Sunscreen alert: One product you shouldn't buy

We've often praised TripIt, an itinerary-builder that allows you to easily forward your travel confirmation e-mails to plans@tripit.com and compiles that research into a single, shareable itinerary, complete with weather forecasts, maps, and restaurant recommendations. Starting tomorrow (Wednesday), TripIt will debut its latest creation, TripIt Pro, a membership-based service that offers extra tools on top of its free online organizer. Company co-founder Scott Hintz walked me through some of the new features. 1. Mobile alerts: the website will automatically send alerts to your cell phone for all the airlines on your itineraries. This will come in handy if you fly on multiple carriers and forget to register for text-message alerts with the individual airlines. 2. Alternate flights: If your flight is delayed or canceled, the text-message alert will also include a link to other airlines with flights that are leaving around the same time as your original departure. (You'll need a web-enabled phone or browser to access the link.) TripIt Pro only shows flights with available seats and also lists a rebooking phone number. Though you'll still have to negotiate with the airline agent for the actual rebooking, Hintz says, "Equipping you with the info is powerful. You can say, 'I want to get that Delta flight that's leaving in 30 minutes' instead of asking, 'When's the next flight out?'" 3. Point tracking: your TripIt Pro account shows all of your recent activity for every air/hotel awards program, as well as all the expiration dates. So now you can have Hyatt and United Airlines points showing up on the same screen. You can try the service free for the first 30 days. If you register by July 31, you'll become a lifetime charter member for $49 per year. Otherwise the service will cost $99 per year. EARLIER Why we like TripIt

Golden Globe nominated actress Scarlett Johansson told readers of The Daily Beast today:I love the Road Food website and make sure to see if I'll be driving through a town offering up "The Best…" anything that Road Food recommends. I was surprised to see my close proximity to one of the best turkey clubs I've ever had!We agree! And we encourage you to check them out if you're taking any long drives soon… Here's our recent Q&A; with the reviewers who run the site: They ate at 700 diners, shacks, and joints to find the best

Kayak has introduced a monthly calendar that lists the starting rates for hotels by the day of the month. Working along the same lines as its Buzz flight calendar, the hotel chart lets you see the best available price based on data pulled from sites like Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, Priceline, Hotels.com, and the hotels' own websites. Although the flight calendar lists the starting rate on any airline, the hotel calendar only displays the prices for one property at a time. The idea is that people tend to care a fair amount about which hotel they stay in, but when they're looking for a flight, the cheapest one is usually the one they're going to go with.Kayak has also tweaked other parts of its website. A Toolbox section on the upper left now lets you share results with others. A small heart icon next to each result lets you tag them as favorites, making them extra prominent for recipients. The e-mailed link stays live for just 30 minutes, though Kayak's spokeswoman tells me that time limit may be extended. The collaboration tool is helpful when you're trying to coordinate flight schedules with friends, for instance. In my meeting with Kayak last week, I also learned that the site plans to roll out an instant-messaging function, so you will soon be able to share your search results over IM as well.

The latest iPhoto software from Apple, iLife '09, allows you to organize your digital photos by faces and places. After you load up your photos, use a "Faces corkboard" (shown at the right) to automatically categorize your friends and family members. Then tag a photo of a person by typing in their name. Apple's face-recognition software will scan the rest of your pictures to find faces that match the mugs of the person you identified, tagging those other photos with the person's name, too. While the technology isn't new—Google, for instance, introduced it to its Web-based photo organizing service Picasa service last September—it is convenient if you already have photos stored on Apple computers. The technology isn't perfect. During my recent one-on-one tutorial at an Apple showroom, I saw the computer failed to correctly identify photos of two nearly-identical siblings. (Less extreme examples also pose problems for the software, such as when a person isn't facing the camera in a photo.) But I learned how mistakes can be manually corrected pretty quickly. I also found that you can speed up your photo tagging by highlighting entire rows of photos at a time and approving all of the tags at once. The most impressive feature, at least to me, is a handy one-click button that not only automatically logs you into Facebook or Flickr but also directly uploads your images to those sites—and preserves all of the tagged information so you don't have to waste time duplicating your efforts. If a Facebook friend tags one of your photos, the new name is synced to iPhoto. Genius! To post a picture to myBudgetTravel or other photo-sharing site (like Shutterfly), drag it to your desktop and upload it from there. The new iPhoto software also organizes your snapshots by places, letting you type in geographical keywords, such as Hawaii, to help simplify your searches. If you have an iPhone or a newer digital camera like the Nikon Coolpix P6000 that automatically records GPS data for you, the program can also map your photos based on location. The "geotags," or the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of where the photo was taken, are saved on a Google world map. Just clicking on the map can bring up all the photos that were taken in that spot. The 2009 edition of iLife (which includes the updated iPhoto software) is in stores and comes with every new Mac computer. Upgrade packs cost $79.