There’s nothing like that feeling of seeing a loved one open your gift and realizing that you literally managed to get them the perfect gift. In fact, the gift is so damn perfect that you wish you had kept it for yourself. You sit there watching them as they brag about it and thank you countless times as they fondle the gifty goodness of it, all the while your plotting their murder in order to get the gift back for yourself. Ok, so not murder, but there has to be a way to get that gift back right? Sure you could just go buy another one but it just won’t be the same as having that first one you bought right?
So, in order to avoid a possible near murder during your holiday festivities some of the writers here at CineGeek have put together a list of the must have geeky gifts for the holiday season. This way, you can buy that first one for yourself and if you are feeling generous you can pick up a second one for that special someone.
Mike’s List
Oscium iMSO 104 Mixed Signal Oscilloscope
When they say there’s an app for that, they aren’t kidding. There’s even one that turns your iPad into a Mixed Signal Oscilloscope that you can download free from the App Store, of course it does require a bit of extra hardware, but the hardware will only set you back less than three bills. Speaking of the hard ware it’s really just a dongle that you plug the probes into. The Oscium iMSO 104 Mixed Signal Oscilloscope doesn’t just work on the iPad but will also plug into your iPhone, and iPod touch. According to Oscium it’s perfect for hobbyist and students and will come in handy for field sales and application engineers, but there’s a market I think they are missing. The demographic that I fall into, the total poser. I don’t have a clue how to use an oscilloscope and only have a dark inkling of what you even do with one, but I find myself seriously lusting after this thing. It’s got one eight bit analog channel and with a 1x and 10x selectable 100 MHz probe. There are four 4 bit digital probes with a 12 MSPS sample rate, whatever the hell all that means. I’m just trying to memorize it all so I can regurgitate it all when I whip this out at parties, after all if I don’t know how to use it I need to at least be able to cite some specs, you know what they say, “fake it till you make it.”
LomoKino
Remember film, you know the old fashioned stuff that you had to buy at the drugstore, load in the camera, take the pictures, take back to the drug store, wait a week with crossed fingers that you loaded the camera correctly, got the exposure correct and the plane carrying the film didn’t crash and burn (that actually happened to all of the film my parents took on their first trip to Hawaii). Yeah I love that stuff, but so far I’ve limited my addiction to still photos. I’ve not yet been sucked into the analog world of moving pictures, but that may be changing. Lomography’s new LomoKino allows you to shoot, I keep wanting to say video, but it’s not video of course it’s film, on regular 35mm film which you can still actually find at the corner drugstore, well most of them. The way the LomoKino gets more than a second of film out of a roll of film is both simple and clever. The simple part is that is only shoots three to five frames a second. The clever bit is that is actually squeezes 144 frames on to a standard 36 exposure roll, that’s four images into one frame. That sounds like it would be a bad idea, but a 24mm x 8.5mm image on film will still give you a pretty good image, but it’s still only thirty to forty five seconds of film. It’s dead simple which you can also read as not very flexible. It’s just got three aperture settings and a close up and infinity focus settings. This is not a practical camera and I mean that in the best possible way.
Star Wars Imperial Wall Paper
Everybody accuses you of having never grown up anyway, so why not throw it back in their face with this Star Wars Imperial Wall Paper. Now you might be thinking this would be the perfect wall covering for your man cave, but that’s where you are wrong. This hand screened and flocked piece of perfection deserves to be displayed in your living room, den, dining room, bedroom, well you get the idea. It’s designed by Brian Flynn and is officially licensed by Lucasfilm so you don’t have to worry about George showing up at three am and demanding his cut. For one hundred and twenty bucks you get a 27” x180” roll. That’s enough to cover 33.75 square feet. I have no idea how that compares to more mundane wallpaper, but it doesn’t matter because ordinary wall paper doesn’t have storm troopers, Boba Fetts and Darth Vaders plastered all over it and no I am not going to apologize for that pun.
Get it Here!
Kindle Fire 
There are two ways to look at the Kindle Fire. The first is to think of it just as another Android tablet. If you’re looking at just the specs the only number of the Fire’s that really shines is the price. So let’s not look at it that way. Take two, let’s look at the Fire as a portal to Amazon’s products and services, from this frame the Fire looks great. It’s the perfect way to mainline all of your Kindle eBooks including access to the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library for Prime members, all of your music in Amazon’s cloud service, Amazon Instant Video as well as other non Amazon services such as Netflix and Hulu Plus and Pandora. Of course when you put it like that it sounds like your paying two hundred bucks; add this to the eighty bucks a year you’re already paying if you’re a prime member, just to make it easier to buy even more stuff from Amazon. Okay that doesn’t make it seem like all that great an idea either. Let’s try this one more time. The fact is the Fire has adequate specs with a great price, but what sets it apart is the fact it comes from Amazon. I think the Fire is really only going to make sense to the Amazon cool-aid drinkers. If you’re a heavy consumer of Amazon’s digital products then the Fire looks to be the premier way to do it. Sony’s Head-Mounted 3D OLED Display 
Sometimes an idea comes around that seems to make perfect sense, but just fizzles out for one silly reason or another. Way back in the last century it looked like everyone was going to be donning head mounted VR headsets for playing games, watching movies and interacting with fancy graphical user interfaces on our computers. Soon the idea of a couple of people sitting around watching one screen would be as quaint as using horses for transportation. Of course the reality was that the headsets were heavy and uncomfortable, the angle of view was poor, the resolution was abysmal and they made you look ridiculous. Over time they did get better but video goggles or headsets or whatever you choose to call them remained a niche product. This new HD 3D capable headset from Sony just may change that. They’re supposed to be comfortable, they have a resolution of 1280×720 and a forty five degree viewing angle which roughly equates to a 150 inch screen twelve feet way. They also include 5.1 Surround Sound phones. Of course you’re still going to look ridiculous but besides maybe an airplane where would you ever wear these where someone else would get a look at you. span style=”text-decoration: underline;” Get it Here!