50 Geeky Presents For Your Christmas List

• Author: admin
• Filed under: General, gifts
• Date: Dec 15,2008

Tengu, named after the Japanese god of mischief (aha! I knew there was a god that was doing that!), is also a little device that plugs into your USB port and makes faces at any ambient noise in what I can only presume is an attempt to get me to look over.

You know those fish, you try to walk by their tank and ignore them and they make that O-O-O face and poof their cheeks out and back in, as if to say “What are YOU?” when it’s clear IT’S the weird-looking thing?

This is Tengu. He even lip syncs to whatever music you play. No one said geek gifts had to be useful.

(I fear this next one.) You have piles of stray negatives that for some reason, you refuse to toss yet you’ve been unable to calculate a use for them. Well, DESTROY them immediately because here comes the USB-powered negative scanner. Now, here’s hoping that the $100 pricetag will prove too steep for the peek into the dark side.

What if you could combine your stovetop, a grill, and a brain? You’d have the iGrill, the George Foreman grill that plugs into your computer and knows what it’s doing.

What to get the Doctor Who fan on your list? Clearly a Dalek webcam is just the thing.

This would be just any other flash drive except for the meter on the outside, which tells you how “full” the memory stick is.

This is a fantastic gift for both office geeks and school geeks: it’s a pen with a built-in camera and recorder. “Livescribe” comes with special paper with record/pause/stop/bookmark and more; when the meeting/lecture starts, click the pen onto the “play” button on the paper and commence with note-taking…although you’ll really only need to write down an occasional keyword.

The camera tracks the location of your pen on the paper, essentially bookmarking that section of the audio with what you write. So, later on, you click the keyword and the pen will refresh your memory by replaying that section of the audio. Genius! Not recommended for those who frequently misplace pens.

What about that dedicated geek at work, the one you owe so much to because he/she has on occasion missed a meal in deference to your silly little computer problems? It’s payback time, only instead of living up to the time-honored expression about what paybacks are, you’re going to make it fun: you’re getting them this USB-powered fondue set. Cubes of bread and cheese sold separately.

Everything should charge via USB. We’re not quite there yet, but at least with these AA batteries that recharge via USB, we’re closer.

There’s something pleasing about living things in your office area: maybe it’s that they serve as a reminder of life outside the office, or maybe it’s that they’re so soothingly unbothered by our world of deadlines and stress. Of course, the pleasure of keeping a fishbowl in my office has always been diminished by the inevitable guilt that follows when undoubtedly I manage to kill them through (I like to believe) no fault of my own.

So I bought one of these and you know what? Eventually the whole thing died but there wasn’t a speck of guilt, not even buyer’s remorse because I only paid twelve bucks and it was a hoot while it lasted.

The USB-powered pole dancer: no, she has no other purpose than to save you some ones.

You know when you were young, and you gave lame things to members of the opposite sex, thinking it was a sly declaration of your love when really it just made you seem more pathetic? Now, you can make up for it with the Mix Tape flash drive. Disguised as an ugly, stupid, embarrassing mix tape wherein you can use a felt tip pen (or whatever…but you know you like felt tip) to write your song choices. Here’s hoping your music taste has improved.

Brownie points for creating something so geeky and so beautiful, all in one: what if your alarm clock was not a lump of metal and plastic, but was instead a lump of metal and plastic with 3,000 pins that arranged to form the time, only to rearrange again a minute later? It’s like those miniature nail beds you press your hand into, which yielded…well, a hand-shaped configuration of nails. Except this one is useful.

And this is similar but instead of metal and plastic, it’s just wood. Wood, and a timepiece. Seriously, it tells time.

The TIX clock tells the time by making you math it out: each clump of squares features one or more that are lit. Counting these yields a digit of the time. Figuring out the current time was never this much work.

Same kinda’ thing but as a watch:

Calendars. We use them…nay, we depend upon them, but come four weeks from now they’re yesterday’s news, to be filed in the round bin. Which is why you need this combination calendar/police tape. The days of the week are in a separate spool so you can line them up accordingly. Man, everything has been invented.

I’m not going to lie to you, this thing makes me mad. But then, I can get out of bed when the alarm clock sounds and don’t need to be tortured as enticement. For those who need help, there’s Clocky, the alarm clock designed to harass you before you’ve even slipped your feet into your fuzzy moose slippers. When the alarm sounds, this clock on steroids will wheel right off your table and around your floor until you catch it. The adrenaline rush will either kill you or start you on your way. You might not even need coffee the first few days.

This next one, similar concept with a Harry Potter twist: part of it flies off and until you can capture it and restore it like a key in its lock, it will not be silenced. Grrrr.

Or, if you’d like to wake more gently rather than less so, Sunrise Creator plugs into a lamp and slowly coaxes it from off to high beams, cycling over a duration of your choice. You’ll have to keep your current clock as a failsafe because this one is silent.

You thought you’d seen every Monopoly boardgame version possible and they could get no cooler…but here comes Photo-opoly, where you customize your own board. Now surely they could never improve it over THAT.

Say you technically have to buy a gift, and you like to give an enjoyable gift, but you’re just plain cheap. This “emergency yodel button” is perfect for that geek with a cubicle far, far from yours.

Say you like to give expensive gifts…this is the smallest PC on the market. Until it’s not.

And while we’re on the topic of great gifts, you may need to get one of these for yourself, too: it takes the place of your car’s sun visor (um, your PASSENGER’S sun visor) and its 7” LCD screen serves as a master transmitter for all of its cool geek features: it plays DVDs and CDs and even has a USB port and an SD card reader. It even comes with a remote, although I’m not sure why.

Teeshirts are like candy to geeks. Starting with a young slovenly Bill Gates, one geek after another fell prey to the comfortable ease of a nice tee. And why not? They’re easy to wash, inexpensive, and they match everything. Some of them, like this wifi detector tee, are even useful. It even displays signal strength by lighting up the according number of bars.

This next one has a problem. The problem is, you might love it too much to give it away. About the size of an iPhone and weighing 5.3oz, it is a projector capable of displaying your movies at 50” diagonal, the size of a bigscreen tv. It just requires a multimedia device (laptop, multimedia player, even some phones) to pull the images or movies from. So, your gift recipient (by which I mean you) is sitting on a plane, bored out of his or her (your) wits and whips out this little badboy to watch a movie on the plane ceiling. Okay, that’s a bad idea because it’s going to alert the authorities (flight attendant) and they’ll lock you up (cut off your supply of peanuts).

We knew it was coming and here it is: video glasses! Soon, it’ll be considered “old school” to actually stare at a monitor and all the cool kids will be walking around with tricked-out shades, comparing specs as to resolution and clarity. (I also suspect that not a lot of work will be getting done because so much time will be tied up by swapping glasses with other geeks and scrabbling around for movies that effectively demo the glasses’ awesome capabilities.) They’ve actually come down under two hundred bucks now but I’m holding out for a pair with wi-fi.

Everybody loves their digital camera. What they don’t love is filling up its memory and trying to keep track of which cards are already full and which still have space available. What would be perfect is if the images could float in space to your computer so that you don’t have to hassle with it. But ha ha, that’s impossible. OR IS IT? (Yeah, you saw that one coming.) With this great little SD card (“Eye-fi”), your camera is instantaneously converted into a wireless device. Now, there’s just the pesky little matter of latching onto a signal.

So, let’s say you’re vacation in remote parts this year, and as much as you love your little Eye-fi card, it’s not going to find a signal out here. What would really be nice is a tiny little printer. But that’s silly, because then you’d have to tote around ink cartridges too, and anyhow, printers don’t come in that size. Got you again! A company called Zink (which stands for “zero ink”) came up with a paper that has the C, M, Y, and K crystals built right in, and a tiny little printer (about the size of your camera) that brings the appropriate colors to the surface. And if you play with it a bit before you package it up and give it away, who’s going to know?

Sure, most everyone has now officially mastered rapid typing via tiny keyboards on their PDA or cell, but it’s still just nice to sprawl out and type on a full-sized keyboard. Obviously, the downside is packing it. The great thing about technology is that someone is working ‘round the clock to solve the unsolvable and you know what? Almost everything is solvable. Surely this tiny little matter. The i.Tech Bluetooth virtual keyboard projects an image of a keyboard and senses where your fingers interrupt the beamed light, recording it as a keystroke. I only wish I’d thought of it first, and that if I had, I wouldn’t’ve been too lazy to do anything with my idea.

Robots just keep getting better and better. Pleo is a dinosaur with soft skin, fluid movements, and he not only responds to the world, he is capable of learning. He has built-in sensors so that he can see and hear and he even has a sense of touch; scratch his back and he’ll turn his head to see who’s doing that. Turn out the lights on him and he might cry. He even sneezes! And best of all, he’s upgradeable, so when they come out with new traits for him, you can load him up. As soon as Pleo can lumber to the kitchen and make me a nice martini, I’m onboard.

As soon as I heard about the HP TouchSmart screen, it seemed a puzzler no one had thought of it before. (Of course, I didn’t either, but that’s not the point.) ATM screens for years have relied on sensual input but somehow our monitors never did, and we’ve been mousing along like suckers when all we wanted to do was point at the pretty pictures and make things happen. Maybe it seemed too simple, too approachable. Maybe if computers are that moron-friendly, none of us computer gurus will seem all that spectacular. Still, I want one.

Desktop Factory is the first out of the gate to release a 3D printer and before you freak out at the five grand price tag, listen for a moment to what it does because the term “printer” is fairly simplistic and doesn’t do it full justice. This baby can recreate a three dimensional object out of nylon granules, using a halogen lightbulb to do the “cooking”…so, not so different from an EasyBake oven, really, only much more expensive and you don’t get a yummy cake at the end. Of course, as soon as you get over the fun of making rubber duckies and other fun but useless garbage, you’ll probably actually find a lot of uses for this; you’ll soon be able to download 3d plans from the internet, such that you can replace all those little tiny parts and whatsits that have gone missing around the house. Next time you lose that tiny screw from your eyeglasses, you can just fire up the ol’ printer.

Let’s stop pretending that you’re fabulously wealthy and a generous gift-giver and that you’ll spare no expense to amuse and delight your friends this Christmas. How about let’s convince ourselves that it’s the thought that counts and that instead of a 3-d printer, they’d be equally delighted to receive a tape dispenser that’s, well, a tape cassette? Okay, so it’s not as much fun as the printer but it’s easier to wrap, easier to lift, and easier to afford. Just don’t mention the printer and the tape cassette thing will seem pretty cool.

Boy, I know I don’t need a thermostat I can talk to but why wouldn’t I WANT one? Gifts are not about what we require; it’s about what we desire. (Make a note of that if you’re that guy that buys his wife things she said she needs…those are not gifts.) So clap your hands twice to make your thermostat pay attention, then command it to raise or lower the temperature. You can preprogram it differently for every day of the week, and different times of day if you like, since you no doubt don’t want it churning while you’re out, yet it would be nice if it had the house at the perfect temperature when you arrive at home. (And as soon as we get that robot going with the martinis, life will be perfection.) If you ask it, it’ll even tell you the time and the indoor and outdoor temperatures.

Sure, you can print full color labels and you can even etch right into the CD with dark grey but did you know you can PAINT your image in full color directly onto your CDs? It’s all brought to you by Dymo, those clever folks that invented that pressure-sensitive color-changing tape…remember? You spun a wheel to a letter, punched, and the letter showed up as white on your dark color adhesive label tape. That sure was some magic and so is this. It even has a clear window through which you can watch the painting…I feel like David Copperfield’s going to pop out at any moment.

Alert: this one is only for hardcore geeks, the kind of geeks who probably don’t see a lot of sunlight because all their equipment is inside so they have no use for the outside world. I’m talking about the kinds of geeks who still fantasize about Princess Leia and truly believe she’s out there waiting for them, waiting for faster space travel so that they can find her. (I doubt in the fantasies, she’s like sixty years old by the time they get there.) Anyhow, this is a replica of R2-D2 complete with spinning head, motion sensor, telescope, and LED lights…oh, and did I mention his body is a fish tank?

Or, perhaps your geek would prefer an R2-D2 to not be a giant sushi container.

If the geek in your life is more of an outdoor type, and there’s any chance of snow at any time, the perfect geek snow accessory is a snowball launcher. This baby will rapid-fire them at victims up to fifty feet away. And, when everyone becomes tired of snowball fights against such an empowered adversary, it comes with a target for lone games.

And if the snowball launcher turns out to be a big hit, you might wish to throw in these heated rechargeable insoles. They’re cordless and a charge lasts for up to eight hours of toasty tootsies.

Rumor has it that some people still take the trouble to use photo albums…I personally think they should be a lot more popular, because looking at photos on a screen is so fleeting, and because we took the pictures hoping the memories would last. Archiving them on a backup drive somewhere doesn’t give them the same life as flipping through an album. I’m sure someday some geek will have invented something so cool for backup photos that they’ll get the love they need, but for now, there’s this popup photo album, where “accent” photos lift up higher in your line of vision as you flip the pages.

No one NEEDS disco lights in their tub; I’m just not sure why they wouldn’t PREFER it that way.

Sam Buxton graduated from art school and made business cards out of very thin sheets of metal with an elaborate cutout of himself working at a computer. I gave one of these as a gift recently and the geek I gave it to had as much fun figuring out how to fold it into three dimensions as he did enjoying its weird geeky beauty once it sat upright. It’s almost the epitome of geek gift as it’s kind of a humble geek homage.

I’m going to tell you something shocking: some people still have VCRs. Yes, it’s true. And they want to get rid of them, they really do, they know they’re basically door stops at this point, but they have these old VHS tapes, see, and it’s the data on the tapes that they really want. Thankfully, you can help them break free and finally reclaim that luggage-sized space for other things like, well, luggage. Here is a device that plugs into a USB port and records VHS tapes in a digital format, so that these poor saps can be embarrassed no longer because they can then burn it to DVD. And hopefully you won’t have to bail them out again when DVDs become suddenly obsolete.
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Here’s the same thing for the dusty collection of audio cassettes…

And I know, LPs were beautiful and yada yada, you still insist they sound better than CDs but they DON’T, and anyhow, yours are all scratched.

You have this friend, he can never remember where he parked. He leaves the movie theatre to use the restroom, he can never re-find his seat. This poor guy needs a miniature GPS, one to carry on his person. Thankfully, this exists and it’ll just set you back ninety bucks. He clicks it to tell it to Remember This Spot! and later it’ll help re-guide him back to it. Here’s hoping he doesn’t lose the GPS.

There are crazy nutso things underwater and a special camera would be a great thing to have but it’s a lot of fuss to have to carry it and all the gear. I’m really loving that someone combined a digital camera with a snorkel mask! I’m too lazy to go anywhere to use it but it’s great for recovering people’s spare change from the bottom of the pool at my apartment…I’ve already reclaimed almost two dollars of my purchase price.

Or, swim goggles with a built-in MP3 player.

Or take it one step deeper: the USB microscope is also a digital camera. No matter how cool your childhood microscope was, it was NOT this cool.

Rumor has it that caffeine can be absorbed through your skin and still administer the same delightful properties. Is it true? And if so, is it any better for your health than inhaling 12 cups before 9a.m.? What, am I some sort of scientist? All I’m saying is, it’s like seven bucks for a bar of Shower Shock and whether it works or not, it’ll be fun for your recipient to experiment with. And it’ll look attractive when wrapped due to its conveniently rectangular-ish shape.