Paper product: Action Method

Price: $5-$15

As much as I love my laptop, I don’t use it to take notes in every little meeting I am in. What I love are Action Method notebooks. The Action Book was designed by the Behance team and is based on the Action Method. The four distinct zones on each page provide a flexible template to get the most out of meetings and everyday brainstorm sessions. Each page of the notebook is divided up into 4 sections.

1. Capture Action steps, relentlessly. During a brainstorm/meeting or on the run, ideas can come and go unless they are captured as action steps.
2. Tend to your Backburner. Keep a “Backburner” to catch ideas that may someday become actions. Whether it is an idea for the future or some small errand you want to remember, put it in the backburner and then forget about it.
3. Think beyond lines and boxes. The dot matrix on the front and back of each page serves as a subtle guide for your notations and sketches.
4. Preparation and Focus Items. Plan for meetings beforehand and be sure to address your focus items.

The Action Method was designed to help us push projects forward by organizing our ideas and focusing on action steps. The Action Book is used by leading creatives in the agency/advertising world as well as at top design studios and innovative companies across industries. The 2008 TED Conference also featured a limited edition TED Action Book to help participants make ideas happen.

Artwork: DNA Portraits

Price: Starting at $199

The perfect gift of original art that no one could ever replicate! I love these portraits because they are simple and modern and yet would fit in almost any home setting. Here’s how it works.

1. Go to their e-store to begin customizing your art piece.
2. Order your complete DNA collection kit.
3. Collect a cheek cell swab using the swab they provide. It’s painless & effortless.
4. Send the sample back to them and take care of the rest.

If you are giving the artwork as a gift, when placing your order simply select “this is a gift” instead of selecting a color. Then the person who is receiving the gift will get the DNA kit in a nice metal presentation box.

Gadget: Magic Mouse

Price: $69

It wouldn’t be me if there weren’t an Apple product on this list. The Magic Mouse is the world’s first Multi-Touch mouse. Need I say more! It’s the perfect gift for anyone with a Mac who uses a mouse. It’s a great upgrade to any computer. It will change the way you use a mouse.

Apple Gift Cards are always good too.

Organization: Grid-It

Price: $22

Every geek has a laptop bag, or a back pack, or something that they keep all of their gadgets in. But the hardest thing is not organizing your gadgets, it’s organizing all the wires, chargers, and other accessories that you have for them.

The Grid-It organization system is a unique weave of rubberized elastic bands made specifically to hold personal objects firmly in place. Designed to provide endless configurations of digital devices and personal effects. Slim design and conveniently sized for your current laptop bag or travel case, lets you easily find what you need. It also has a rear zippered pocket for additional storage.

I hope you enjoyed my little gift guide. And keep in mind that geeks aren’t always just about gadgets, we appreciate good design and clean lines, there are food geeks, and fashion geeks, tea geeks, all kinds.

Take a look at what I got Drew for his birthday. It’s a print by an Etsy artist from Drew’s favorite movie Say Anything. It was the perfect gift. Not the most expensive, not the most “geeky” but just right.

So pay attention to the geek that you are shopping for, many times the best choice is the one you wouldn’t expect, the one that comes from the heart.

I hope you find the right gift for your geek this holiday season.

Let me know what you are shopping for in the comments.

She told me that she felt like she didn’t think she was really using it correctly. I told her that there really isn’t a “correct” way to use twitter, but I was curious as to what made her think that.

She had some really interesting insights about how she uses twitter and ways she would like to see it be improved. These were things that I had not really heard from a lot of users or really from the general tech community so I thought I would share them with you all.

The first thing that she felt was missing was a facebook type of “wall-to-wall” view, for your conversations back and forth with one person. I know that there are some apps that do this but Rosie mainly uses the main twitter web page when she is at a computer and twitterific on her iPhone. She would like these features to be built into the main twitter site.
However you can use search.twitter.com/advanced to search for conversations between specific people.

She also was really wishing that she could see her list of followers/following in alphabetical order. This was something I never felt the need for but I was really wondering if other people might find this helpful as well.

Rosie also became frustrated that she could not just DM anyone. She wants to be able to have a private conversation with anyone, no matter who is following who. She said that it was kind of strange that you might be able to have a one-way DM conversation if you were DM-ing one of your followers who then could not DM you back because you were not following them.

Her last insight was that she felt that the interface and general feel of twitter was a little childish. She couldn’t really explain why she felt that way, but I thought it was interesting none the less.

If you want to follow her she is @rosesness on twitter.

I would love to hear your thoughts on her thoughts.

So here we are again — playing Nostradamus in media, technology, and pop culture — with 36 predictions for 2009:

1. Hatahs: 4chan digitally antagonizes an entire race of people into self-inflicted genocide.

2. Facebook: By the middle of summer, you realize that you’re logging into most websites via Facebook Connect. You get a creepy feeling in your gut about this, but it’s so damn convenient.

3. Politics: After a freak caribou attack injures Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Sarah Palin joins The View.

4. Newspapers: At least three major daily newspapers cease to exist. The most likely members of the carnage: the Denver Rocky Mountain News, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

5. Yahoo: Fuck it, Lycos buys it.

6. Twitter I: Facebook finally buys Twitter, but only after a price war with Google ramps it up to a ridiculous nine-figure valuation. Unsurprisingly, this is Twitter’s big plan “to make money.”

7. Twitter II: But seriously, just like those stories in 2001 about people who [shock!] make a living off of blogs, the “Twitter professional” will somehow become a reality.

8. Twitter III: A major news event happens that no one live twitters. NYT writes three stories (Styles, Tech, and Media) about this phenomena, quickly dubbed “Twitter Shock.”

9. Starbucks: After trying everything else imaginable, they introduce a new “buffet” option, which is a surprise hit.

10. Daughter Moguls: In the most convoluted assassination plot ever devised, Christie Hefner, Shari Redstone, and Elisabeth Murdoch join forces to commit triple patricide. Vanity Fair dedicates three eInk covers to the incident, with heads that morph from father to daughter.

11. Magazines I: Some rich kid on the west coast launches a magazine called Charticles, which consists only of… yeah. Choire Sicha commits suicide in his St. Mark’s apartment by paper cutting himself to death with the debut issue.

12. Magazines II: Monocle raises its newsstand price to $1295.00.

13. Magazines III: Doy, of course Portfolio goes under. The final cover story is mysteriously about cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney.

14. Gossip Girl: In the Christmas ’09 episode, Chuck and Blair finally fuck again. The recession ends.

15. Subscriptions: Against all seeming rationality, several new online subscription publications show up on the scene.

16. Where The Wild Things Are: You know what? The movie actually does suck. Gen X icons Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers are pilloried by a millennials who claim old people just don’t get it. They’re kinda right.

17. New York Times: After Brian Stelter notices that David Carr has refriended Jayson Blair on Facebook, the New York Times asks Carr to take a drug test. Upon failing, he returns to Minneapolis to run City Pages, which ends up being the last remaining alt-weekly at Village Voice Media.

18. Online Video: Something’s gotta give. Two of the “big” three — Revision3, ON Networks, Next New Networks — cease to exist by the end of the year. And when 23/6 and Funny Or Die expire on the same day, Alley Insider’s headline is “Funny Or Dead In 24/7.” Normal people have no idea what any of these things are.

19. Terrestrial Video: Something’s gotta give. One of the “big” five is morphed into a cable outlet.

20. Daily Beast: Tina Brown uses her consulting role at HBO to pitch a reality series about her own website. No one thinks it will go into development, but then Aaron Sorkin and Mark Burnett sign on. Julia Allison and Arianna Huffington are super pissed.

21. Tina Fey: First woman knighted. Now Oprah’s pissed too.

22. Google: They do a lot of stuff that no one expects, but the surprise application of the year is some sort of mashup between three core Google products: Reader, Chrome, and Docs. Oh, and maybe Android, just to make this pshit sci-fi.

23. FriendFeed: Not only does your mom still has no fucking idea what it is, but your friends don’t either.

24. Publishing: 49 books are published that chronicle the end of publishing.

25. Music: Proving that fake stuff always wins, Lonely Island’s album debuts platinum — the only album to do so this year.

26. Lara Logan: Dueling February covers of Parenting and Playboy.

27. Gawker Media: Nick Denton predicts armageddon, using copious Excel graphs to elucidate his point.

28. Mad Men: After negotiations break down with AMC, a rumor floats that a movie is in the works. It is eventually released in 2012 on the same day as the Arrested Development movie.

29. Diablo Cody: Released in September, Jennifer’s Body becomes the first young adult movie since Heathers and Clueless that resonates with grown-ups. While you try very hard to think of a new reason to hate her, Diablo casts Sasha Grey in her next film. Backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash ensues.

30. Words: Webster’s Dictionary names undershare word of the year.

31. Online Media: Trying to take advantage of cheap labor, hundreds of “me too” small startup publications launch. They will call themselves “online magazines,” but they will be blogs.

32. Microsoft: They! Will! Suprise! You! (Actually, no they won’t. You hear this every year. Their online version of Office will be begrudgingly cool, but it will have one severe flaw that renders it unusable.)

33. Apple: After Biz Week’s “Is The Innovation Over?” story appears, Steve Jobs retires at the end of the year, surprisingly citing health reasons.

34. Education: 37 percent of the people you know go back to grad school.

35. Digg: It does not get bought and Kevin Rose does not go on a date with Jennifer Aniston. Every boy in the Valley weeps at a shared realization: their sense of worth is over-valued.

36. Rupert Murdoch: He dies in a freak yacht accident. Sumner Redstone, Padma Lakshmi, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Rachel Sklar, Hoobastank, and Shaquille O’Neill are also on board, but all survive. Foul play is suspected, and an investigation reminiscent of the board game Clue ensues. A rumor spreads that Murdoch’s cryogenically frozen brain is in an Anaheim basement next to Walt Disney’s frontal lobe and the Arc of the Covenant. Michael Wolff sells his next book, The Brain Eaters, for $10 million. 17 people buy it; 4 read it.

1. The Kodak Zi6 – Now while many people may see this camera as a flip knock-off, I see a bigger better screen, rechargeable batteries, and no red light in the front while recording (unlike the flip) This allows for super secret stealth recording. Plus (and I hate to say this) I do love pink gadgets.

2. The Sanctuary – This takes all your gadgets, keys, and everything else coming out of your pockets at the end of the day, and puts it in one neat box that also hides all the wires and keeps everything neat. You might say, ok Sarah that’s nice but what is so special about this? It comes with a universal charger compatible with over 1500 electronic devices from most major brands and a USB port. It can charge whatever you got! All you need is a spot that will hold the 9″ x 9″ box (23 x 23 cm). Oh and in case you were wondering, it works with 220V and 110V.

3. Canon 5D Mark II – With 21.1 megapixels and HD video can you really blame me for wanting this?

“Professional photojournalists and wedding photographers already choose the EOS 5D for its discrete size and outstanding image quality,” said Mogens Jensen, head of Canon Consumer Imaging. “The addition of HD movie recording opens a new chapter for EOS. It creates new possibilities for EOS photographers to capture and share their stories and to stay relevant in a rapidly changing digital landscape.”

Now I don’t blog about photography because it is my first love. Before the internet, before social media, before I was a blogger or a vlogger, I was a photographer.

If you are thinking about picking this up for yourself or as a gift do yourself a favor and only buy the body. DO NOT get the kit with the lens. Just buy a fixed 50mm EOS lens to start with and you will be much better off.

4. Polaroid PoGo Printer – A mini polaroid printer that can print via bluetooth from a cell phone or from being plugged into your digital camera is awesome in my book. The printer prints 2” x 3” borderless, sticky-back prints. A must gift for all your friends who take a million photos at the party. Now they can have this tiny printer and stick the picture right to your back.

5. TriniTEA Electric Tea Maker – This is the ULTIMATE tea gadget! I am so sick of coffee drinkers getting all the gadget fun. So this goes on my list for all us tea geeks. This wondrous appliance does it all – heats water, steeps leaves, and keeps tea warm. Variable timer and temperature control let you adjust the strength of an infusion, ensuring a perfect cup of tea each time.

6. Apple Macbook – You know it can’t be a wishlist of mine without Apple products. I have been moving around a lot and realizing that life without a laptop is not as easy as it seemed. So the new macbook seems the most practical. We all know the reasons to buy it so I am not even going to waist your time with why it is amazing.

I hope everyone has a great holiday season. And remember, jewlery never hurts either.

And I agree whole heartedly

#1. Apple iPhone

#2. Nikon Coolpix S51c

#3. Netgear SPH200W Wi-Fi Skype Phone

#4. Palm Centro (I just don’t get it with this phone)
#5. Sony Handycam HDR-CX7 (I really want one of these!)

#6. Samsung P2

#7. Toshiba Portégé R500-S5004

#8. FlyTech Dragonfly  (this is just creepy)

#9. Iomega eGo Portable Hard Drive  (that looks like a flask)

#10. Belkin N1 Vision Wi-Fi Router (this looks like the coolest router ever!)

Full article 

If you’re the person in your family who is often called upon to provide free tech support (or, as I call it, the “sucker”), this post is for you. If your parents/aunties/sister/parole officer are running Mac OS 10.4 or earlier, you must convince them to upgrade to Leopard. Here’s how.

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