As the East Coast begins to recover from Hurricane Sandy, there is a lot of cleaning up to do. To help you document property damage to your home or car, we’ve put together a list of apps that can come in handy. Below we’ve linked to iOS and Android apps that can help you with either documenting damage, filing claims or simply tracking possessions.

1. Insurance Claims Recorder: “The Insurance Claims Recorder is the premiere method for recording claims interviews both in person and live phone calls. Easily and securely take recorded phone statements; live, in-person recorded statements; record conferences and meetings; and take dictation of contents inventories; field notes; letters and memos. The Insurance Claims Recorder gives the claims professional the ability to attach a claim number (or file name), the insured name, the interviewee name, and relationship to accident with each audio file.” Read more

Barnes & Noble hasn’t given a specific date for when they plan to release Nook Video app and start selling movies and TV shows on the Nook HD, but they have been dropping hints about the content they plan to sell.

Today B&N announced they had signed new deals with  NBC and Fox. These deals will bring a wide selection of movies and TV shows to Nook HD owners, including blockbuster films like Snow White and the Huntsmen, Battleship, Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, Ice Age: Continental Drift, and many more. These deals will also add hit TV shows like The Michael Richards Show, Coupling, Good Morning Miami, and other hit titles from Fox and NBC. Read more

Windows 8 has been available to the public for just a few days, and it seems to be picking up apps at a reasonable pace. The digital textbook distributor Kno has released a new app for Windows 8. The app brings all the great features found in Kno’s Android, iOS, and Facebook apps, including:

• handwritten notes,
• 3D models,
• Smart Links, a curated set of links which help explain and elaborate on key concepts
• Snapview, a new way to review content from multiple sources,
• Social Sharing, including the ability to subscribe directly to someone else’s notes and see them in the textbook,
• and extensive annotation options including highlights, bookmarks and sticky notes.

Windows Store

Everyone now takes apps for granted, no matter whether they are on your smartphone, tablet, or even your TV. In fact, we’ve shifted a lot more activities to our mobile devices than you might think.

Coursesmart posted the following infographic today. It lists some of the furnishings that college students used to buy for their dorm rooms and matches the items up with the apps that replaced them. This infographic was intended to show how students can save money, but I like it because it shows how many things we now do with apps.

For example, I can recall the time when I had a Polaroid camera. It ages ago, and it has long since been replaced by the camera on my tablet. Read more

Rovio has been teasing us for several weeks now about their newest addition to the Angry Birds franchise, posting teaser video and teaser video. Today they finally showed us a tiny bit of what the game will look like:

As you can see Rovio has created at least 2 new bird characters based on Luke and Leia Skywalker. Clearly Rovio has tied this game into the Star Wars mythos; one character shoots some kind of blaster while the other has a lightsaber. And if you look closely you’ll see that the pigs have been dressed up as Imperial troopers and Tusken raiders in levels reminiscent of Hoth and Tatooine.

While Hurricane Sandy may take out your electricity and your Internet connection, if you’ve got a phone signal, you can still use access Twitter via SMS. This, and a radio, can be a good way to stay up-to-date on what is going on in your area and a good way to broadcast messages out.

Text the word “START” to 40404, and Twitter will reply with the word, “YES.” If you text back your username (without the @sign), you will set yourself up to be able to send tweets via SMS. You can also choose to receive select Twitter accounts, say the National Weather Service @usNWSgov or Michael Bloomberg @NYCMayorsOffice.

The Washington Post has all the details: “ You don’t need a Twitter account to get important tweets sent to your phone. Just text the word “Follow [username]” to 40404 on a U.S.-based phone. For instance, if you want to receive tweets from @CapitalWeather and you don’t have a Twitter account, text “Follow capitalweather” to 40404.” (Via @baratunde).

Instacane.com, a site built by Facebook employee Chris Akerman and software engineer Peter Ng, is documenting the progress of Hurricane Sandy through a collection of individual updates on Instagram. The site follows the hashtags of Instagram users affected by Sandy and displays an array of images from different people experiencing the storm.

The photos are a great detour from the giant graphics we’ve been seeing that show most of the Eastern Seaboard all in red. They show sobering images from the trenches of the storm like this photo (pictured left) from hoeboma of Atlantic City flooding and shots of flooding in Manhattan.

It’s also got a collection of images of hurricane preparations, from empty store shelves to cabinets well stocked with water, packaged foods and beer. There are, of course, some silly pics. (Via TechCrunch).

The Hurricane Guide by William Radcliff Birt is today’s Free eBook of the Day.

Today’s book is a guide to navigating hurricanes by seas. While we don’t advise such actions, it’s an interesting read if you’ve still got power for downloading. (Don’t forget to charge up your eReader!). Here is an excerpt from the book:

It is the object of the following pages to exhibit, so far as observation may enable us, and in as brief a manner as possible, the connexion, if any, that exists between those terrific meteorological phænomena known as “revolving storms,” and those more extensive and occult but not less important phænomena, “atmospheric waves.”

Project Gutenberg has the free download.

For more free downloads, check out our Free eBook of the Day archive.

The iPad Mini was only reveleaed to the world last week and it is already getting the satirical treatment every Apple product gets.

The following video apes the classic Apple employee plus camera style commercial to gently tease Apple about the iPad Mini.

Humor aside, this is actually a pretty good summary of the components and features of the iPad Mini. If all you want to know is how this tablet differs from its predecessors, this video will help.

The “expert” gadget bloggers who decried the iPad Mini might not like the new tablet but it’s pretty clear that the public disagrees.

It has only been up for pre-order for three days and Apple’s latest gadget is already out of stock.

Apple is now showing a two week delay for both the black and the white WiFi models. The models with LTE cellular won’t be available until mid-November, of course.

As impressive as this might be, the iPad Mini actually didn’t sell out nearly as fast as some of Apple’s other products. The latest iPhone sold out within hours, and the iPad 3, which was launched in March of this year, sold out in under 48 hours. This suggests that demand for the iPad Mini might not be as high as Apple would have liked.