Great gift ideas for the geeks, and the non-geeks, in your life

Lifestyles

Discussion

COMMENTING ON STORIES:

Welcome to our story comments feature. We welcome your thoughts and your opinions, including the unpopular ones. We only ask that you keep your conversations clean, civil and on the topic of the story you are commenting on.

Coinciding with our websites redesign, we launched our new story comments feature through Disqus.

Disqus gives users the ability to log into our story comments feature so that they may be able to track their conversations, receive emails when their comments get a reply or to even have your comments update onto your Facebook or Twitter accounts.

For the time being, our story comments feature will continue to have the ability to post comments anonymously. We reserve the right to require registration in the future using your name and verified email address.

Not all comments are deemed printable. Some are disqualified at the newspaper’s discretion for a number of different reasons. Please follow our Online Rules of Conduct at all times.

RULES OF CONDUCT:

We reserve the right to remove comments that are unacceptable, to wit:

1. False and inacurate statements.
2. Personal attacks. Explicit name-calling.
3. Harassing, harmful, vulgar, obscene and defamatory language.
4. Threatening statements or statements that suggest violence.
5. Hate speech of any kind.
6. Intolerant comments on religion, race, age, gender, sexual preference or disabilities.
7. Accusations of criminal activity.
8. Content that is harmful to children and minors in any way.
9. References to any type of sexual activity and other private matters.
10. Random and inflammatory statements that are off topic.
11. Advertising of any kind.
12. Typing in all caps.

WE ENCOURAGE REASONABLE AND COURTEOUS COMMENTS THAT:

1. Create conversation on issues of interest and concern to fellow readers and local community members.
2. Express opinions and contrarian views.
3. Stimulate debate with respectful language.
4. Stay within the boundaries of these rules.

WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO SUSPEND OR TERMINATE ACCESS FOR:

1. Violating any of these Online Rules of Conduct.
2. Deliberately disrupting discussions with repetitive messages, meaningless messages or spam.
3. Misrepresentation of identity or impersonating another user.

WE WELCOME:

1. Flagging violations of these rules that you observe to our attention.

MONITORING:

We monitor comments regularly Monday - Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Approval of comments outside of this time (including weekends) will be sporadic.

comments powered by Disqus

December 18, 2010

Great gift ideas for the geeks, and the non-geeks, in your life

Anonymous Daily Star The Daily Star Sat Dec 18, 2010, 02:30 AM EST

In case you haven't noticed _ maybe if you're a hermit living in a cave _ it's that time of year again.

Gift-giving time. You know what I mean. Retailers think it runs from October to February, but people like me narrow it down to, at most, a couple weeks before Christmas. Sorry about that, stores.

Some people are easy to think of gifts for. Others, not so much. Geeks many times fall into that second category to the non-geeky crowd.

Since I am considered to be more or less of the geek persuasion, maybe I can help. It's almost getting to be a tradition for me to suggest gift ideas this time of year, so the other day I went shopping for a little while to see what I could find in local stores that would qualify as acceptable presents to my kind of people.

Some of these things I have suggested in other years, but _ like socks and underwear _ some items are perennials.

In that category I would include USB flash drives, which have grown in affordable size to be very useful. An eight- or 16-gigabyte drive will let you carry around an awful lot of "stuff" in your pocket or on your key chain, and they can be had for less than a bill that displays a picture of a guy named Grant.

Along the same idea, but a bit splurgier, would be an external USB disk drive. Music and video collectors are always hungry for more storage space.

A not-very-sexy, but many times much appreciated, gift will be the proper ink cartridges for an ink jet printer. These little babies are not cheap, so people hate to buy them, but certainly appreciate getting them. A pack of photo printer paper is a nice accompaniment.

Of course if your giftee doesn't have a color printer, that could be an idea, too. Today's printers will do a very good job of printing photos, and there are even small printers that specialize in those smaller-size pictures that grandparents like so much. Decent ink jet printers are pretty cheap, as the printer companies want you have one (so they can sell you the costly cartridges later on).

Smart phones are becoming extremely common now, and many will function like a GPS to help you find your way as you drive in unfamiliar territory.

But many phones' GPS function dies out when there is no cell signal (like quite a bit of the territory around here). A dedicated GPS device works all the time, and you won't have to give up an awful lot of money for one anymore.

For the geeky guy with a lot of mobile devices, and only one 12-volt power outlet in the car, they make adapters which will plug in and provide two sockets, one for a GPS and one for a cell phone charger.

If the recipient has a cell phone, but no car charger for it, guess what? Santa can provide one of those, too.

Just make sure it is the right kind for the particular phone, because the "universal charger" idea hasn't kicked in yet in the U.S.

If you're thinking along the lines of a more generous present, beautiful LCD computer monitors are now pretty affordable. Someone with an old CRT-style monitor will really appreciate one.

Or, if you want to go bigger yet, this is the year for big-screen LCD TVs. The high-definition display is quite awesome, if you've never seen it, and prices have come down a lot. Really decent models can be had in the $500 range now.

Blu-ray is the technology for putting high-definition movies onto optical disks. If you want to watch rented high-def movies, you need a Blu-ray player to connect to your high-def TV set. These are now in the $100-to-$200 range, and go really well with one of those big beautiful TVs that your giftee may already have. Hint, hint.

All of these items are available in the stores right around here. I know, because I intentionally went around looking for them. And local availability is one of the key things for those who _ ahem _ don't plan ahead far enough to allow for online ordering or traveling to buy gifts.

Here's hoping that I may have helped some Santa and some geek. And, really, I wish all of you the happiest of holidays.

Bruce Endries is former systems manager at The Daily Star. He can be reached by e-mail at techgp@dailystarmail.com. His columns can be found at www.thedailystar.com/techgp.