Before we get started on the geeky gift ideas, I just wanted to quickly share a few helpful resources.  First, you’ll want to check out Google’s special Holiday Shopping Search.  This is great for tracking down products and comparing prices from different vendors all in one shot.  Also helpful, you’ll see the top searches shoppers are using this holiday season – great to find out what the most popular gifts are (looks like video games, music players, and digital cameras top the list), and may also give you some ideas.  Secondly, you’ll absolutely want to refer to DealHack’s list of Holiday Shopping Deadlines.  There’s over 150 of the top Internet retailers listed with their shopping & shipping deadlines – if you like to wait til last minute as I do, it will come in handy to know you’ll be able to receive items in time.

So on with a couple ideas!

1. Duracell Pocket Inverter 175

The Duracell Pocket Inverter is a DC to AC power inverter.  Basically, it’s a device you plug into the cigarette adapter in a vehicle’s dash that provides you with a standard AC power, like an electrical outlet in your home.  This allows you to plug your gadgets in while on the go without buying special mobile adapters for each one.  This Duracell is one such model, however inverters come in many shapes and sizes from many manufacturers.  What stands out on the Pocket Inverter 175 is a USB port in addition to the AC power outlet.  Lots of devices nowadays recharge via USB power from a computer (like iPods & iPhones, digital cameras, etc.), so those devices plug right in as if you were recharging them at your computer.  Shop around for other models if you wish, however, understand that “bigger isn’t necessarily much better” if you’re looking for something portable – it’s just more expensive and probably overkill.  A typical vehicle cigarette adapter is rated at 15 amps, which can provide 180 watts of power: 12 volts * 15 amps = 180 watts (thanks Dr. Ohm!) So this 175 watt Duracell model is juuust right.  (Larger inverters serve special purposes: larger appliances in boats, motor homes, et cetera… and would just blow a fuse in your car if loaded to their capacity!)  An inverter the size of the ‘175 is perfect for portable games, music players, cell phone chargers, laptops, portable TVs and DVD players, and other such devices.  It’ll only set you back about $40, which in some cases is less than a single specialty adapter for just one device. (Search for it!)

2. Antworks Space Age Ant Habitat

The Ant Farm is a classic educational toy and cultural icon, dating back to 1956 when Uncle Milton’s began selling them.  In 2003, NASA brought ants into space to perform gravity experiments, and devised a nutrient “gel” to meet the food and water needs of their 6-legged passengers.  Back on earth, Antworks combines the nutrient gel and Ant Farm concepts, and we’ve got a space-aged makeover of the classic Ant Farm fit for a new century.  Ant Farm is a trademark of Uncle Milton’s of course, so Antworks instead produces an “Ant Habitat.”  Fill up the container with your nutrient gel, give the tunnels a head start, add ants (yes, they still come in the mail when you’re ready for them), and sit back and watch your colony thrive. There’s even an accessory light to give your colony a cool blue fiber optic glow.  If you’re partial to the original, Uncle Milton still makes ‘em, as well as their own updated gel version too.  $15-25 for the Antworks Habitat (shop around!), $13 for the lighted base.  (Search it!)

3. USB Cell AA Rechargeable Batteries

These are an absolutely ingenious idea sure to score a perfect “10″ on the nifty scale with any nerd.  They look like regular AA batteries, and they are, sort of.  Flip the top back to reveal a USB plug.  The battery plugs right in to a USB port for recharging.  USB Cell managed to fit a rechargable battery, re-charging circuitry, and the USB plug itself all inside the normal form factor of a regular AA battery.  These are NiMH rechargables that work like any other rechargable battery as far as your devices are concerned.  When you’re out of juice, you can plug it right in to your computer or any powered USB port, which are nearly ubiqutous on a lot of electronic equipment these days.  There’s some drawbacks: they don’t last quite as long as normal rechargables, take a bit longer to recharge, and are a little more pricey.  But the geek-chic coolness factor trumps some of that.  They are however a perfect match for battery powered things that hang out near the computer anyway: wireless keyboards, mice, game controllers, and they’d be handy for traveling if you’re bringing a laptop anyway and want to avoid the battery charger too.  $20 for a pair.  (Search it!)

4. Logitech Harmony series Universal Remote Controls

Logitech has a whole series of programmable, universal remote controls.  These can be a little pricey, but these aren’t your typical remote control.  They’re universal remotes, which means they can control every piece of AV equipment in your home – Logitech can boast close to a quarter million different devices supported, and the remotes can “learn” from other old remotes that aren’t otherwise supported.  Unlike cheaper generic universal remotes, these can control several devices at the same time.  There’s no switching between “TV” or “Receiver” functionality; press the volume button, and it controls your receiver volume.  Press the channel buttons, and the channels change on your cable box.  You configure the remote control to your AV environment, so the controls for the buttons go to the right device, every time, the way it should work! The remotes are fully programmable and customizable via a computer interface connected by USB connection (Mac or PC compatible), so you don’t have to worry about punching in all this information on the remote itself.  The best feature are the “activity centered” buttons.  Think of the steps you might take now to watch a DVD: power on the TV, power on the receiver, power on the DVD player, set the TV to “input 3″, set your receiver to “input 2″, whatever your setup calls for.  How about a button that says “Watch DVD” that automates all those different button presses for you?  That’s exactly what you can program these remotes to do.  They’re a great gift for somebody to tidy up their huge collection of remotes, or somebody who struggles with working their complex AV system – but beware, you WILL need a little tech-savvy to set these up, so this might be a gift best given FROM a geek to a non-geek, along with a little configuration help to send them on their way.  The remotes retail from $99 to $499; there’s a whole slew of options, shapes and sizes, even customizable color screens and rechargeable models.  Shop around and you’ll find them for less than those retail prices.  (Logitech Website for Harmony series)

5. An HD Radio

Not sure what an HD radio is?  You’re not alone.  These are the greatest new products that either nobody has heard of, or doesn’t understand what they are.  I’ll try and break it down, short and sweet.  An HD radio is a digital radio, that picks up over-the-air signals, like an AM/FM radio.  An HD radio IS NOT a satellite radio, although it boats similar sound quality and features.  You pick up local stations, that are broadcast for FREE; there is no subscription required.  An HD radio is most similar in concept to the new digital TV broadcast scheme that’s forcing consumers to either upgrade or use converter boxes to keep using their rabbit ears.  Unlike the DTV transition, there’s no deadline set for a conversion to digital radio.  There likely won’t be one set for some time to come – so don’t get worried that you have to upgrade – but if you have a radio afficianado on your shopping list, they sure will appreciate the upgrade.  These radios are all over the charts when it comes to prices and options – they come in many varieties from table top and alarm clock size, to stereo component size, to units for installation in the car.  (Some ‘08 and many ‘09 vehicles will start shipping with HD radios standard… and there’s no portable models as of now, the electronics required haven’t been shrunken down small enough just yet!)  Your one-stop-shop for information on HD radios is the aptly named hdradio.com.  On the site, you’ll find a station locator to see which stations broadcast in HD in your area; in the Buffalo area there’s already about two dozen stations. You can still tune into regular AM & FM stations with these, but when you tune into HD stations you’ll get much better sound quality: AM now sounds like FM, FM now sounds like CD, and there’s never any fuzz or hissing.  Like DTV, some exisiting stations broadcast multiple versions at once, so you can pick between different tunes on the same station, and some are even commercial free.  Pictured is a Cambridge Soundworks Radio 820HD, which is a great choice for a mid-range, entry level, mid-priced table top model.  Retails about $129 – but again, shop around, you might beat the factory direct price.  (Cambridge Soundworks site)

What did you get for your geek this Christmas?  Leave a comment and share your idea with us!

First, we’ve got two great bits of news on the e-book frontier:

In the left corner: It looks like photos of the second revision of Amazon’s Kindle electronic book device have hit the web.  Of course, as with any “Internet leak” you have to take it with a grain of salt.  Amazon tried (with mixed results) to buzz up the original Kindle,  but if you’re not familiar with the original device, I can’t really blame you – but you can check it out here.  Could this leak be another attempt at generating some buzz?

The Boy Genius Report has a photo gallery with photos of the purported second version of the device.  It seems to be merely an incremental update: some cosmetic changes, new controls and keyboard layout, and USB charging instead of relying on an AC adapter.  Of course, there’s only so much one can infer from looking at photos, so we’ll have to wait for more official word to hear what other features may be built in.  No word on when this might be available; Amazon has previously claimed there wouldn’t be a new Kindle this year.

The new kindle is rumored to still use EVDO wireless as the first edition did.  This wireless functionality is pretty cool: it works with Sprint’s cellular EVDO network, so you can pick up a signal in nearly any populated area and find and download content to read on the go.  Amazon foots the bill for this; so there’s no need to be a Sprint customer or to pay any monthly access charges.  (Content however, often comes with a cost.)

In the right corner: Sony has announced their new e-book reader, the PRS700, at a press event this past Thursday.  It’s a follow up model to their acclaimed PRS505 reader, and it adds some really cool features.  It’s got a sleek look, a touch screen that lets you flip through pages with the swipe of a finger, more memory, more processing power, and a front light to allow you to read in low light situations.  It has five different font sizes and a new zoom feature to make reading easier on the eyes.  The biggest news out of the press event however isn’t even the device itself, but rather Sony’s new commitment to the e-book market.  They will be carrying the device at 3,000 locations U.S. wide (up from 700 currently), have hired a sales force of 1,000 to give in-store demos, and plan to have 100,000 titles available for download in their digital book store by year’s end.  The device is slated to be available in November, so with Sony’s new marketing position, you can expect to see this around when you’re out shopping this holiday season.

Both of these devices are of course based on electronic ink display technology.  Electronic ink is a ground breaking technology using actual ink particles to display text and graphics on amazingly thin (and even flexible) screens, and the ink particles are controlled by means of the electronics in the device.  It makes for outstanding battery life – the only time power is needed is when you change the page.  You can keep text on the page indefinitely however, without sucking up any more juice.  That means these devices have battery life on the order of days or weeks, rather than hours.  This does means you still need to read under comfortable lighting.  While there have been add-on accessories akin to book lights, the new Sony device brings a built in light to the game (expect battery life to decrease while you’re lighting up your screen.)  Electronic ink displays are black and white only at this time, though the readers out there are getting pretty good at displaying images in grayscale with many shades of gray.

They’re still a niche product – probably because of price – with the current Amazon Kindle clocking in at $349 (no word on pricing of the new version yet), and the Sony device expected to be $399.  This will hopefully change as years pass and electronic ink advances.  Industry experts have been predicting that electronic ink will take over old fashioned paper and ink for years now, but with each new device it seems we’re taking a step closer.  The time is near when Universities will likely mandate or provide these for students, and they’ll be able to carry an entire college career’s worth of textbooks in a single device, with the ability to note-take and annotate as well.  Just think of all the trees we’ll save…

While we’re on the topic of electronic books, I thought I’d give a shoutout to two new software applications I’ve been trying out recently that I’ve found particularly useful.  (Note, my “daily driver” is a MacBook, so these are Mac OS X applications – sorry Windows users!)  More after the jump…

The first is Yep!:

Yep! bills itself as the “iPhoto for PDF.”  I think it’s more like an iTunes for documents… but either way, you get the idea.  Yep! will scour your computer for PDF files, and gather them all in one place, regardless where they are on your hard drive.  It has powerful tagging functionality that allows you to not only find your documents quickly, but can automatically show you which documents are related or similar to the one you’re looking at.  It has search capabilities similar to the already built in OS X Spotlight, and includes a number of ways to organize, categorize, and preview your documents.  My favorite feature (simple but important): it remembers what page you were on, so if you’re reading a document and stop only to come back later, it will open up right to where you’ve left off.  You can try Yep! for free, but the full version will run you $34.

Combine Yep! with a document scanner, and imagine the possibilities.  Take all the paperwork and clutter in your life and turn it digital, allowing you to find anything at the touch of a button.  Imagine being able to check your home theater manual, find an invoice or recipe, check out last year’s water bill, etc, in seconds.  (Remember to back up though!)  There’s dozens of document scanners on the market with some pretty affordable price points these days, so this combination could be a godsend for some folks.  We use a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M here at the office which will eat a thick stack of papers alive, front and back simultaneously, churning out an indexed and searchable PDF file in a matter of minutes.

Second, we have Audiobook Builder:

This is a super simple to use app that will turn any type of existing audio file, or audio CDs, into “m4b” files.  An m4b file is like a regular AAC audio file, with some extra features thanks to meta-data that can be stored in the file.  An m4b lets you combine multiple files/tracks into one single file that includes markings to delineate chapters.  When played on a supported device, like an iPod, you can then skip around between chapters in a book, view the cover and illustrations in the book, and save your place to pick up listening where you’ve left off.  iTunes and iPods treat these as separate types of media, so you won’t have to worry about transitioning from an upbeat dance tune to chapter 7 of a philosophy book when you’ve got your device on shuffle.  The killer app for me: iPod’s speed feature.  An iPod allows you to speed up playback of m4b audio files by 25%.  Listen to 75 minutes of an audiobook in 60 minutes time.  Don’t worry about the reader sounding like a chipmunk; this is pulled off without changing the pitch of their voice.  (You can also slow down the speed if you’re really trying to absorb the material, but the speech unfortunately sounds a little weird when you do this.)

The speedup feature is pretty little known, and that’s probably because it only works with m4b files.  m4b files are little known, probably because the typical means of acquiring them is to buy commercial audio books through a store like iTunes’.  Audiobook builder bridges that gap and lets you turn anything into an m4b.  Now you can turn any MP3 podcast for example, recorded lectures, radio show recordings, et cetera into an m4b file, and fill your head with 25% more information.

Another plus?  Registering your copy of Audiobook Builder will only set you back $9.95.

HTC's G1, courtesy T-Mobile USA

After about a year’s worth of hype, an Android based phone is a reality.  Google has spearheaded Android as an “Open Handset Alliance” project. Essentially, it is an operating system and application bundle for use on mobile devices.  It’s based on a Linux 2.6 kernel, and the entire project is open source.  This possibly marks a major paradigm shift in the mobile industry, as up until now, most mobile devices are locked down with at least in part proprietary, closed software.  Google’s plan was to develop an open platform that the open source community as a whole could improve and contribute to.  Rather than allowing developers to add applications as an afterthought (*cough* Apple, you listening?), extending support immediately to developers in a free and open manner was goal #1 of the project.

T-Mobile is the first to bring an Android based phone to market, and presented it to the public at large at a press event in NYC this morning.  The first Android phone is being made by Tiawan-based HTC.  The phone features a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and touch screen support (though apparently not the high-tech “multitouch” found on the Apple iPhone.)  It’s loaded with the full array of Google apps such as GMail, Google Maps, and YouTube.  It also includes “Shop Savvy” to help find the best prices on items while on the go, and “Eco Reo,” a calculator of sorts that helps the environmentally conscious consumer track their carbon footprint.  Amazon also announced this morning along side the T-Mobile announcement, that their MP3 application will also be pre-loaded into the device, which is basically a mobile-phone optimized version of their on-line DRM-free MP3 store.  The phone of course doubles as a music player, and MP3s purchased through the Amazon store can be freely transferred to any other device.

The phone’s web browser is based on WebKit, which is the same technology found in Apple’s Safari, the Apple iPhone browser, and the newly announced Google Chrome browser.

The phone will set you back $179 with a 2-year contract, and has two tiered data plans at $25 and $35; a voice plan is bundled and priced separate and is required.  3G connectivity is only available in select markets at the moment, but T-Mobile is announcing that coverage should reach 80% of their customers by November.  The United Kingdom can expect to see the phone hit their streets around the same time in November, and availability will reach Europe wide into 2009.

Though we can probably expect the open source community to fill in some of the gaps where the phone lacks, some drawbacks named off at the press conference this morning include: the phone CAN NOT be used as a tethered modem, to provide connectivity to a laptop, regardless of your data plan.  It’s mail support is also limited and does not yet support Microsoft Exchange.  The phone is also going to be locked to T-Mobile, so despite hyping up the “open” nature of the software, they’re still going to dictate which provider you can use it with (which seems a little hypocritical to me!)

Much of this phone’s success, and Android phones in general, will depend on the community of users developing new applications for it.  In that sense it’s a bit of a gamble, but my money would have to go down on Android; I’m betting we’ll see some pretty creative and innovative ways to use a mobile phone in the coming months.  Whether or not this can take a bite out of Apple’s iPhone momentum?  We’ll have to wait and see.

The new iPod Nano

I’m sure you can go anywhere on the web for the nitty-gritty details and discussion about every last word said at Apple’s media event held today in San Francisco, (and in fact, you might not be able to avoid it.)  So rather than go there, let’s try something new: a quick and easy summary, free of fanboy-dom and man-crushes on Steve Jobs… the event wrapped up moments ago, so here’s what it boiled down to:

- iTunes 8: better accessibility features, smart playlist algorithm “Genius” finds related songs

- iTunes Store: Shows will be available in HD for $2.99, NBC came crawling back

-iPod Nano: adds cover flow display, voice recording feature, 8GB for $149, 16GB for $199

-New Apple brand in ear headphones, sold separately, $79.  Includes remote control for iPods, microphone for voice recording.

-New iPod classic.  Only available from now on in thin form factor.  120GB for $249.

-Revised iPod touch: thinner, small-built in speaker for “casual listening,” also has Genius playlists, more eco-friendly manufacturing, 8GB for $229, 16GB for $299, and 32GB for $399

- Software updates (available Friday) for iPhone & iPod touch.  Better battery life, fewer dropped calls, bug fixes, faster & more reliable iTunes synching

In usual form, you can already pick up all the new products on the Apple store (though the headphones appear to be pre-order, they say “coming soon”).  The store was off-line during the talk, but just came back up.  No sign of iTunes 8 on software update just yet.