@Randem

Apple just never ceases to impress me. This is another home-run. Go watch the video and see how huge this tiny little laptop really is.

For the Star Wars geek in all of us, stormtrooper ornaments can restore order to your intergalactic Christmas. Also available: Leia, Luke, Amedala, Jabba the Hutt, and more.

No Pastafarian Christmas tree would be complete without the Flying Spaghetti Monster ornament.

Any steampunks hiding among us won’t be able to sleep until they have adorned their tree with a Cthuluclaus ornament.

And for the super-conservative, liberty-hating, support-the-troops crowd, my personal favorite is the unaborted commando fetus ornament. Now you can support the troops from the womb to the war and topple despotic scrooges for the holidays.

Watchismo has a holiday watch gift guide, offering gift suggestions in every price range from $100 to $100,000.

Here’s a great way to deal with that cable clutter at home, and do a little bit to help the environment, too: charge your phone or iPod on the go with a solar-powered messenger bag. Not only are they cool and gadgety, but they’re also rather stylish, not to mention green.

The only catch is this little bit on their product page that says “6 volt boost required for some cell phones“. It sure would be nice if they gave more information about what that means. If you have to carry additional hardware, or worse, a battery pack, it would just be defeating the whole purpose of buying this rather expensive bag.

Maybe I’ll have to pay a visit to Noon Solar and find out.

Something strange happened over the weekend. Last week, everywhere I looked were Halloween-themed decorations. But somehow, between Friday and Monday, all of that disappeared, and now there are Christmas decorations everywhere I look. Funny how there’s never any thought given to Thanksgiving… it’s already time to ramp up the holiday sales.

So, if you’re looking for Christmas gift ideas for that hard-to-shop-for person you know, here are a few suggestions.

DIY Donuts
Light the sign in your front yard, the donuts are hot off the press! Who needs Krispy Kreme? Now you can package all the sugar and starch into bite-sized donuts all by yourself with the Dough-Nu-Matic. $130.

Cubicle Doorbell
The cubicle dweller on your list will never again be surprised to look up from the exhausting workload only to find that someone’s been hovering over their shoulder for five minutes. Now, visitors can signal their visit by ringing the Cubicaller. $12.

Portable Rotary
This is incredibly cool. It’s a fully functional mobile phone, but it looks like an old fashioned rotary dial phone. It even has something that no other mobile phone has… a dial tone! Just stick in your SIM card and you’re up and going on your existing account with your Port-o-Rotary. $249.

Flintstone Car
If you really want your Christmas gift to be neat and original, you’ll have to make it, rather than buying it. A Flintstones car, for instance, would be an ultra-cool, enviable present for a toddler.

I got an email from an old friend today, asking if I had gotten an iPhone yet. (I guess that’s the nice thing about having a web site and blog… people can keep up with you even if you’re a little out of touch.)

Having learned that I hadn’t taken the plunge (though I was really close to doing it on Saturday) she advised me to do it, saying that she bought one, and her boyfriend liked it so much that he got one the following day.

But the real gem is that she sent along a link to a great additional reason for buying an iPhone: the power of unlocking it. Sometimes one URL can say so much. So guess where I’m going at lunch time.

This idea is pretty cool, especially in a space-saving sense, as you’re getting a chair, media storage, and a lamp. The only problem is that it seems to lack enough cushion to be properly comfortable.

I don’t think it would be too hard to add cushioning material, and then cover the whole chair in leather.

We had to know it was coming. It’s the next logical step. The iPhone is, as Steve Jobs promised, “the coolest iPod yet.” But what if your phone service isn’t with AT&T? Or what if you don’t need a phone, and you just want an iPod?

Apple has announced the iPod Touch. As far as I can tell, it’s an iPhone without the phone. Apparently, the removal of the phone functions not only made it possible to drop $100 from the price, but it also made room to double the storage capacity. Unfortunately those two things are mutually exclusive: either you get it cheaper, or else you get it with more storage.

My generation IV iPod, from the dark ages before video was added as a standard feature, gave me 20 gigabytes of storage, and I tend to keep it loaded pretty close to capacity. I can’t imagine how you add the ability to play video — and on a bigger screen — but don’t add storage. In fact, they reduced the storage!

Well, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure I don’t need 7.8 days worth of nonstop music with me everywhere I go. I could probably start managing what’s loaded instead of just taking everything with me everywhere.

But you see, that’s the problem. The thing that made the iPod so cool was that you could take your entire music collection with you everywhere you went. In my opinion, that’s the first and most important feature.

So why can’t they just add one tiny little memory card slot? They don’t have to include the memory or upgrade it, they can just put a CF slot, or SD slot, or something, allowing the user to upgrade at will. Why did the company who thinks of everything not think of that?

There are a lot of really nice looking Nixie clocks here, but my favorite of the bunch is probably this one by Tyler Root.

This one, by John Lazzaro, is pretty nice too.

Maybe one day I’ll have a proper workspace where I can try making one of my own.

This has to be just about the coolest watch I’ve ever seen.

I’m sure that’s reflected in the $25k price tag.