jkOnTheRun Fifth Annual Geek Holiday Gift Guide

It's time (past time really) for the jkOnTheRun Fifth Annual Geek Holiday Gift Guide to help you find the cool and unusual gifts for that geek in your life.  I had to stop and look at that again, yes, it's the Fifth Annual guide!  That's a lot of years in blog years.  We've scanned the geekosphere and come up with the ten best gifts you can lay on your special geek.  Tell them jkOnTheRun sent you (no affiliation of any kind).

1.  My Documents Laptop Sleeve- what could be a better way for your geek to carry all his/her documents around than this sleeve?  You know your geek takes the laptop everywhere and is in the cloud so all of the "documents" are just files anyway, right?  $29.99

2.  Plant Twitter Kit- your geek is all over the Twitter and it only makes sense that his/ her plants are too.  This kit will allow the geek's houseplant to notify her via Twitter when it needs watering or when it's been over-watered.  Now that's geeky.  $99.99

3.  LOL Magnetz- I can hz magnetz?  What better way to live the cheezbrger lifestyle than with your geek's own LOL Magnetz on the fridge or cubicle?  $19.99

4.  Personal Soundtrack Shirt- because the only way to make your geek more annoying is to make his clothes play sounds.  The Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt will let your geek make his own music everywhere.  And any clothes with a remote control scores you big points with your geek.  $39.99

5.  Scrolling LED Belt Buckle- what better accessory for the clothes on this list than the LED Belt Buckle.  Let your geek declare anything he/she wants in bright colorful lights.  What could be geekier than that?  $19.99 - $24.99

6.  Got Root? Hat- sometimes your geek has problems with style but that's solved with the Got Root? Hat.  Great for any occasion and it has the slogan on the front only a geek could love.  $16.99

7.  Little Star Wars Costumes- you and your geek have started a geek family of your own and everyone knows it's never too early to start embarrassing your kids.  These Little Star Wars Costumes will show off that geek background that no good geek should ignore. $19.99

8.  Einstein Action Figure- your geek's hero is faithfully reproduced as a fully bendable action figure.  If you can call Einstein an "action figure".  Imagine the look of delight on the face of your geek as he plays with the doll, er, action figure.  It's what you live for.  $7.99

9.  Finger Drums- no more playing air drums on the table for your geek.  Finger Drums reproduce a complete set of drums that your geek can play to his/ her heart's delight.  And there is nothing more aggravating than a geek playing little tiny drums so make sure this gift is for your geek's cubicle.  $24.99

10. WTF? Mug- nuff said.  $6.99

Site construction upcoming: plan appropriately

Just a quick heads up that we've got some back-end changes here on the site later today. The timing is generally out of our hands but the window we have right now is between 6pm ET and 9pm ET. We should actually be up and running during the changes, but it's unlikely that any reader comments can be left during this window. We're mentioning that aspect specifically due to the HP Magic Giveaway contest that kicked off today. Remember that to enter that contest, you have to leave a comment on the contest post. You have a week to do that, so this small downtime won't preclude anyone from entering. However, I'd recommend holding off on your entry until after we're back up and running 100%, just to be certain that your comment is captured and entered.

I'll also post an update to the contest post linking to this message in case folks don't see this info. Again, the time-frame is out of our hands, but the changes are needed so that we can continue to bring you mobile tech content now as well as some new features in the future. Thanks!

Don't forget the mobile version of jkOnTheRun

We are a mobile tech site so it's only fitting that we provide the best way to get our stuff even when you are mobile.  We've been testing a mobile version that is working well so we want to make sure you have it in your mobile bookmarks.  This version provides the the titles of the most recent posts on jkOnTheRun and an image thumbnail if your mobile browser supports it.  I've tested this on the iPhone, the T-Mobile G1 and the Blackberry Storm and the home page displays the thumbnails on all but the Storm.  Everything works as it should though and you'll find it loads the full articles fast and with all images.  Give it a spin and let us know how you like it.  It works really well for me so far and I'm enjoying it.  It lets me keep up with all that posting Kevin does when I'm screwing off running around.  The URL is simple- m.jkontherun.com.  Here's what it looks like on the iPhone:

My current home office

I have settled into a final configuration of my home office, Mobile Tech Manor to many, and when I saw Xavier of Notebooks.com had posted his work area I felt it long overdue for me to do the same.  It took a while to get a good layout for my furniture and gear but it's pretty much final now.  The configuration is a typical L-shape with cords and cables all over the place, something not too uncommon with us geeks.  Maybe we can talk Kevin into posting his home office?  Here's a photo of the jkOnTheRun Gulf Coast Bureau with more after the jump:

Firefox share at a record high

The browser war has always been of interest as Firefox has been making a push into our browsing lives for some time.  Microsoft has long enjoyed big numbers but the folks at Mozilla have continued to improve their browser which continues to capture the attention of the masses.  Word has come out recently that Firefox has reached a 20% market share in the browser war which is certainly big news in that space.  When you improve it, they will come seems to be the mantra with each new version of Firefox.

We have always watched the browser share at jkOnTheRun to keep tabs on what browser our visitors are using and perhaps because our audience is more technically savvy than some the Firefox share has always been consistently high.  Given the continued popularity of Firefox the percentage of our readers using it may not surprise some but it does us:

Yes, this shows that almost half of you readers are using Firefox which is a staggering number and by far the biggest share we've seen since we've been tracking this the past few years.  This chart apparently shows that Firefox 3.x is showing up as Firefox 1.x but it's still a valid chart otherwise.

Off to the WiMAX event in Baltimore

Quick note that I'm on my way out the door for the two+hour drive down to Baltimore. Today is the WiMAX launch event. Note that it's the launch event and not the launch: the service officially went live last week and has already seen some reviews. I'll be doing my own hands on at the event but I won't likely be testing coverage, bandwidth and latency on the fringe as the event is in the heart of the harbor area. I did just find out that the Lenovo folks have something waiting for me at the event. It's a 30-day loaner device that's currently available and it's not a netbook. Hmmm......

Enjoy your day with James as I go see the "hotspot as big as a city!" Oh and before anyone asks: yes, I'm taking the MSI Wind, which is now running Vista SP1. At under three-pounds and less than a foot wide, it's great for travel and I can whip it out during the event without hurting myself or someone else. I'd better bring my EV-DO card too: once I leave Baltimore, I leave the WiMAX behind!

Good-bye mini-notebooks, hello netbooks

Just a quick programming note. You could say we hedged our bets with the netbook name because when we started to cover them, we created a "mini-notebooks" category. Hey, don't blame us be for being cautious considering we've also got UMPCs, MIDs, ULCPCs, Origami devices and who knows what other names coming down the pike to contend with. In any case, it looks like the netbook name isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so we've modified the mini-notebooks category to be the netbooks category. We now return you to your regularly scheduled coverage of standard mobile devices with non-standard names.

Kevin at Mobilize 08

We get the coolest job at Mobilize!

We're without coffee, but we did see a Java sign here at Mobilize! There's an amazing day of events planned between keynote addresses, startup launch presentations and of course, it's great to personally meet the GigaOM team that we work with virtually. James and I will miss some of the presentations though... turns out that we're doing around 20-odd, brief interviews on camera with various mobile tech companies. Folks like Qualcomm, Loopt, Skyfire Labs, Dial2Do, Tellme and many more!

This is going to be cool... I'm just hoping not to miss one of the keynotes. Rich Miner, co-founder of Google Android is speaking and I'm hoping we'll get a few more glimmers of info about the new handset platform. We've got an invite for the Android launch event next week as well, so whatever we don't hear today, we'll be sure to hear and see in New York City.

I don't know the logistics yet, but as far as I know, all of the video interviews will become available for online viewing. More to follow as the fun and craziness is just getting started!

jkOnTheRun Visitor Browser Share- Chrome version

We keep track of what browsers are used to access jkOnTheRun and post these statistics occasionally as they paint a good picture over time of the browser wars.  We can watch Internet Explorer slug it out with Firefox and see who is winning the fight round by round.  This week we saw the big release of Google Chrome and I was curious to see how it showed up in those statistics.  I took a picture of the browser share for just September 3rd, the first full day after Google Chrome was released.  I realize that the share of total visits using the Chrome browser will be higher than normal just because it's new but even so I was unprepared to see these stats:

That orange slice of the pie is Chrome and it's accounting for a whopping 10.36% of the total visits for the entire 24 hour period that constitutes September 3rd.  Any way you slice that figure you have to realize that Chrome is going to wreak havoc in this browser war going forward.  Chrome still needs a lot of work but it's a pretty good browser out of the box and this number shows that.  We also see that Firefox is whipping up on Internet Explorer by a fair margin which is getting larger all the time.  That last stat, HTC P3700 Opera, is the HTC Touch Diamond which shows up as its own browser.  At least one visitor is using the Touch Diamond.