Do you have a voracious reader on your Holiday Shopping list? The Amazon's Kindle might just be the perfect gift. It can hold over 200 books and it's wireless connectivity makes it easy to use to read online newspapers and blogs or quickly download the latest best-seller. Even better, you can transfer any e-books or journal articles now sitting on your desktop computer for easy on-the-go reading. 
OBVIoUS FRoNT takes our discarded computers, radios, televisions and other gadgets and refashions the bits and pieces into jewelry and art. You can find all kinds of fun creations at the Obvious Front shop at Etsy, including earrings, charms and colorful critters.The colored dots that sometime appear on a robot's lips are all natural. I like matching them up in pairs for a special look, as most of a robot's personality is in their lips.
This group consists of four Dot-Lipped charms, each one about 1.5" (4cm) tall. They're all built with cleaned electronic components salvaged from discarded TVs and VCRs using lead-free solder.
Each piece is individually bagged with a suction cup for hanging by your computer (helps prevent crashing). A 7mm jump-ring is included for use as a necklace from your chain (turns heads in the IT department). You'll also get four gift cards, making these robots great little surprises for you favorite computer geeks.
CBS News has put together a decent list of gift gadgets for women. Fortunately they've focused on the (relatively) practical and stylish, rather than the girly and pink. 
The Circuit Snowflake Cards at Fractal Spin are perfect for sharing the holiday geek spirit!Totally geeky yet subtle, the snowflakes on these cards are made entirely from electrical symbols--the one in the foreground, for instance, features the "ground" or "earth" symbol at each of the tips.
Kevin Kelly has a personal review of the GPS-powered SkyScout Personal Planetarium, which sounds like a lot of fun for the amateur astronomy buff:Mostly, we star gaze from our backyard in the ‘burbs -- not a "dark-sky certified" area with a dramatic showing of stars hidden by the pollution of city lights. But that's the point: there's so much to see, even in our own backyard! Our favorite function is the "tour" which lets us sit back and look upward while listening to a Top 20 list of objects identified as optimal for viewing based on the date, time, and location of our session. The audible lessons are really interesting and fun -- usually consisting of highlights and some esoterica of the object under observation.You can purchase the Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium at Amazon.com
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Brando sells a very cool portable USB microscope that includes lenses that magnify up to 600X, LED lights and a built-in camera. Yes, it's pricey at $199, but the fact that you can capture stills and video directly into your PC means it could make a great teaching tool. It also has two extra USB 2.0 ports, which allows it to act as a hub.
Swiss company Pat Says Now sells this funky gold brain optical mouse. I love their description:I know everything. No one’s as clever as me. And I never forget anything. From now on all the brainiacs of this world can show everyone in the office how smart they are. Also makes an ideal gift for know-it-alls.It's a gift that says "you have a lovely brain".
Making the blog rounds this week is this concept for a USB flash drive sporting a Swarovski crystal by Jennifer Flume Design. According to the description two rings can be connected together to "transfer information from one ring to the other." How romantic! (via TFTS)
The answer, of course, is both! I actually have one of these binary clocks in my living room and when people see it for the first time it's always the same: first they're mesmerized by the blinking lights, then they realize it's changing every second, then the question "If it's a clock, how do you read it?" *
Pepto-Bismol pink isn't really my favorite color, and I don't have a bathroom big enough to hold all that stuff (I don't really think it would be much fun playing Wii while weeing, so to speak), but I'd definitely be willing to find space for the stuff somewhere, though . . .
