatable nutrients (e.g., the iceberg lettuce in Recession Recipes' Iceberg Lettuce Soup), but you can always play around with these recipes -- one of the fun things about cooking anyway -- to suit yourself.

For example, cabbage is cheap and very nutrious. Maybe you substitute that for the iceberg lettuce in the soup recipe. Or you take the time to make biscuits from scratch - anything processed costs more, so you'd theoretically be saving even more money if you circumvented the canned biscuit dough....

These collections give you more than just the recipes themselves. If you go surfing through them, you'll discover themes and patterns that will help you a better shopper and a better cook. Study them, and you'll learn more than just a new dish for the family menu.

For more information:

How to Cook 4: Beans Are Easy, Cheap, and Good
Menu Planning 102
Menu Planning 101