Guys and gals, Valentine’s Day will be here before you know it so if you don’t have your plans for gift giving for the geek in your life hammered out, you had better get to it. ThinkGeek has all sorts of stuff that geeks will like and you should give some of the stuff a gander.
Among the cool V-Day gear is a plush heart pillow that has a rhythmic vibration. If that’s not geeky enough for you can give the LED Flashing Sweetheart Kit. You have to build this thing yourself, it comes with a heart shaped board and LEDs that have to be soldered on along with other parts. Nothing says love like a soldering gun.
You can also get a box of Mini Plush Microbes, stuffed animals FTW! My personal favorite is the 8-Bit Flower Bouquet. I think this is what Mario would have given the Princess for Valentine’s Day.
If Jabba the Hutt celebrated Christmas the celebration would probably include a bikini-clad princess dancing around, lots of frogs in jars to eat, and a bounty hunter delivering a carbonite encased Han Solo as a gift. This really cool Christmas ornament has surfaced at Oddee and it rocks.
The Boba Fett ornament is part of a collection of 20 geeky holiday decorations. I also really like the Star Trek centerpiece that shows Spock unboxing some Tribbles and Kirk getting a new yellow shirt. The Darth Vader nutcracker is also really funny and reminds me of Space Balls.
I could also get onboard with the Star Trek Stockings; though I suspect that red stocking will burst into flames at any moment since red shirts always die. If these decorations don’t tell Santa you are a geek, nothing will.
You can tell a geek by the gadgets they carry. There are levels to geekiness, sort of like levels in martial arts. At the early stage of geekiness, you start to carry more gadgets like say an iPhone and an iPad. Once you move to higher levels of geekiness, you start to wear geeky clothing like the Large Pocket Shirt.
The shirt looks like those pocket undershirts by grandpa used to wear only the Large Pocket Shirt has a gynormous pocket. It has a single massive pocket that covers most of the user’s chest. It’s size to hold things, apparently things like giant office supplies.
The maker says that the pocket is large enough for you to actually fit your iPad in it. The shirt is made for 100% preshrunk cotton and comes in S-XL sizes for $30. Shipping is free and the shirt will ship on December 10.
Geeks like weird stuff. If that weird stuff happens to not be a gadget, that’s fine. We need to decorate our homes too. My wife is always buying some sort of soap to put in the bathroom that we aren’t allowed to use, which is silly to me.
What I need to decorate my sink with is this Uranium glow in the dark soap. The soap is marked with the periodic table notations for the soap and a single bar is not cheap at $6.99. You can buy an entire box of Dial soap for that price.
Each bar measures in at 2.25″ x 3″ x 1″ and its human tested and vegan free. Apparently, it smells like the ocean, which in Texas means it smells like oil and dead shrimp.
Geeks like to build stuff out of Lego. It’s a fact of life. Geeks also like Christmas, that’s when we tend to get new gadgets and stuff. The only downside to decorating for the holidays is that the setting up your tree can be a real pain in the rear.
If you want to go a bit smaller in scale with your declarations and make them really geeky this year, you need to build this Lego Christmas tree diorama thingy. What we have here are the plans to build that looks like a little corner of a house with a blocky Christmas tree in it.
You can get the plans for building your own at the source link if you have Lego Digital Designer 4.0 software. This is the same software you needed for those Lego tree ornaments I mentioned a week or so back. You can also buy the complete kit at Lego Digital Designer for about $25. You can supply your own bricks too and just work form the plans.
I would wager that most geeks out there spent lots of time building things when they were kids. I know I used to build all sorts of things from Lego, Tinker Toys, and Lincoln Logs. I still build stuff on occasion with my son out of Lego. A new set of building materials for geeks has debuted called Nanodots.
The little spheres are strong magnets and look like BB’s to me. Each of the beads is magnetized and they will stick together in any shape you can imagine. You can get the beads in four different colors including original (nickel), black, silver, and gold colors.
Each set of the beads comes with 216 little balls, a carry pouch, and an instruction manual with building tips. Pricing varies with the color with the cheapest being the original color at $29.99 per set and going to $39.99 per set for the gold Nanodots. You need a bunch of these if you want to get into complex shapes; some designs have over a thousand Nanodots.
When it comes to cosplaying, some people like to go all-out. Whether it be crafting a life-size Buster sword or a Transformers costume that can actually transform, countless hours will be poured into these props. If that’s the sort of thing you enjoy, then you might want to check out this awesome repulsor beam blaster, inspired by Iron Man.
The arm-mounted contraption is constructed from a xenon bulb coupled with the flash capacitor and charge circuit from a disposable camera. Of course some other necessary parts are there to get them all to work together nicely. The ring itself has a constant glow from a set of LED bulbs, but the real power comes from the xenon one. A press of a button starts it charging, then you need only touch one of your fingers to a trigger on the ring. It may not physically harm your foe, but it will very likely blind them.
I bet that most fans of computers and tech have a ton of old computers and gadgets packed away in the attic or garage. If you want something cool to do with all that old hardware, the circuit board table is the perfect way to show off your geekiness.
The table is actually built from two tables. The inner table holds all the circuit boards you see inside the glass and wood outer table. Everything on the inside is visible thanks to lighting around the edges of the table.
The components inside the table are from an old Intergraph 6000 computer that was the first computer the builder of the table owned. Other than the parts from that first computer are components from other tech devices and parts from old 2800 baud modems.
What can you do when no one’s got a phone to jamwithyou? Why, you can be a geeky one-man band, of course! Web developer Steffest (just one name, like Sting or Madonna) managed to do just that by strapping a couple of Android devices (possibly an Archos 5 and a HTC Desire), a couple of WinMo handhelds (looks like a HP iPAQ h1940 and a HTC Touch Diamond), and an iPod touch on top of a portable speaker. All this just for a forthcoming presentation on mobile cross development — Steffest had to painstakingly write the same audio program “in Java for Android, in C# for Windows Mobile and in Objective-C for iPhone.” Oh, and it doesn’t just end there — turns out this dude can also pluck tap away a good Neil Diamond classic on this five-way nerd-o-strummer. Get on board and check out the video after the break.
When I first saw the Iron Man movie a couple years back, I thought it would be cool to have that original arc reactor sitting on my desk like Tony Stark did. I figured that in no time Marvel would cash in and start selling replicas. Apparently they decided to wait until the second movie was getting ready to come out, as they’ve finally decided to put one on the market.
For $150 you can have your own aluminum and stainless steel replica arc reactor. It’s even got a number of LED’s to give it that wonderful glow, if you’re into that. The full-size prop replica comes in the same plexi-glass case that you saw in the movie, though you can take it out if you wish. Sadly, it will not power your own homemade Iron Man suit.
