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

I'm taking my phone off "the grid", who's with me?

It's about time for another crazy mobile experiment. Last time was my 60-day "web-challenge" where I tried to use only a browser for my daily computing tasks. It went quite well, but indicated to me that web services still have plenty of room to mature. So what's the new challenge? This one fits in with our household efforts to be more "green" in our care for the environment.

In 2005, we sold a gas-guzzling truck and opted for a new hybrid vehicle. In 2007, we swapped out over two-dozen incandescent bulbs with CCFLs and saw a huge drop in our electricity usage. Earlier this year, we purchased and installed a solar-powered attic fan and we're on the verge of composting our organic food waste. Since I use mobile devices all day, I decided to take a solar-powered approach to further reduce our electricity consumption so here's the challenge: I'm taking my handheld devices off the grid for the next 60 days. Or at least, that's what I'm going to try.

How to modify Mac multi-touch gestures in Firefox 3.1b2

Ever since we found out that the latest Firefox 3.1 beta for Mac supports multi-touch trackpad gestures, I've been giving my fingers a work out. Just as a refresher, here are the commands that are natively supported:

- 3 finger swipe Left: Go back in history (hold Cmd to open it in a tab)
- 3 finger swipe Right: Go forward in history
- 3 finger swipe Up: Go to the top of the page
- 3 finger swipe Down: Go to the end of the page
- Pinch Together: Zoom out
- Pinch Apart: Zoom in
- Twist Right: Next tab
- Twist Left: Previous tab

Dave Zatz asked a great question in the comments from yesterday's post: "Whatever I've been doing accidentally has been zooming in and out of pages and occasionally flipping tabs. I seriously thought Beta 2 was buggy. Glad to know it's only multitouch. But how do I turn it off??"

After some digging, I can answer that question. In fact, you can not only turn these commands off, but you can customize them if you know how.

Quanta demonstrates "look ma, no hands!" touch capabilities for Windows 7

Although it's just an early beta, Windows 7 shows much promise and desirable features. One of this is the integrated support for multi-touch control and some hardware manufacturers are wasting no time in taking advantage of touch. Even when there's no smudgy touching at all. Take Quanta, for example.

DigiTimes says that at WinHEC Taipei, the company demonstrated their magical, mystical Optical Touch technology. Instead of using a touchscreen display to accept touch commands, Optical Touch relies on two web-cams to watch your roving palms and then interpret the commands right into the operating system. The cameras are placed on the top corners of a display and support standard cursor movement as well as image rotation and screen zooming. Someone use two fingers to pinch me when I can wave my hand across the screen on a Sunday afternoon and have a pint automatically appear while I watch football.

Curious to get a glimpse of how this might work? Check the Microsoft Research efforts on video that we highlighted in the not-so-distant past for a similar implementation. Still no beer though.

Apple- buy a Mac and save on taxes

How do you sell computers at a premium price in this down economy?  Apple has the answer and just shared it with me via email:

GetJar: Merry Christmas Steve Jobs

Press release speaks for itself:

Merry Christmas Steve, from Everyone at GetJar Networks

LONDON, December 3, 2008: GetJar Networks, the world’s most popular mobile application distribution and developer community, today thanked everyone in Apple’s marketing department for helping to put mobile applications on the map.

Ilja Laurs, CEO of GetJar, said: “As a small private company we have been busy since 2005 putting mobile applications and games onto consumers’ phones. Since it is the season of goodwill we would like to show our appreciation of the work of Steve Jobs and everyone at Apple for communicating the value of mobile applications to a wider audience.

“At GetJar we have been building the world’s leading mobile applications development and distribution community since 2005 and currently host over 10,000 unique applications that are generating 18 million downloads a month around the world. As a small underground upstart, rapidly emerging as the non-iPhone alternative for mobile applications, we’ve seen a significant increase in mobile applications downloads on our site since Apple’s launch of its App Store this year. As awareness of mobile applications has grown in the popular press through the efforts of Apple’s marketing machine, consumers all over the world have increasingly started to say: ‘Cool! Where can I get this kind of stuff for my phone?’ For many, the answer has been GetJar.

“Mobile phone applications on GetJar are available for all the popular handsets people use every day — from makers like BlackBerry, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and many more. Consumers come to GetJar to download everything from location-based apps such as Google Maps, mobile browsers such as Opera Mini, and social networking apps such as Nimbuzz. With mobile phone shipments expected exceed 1.2 billion phones this year alone, the potential market for mobile applications is truly huge.

“So our holiday season message to consumers is this: don’t worry if you don’t have an iPhone – you can still get Facebook, Google Maps and great games on your phone! And to our friends at Apple: Merry Christmas, and keep up the good work!”

New South Wales to provide 197,000 students with netbooks

Small notebook computers are no question perfect for students to use at school.  The small and light form makes it easy to backpack around the school and as long as the notebook has fairly standard components it is more than sufficient to meet the needs of those students.  The officials in the Australian state New South Wales agrees with that assessment and have announced that 197,000 public school students will get what sounds like netbooks this year.

"These custom-made laptops are about three-quarters the size of a regular laptop - compact enough to fit into a schoolbag or a locker but powerful enough to support all the IT needs of our high school students.

"We can deliver the digital revolution by putting wireless networks in every public secondary school and buying a laptop for all the 197,000 students in years 9 to 12."

They go on to indicate that students will get to keep the "small notebooks" when they leave school.  This is a very ambitious program and the largest of this type we've heard of so far.  Kudos to the Aussies for putting their money where their students are.  There was no word given which company is supplying the laptops.

(Sydney Morning Herald via Gordon Cahill)

Turn your VGA port into a powered USB

This little project over at Instructables is right up the alley of netbook owners. I love how every netbook I can think of offers a VGA port so you can make use of a larger, external monitor when the need arises. Let's face it though: when you're mobile with a netbook (isn't that why you bought it?), you're not getting anything of value from the VGA jack. Why let it lie peacefully sleeping while you and the USB ports are toiling away when a little bit of elbow grease and soldering can turn this into an extra, powered USB port? The short process looks relatively painless, even for a soldering n00b like myself.

Gizmine launches- Japanese gear for everyone

Those crazy folks at Dynamism have long been good buddies of ours and today they launched a new retail site that it beyond description.  Well that never stopped us before so we'll describe it anyway.  They bill the new Gizmine site as "the world's largest Japanese gadgets and lifestyle design shop".  They have USB powered stuff, watches and a lot of stuff you'll have to figure out what it does exactly.  We wish Gizmine the best of luck and hey guys, we really like that gold-plated keyboard:

Screenium adds PIP input to Mac screencasts

We've been long-time fans of Screenium for the Mac. It's a great screen-capture tool that just got greater... er, better. MacWorld says that version 1.06 adds support for multiple webcams like the iSight on a Mac. This allows you to create your screencast but also capture your own picture so folks can see your facial expressions when you totally hose up the screencast. Well, maybe I'm the only one that happens to. I gave the new feature a quick try by showing how easy that shared Google Docs drop and drag feature works in Gmail and the results are pretty good. Next time I'll have to make sure I zoom in on the actual subject matter though... probably more effective if you can read what I'm showing, no?

Screenium is $20 although there's a free trial. James and I were impressed enough with the application when we looked into it over a year ago that we both plunked down the coin.