My wife's clock radio starts blaring at 6:30 every morning just as the kids are slowly stirring from their slumber. The news of the day is usually tame -- weather, politics, business -- but some mornings, it's all tragedy. Hours of it. Tragedy so plainly wrought that I wonder if I shouldn't throw the clock radio out the window.

So how do we talk to kids about this stuff? How do we hide the news when it comes at us from all angles? How do we keep a plugged-in generation in the dark? Should we?

Crowdfunding may seem too good to be true: you have a great idea, you create a web page, and a month later, you have enough money (hopefully) to bring your idea to fruition. For countless artists, writers, and filmmakers, sites like Kickstarter have let them do just that. Here are some tips and tricks for making a great crowdfunding request to get your amazing idea off the ground.

First, a little on crowdfunding. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are the two major crowdfunding platforms. Users can visit their pages and "pledge" amounts to get certain rewards, including products. Each reward should be an item -- a T-shirt, a movie, a video game -- and each product should be something people want. Most crowdfunding efforts compartmentalize rewards into different tiers and leave one "entry level" tier that includes a personal note or postcard from the creator.

Facebook recently announced something called Facebook Home, a program for Android phones that puts your social feed front and center on your device. What does that mean? Well, you can send Facebook messages, read Facebook feeds, and look at Facebook photos. In short, it turns your phone into a Facebook phone.

As Jan on The Brady Bunch might have said in exasperation if the show were on today: "Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!"

Here's what Home will mean to you. 

Sharing photos on Facebook or Twitter is fun for, say, a weird rock you found in your salad or a strange bird that appeared in your back yard. However, it's not so great for sharing baby's first steps or first poopy. That's what Eugene Murphy created Tweekaboo. 

This app is fantastic because it lets you pull a lot of your baby pictures off of Facebook and Twitter. Those social networks are essentially black holes for content and my parents, for example, rarely use them. However, Tweekaboo encourages the entire family to connect to see the kiddos via an iOS app.

If you're an iPhone fan, you'd be excused for not noticing the rise of a new breed of smartphone. Samsung has been selling their Galaxy line of devices for a while now, but they've just announced the S4, a super-slim, feature-packed smartphone that some people think will give Apple a run for its money.

The S4, available in April on most carriers, is less about the form than the function. 

If you've ever dealt with home security salesmen, you'll know they're kind of pushy. Home security is obviously serious business, but the lengths they go to in order to suggest "upgrades" to their services are a little off-putting and I've never really enjoyed the process.

Luckily, there are now a number of "modular" security systems out there that make it easy to install and run them without much fuss. In fact, they are designed to be removable, so when you move, you can simply take the hardware with you.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education -- or STEM ed, as it's called -- is a big deal. Over the past few years, we've opened a huge gap between the U.S. and the rest of the developed world and, ironically, hiring in high tech is up while management and financial hiring is down or flat. In short, there's no better time to get our kids interested in technology.

But how do you get young ones interested in computing, electronics, and engineering? It's easy: You sneak it in the same way you sneak vegetables into their mac and cheese!

Beer après skiAs we approach the tail end of winter -- and some of the coldest weeks we've seen -- the family and I decided to head up to Massachusetts for a bit of skiing. I, luckily, get to stay in the house we rented and watch the 1-year-old cavort and eat stuff off the floor, but the wife and two little ones are on the slopes with a bunch of heavy duty gear.

What are they carrying? Here are my picks for gear to pack on your trip.