Kerime B. Toksü's 2literal.com

I know I said I’d put up five more gift suggestions this week, and I was going to describe my top five charitable gift opportunities, but I haven’t had time to compile a list. Work has been crazy — between editing a video and building a database, I’ve hardly had time to eat.

But I’m not complaining, because I like my job and my boss rocks. He’s the one who’s sending me to MIT in January for the 4th International TEI Conference on tangible, embedded and embodied interaction — HCI, design, interactive art, user experience — how computing can “bridge atoms and bits into cohesive interactive systems.”

I’m already so excited to be going that I’ve been fantasizing about being a grad student (again), working on research and writing all day in a crappy Boston apartment (again). Though this time around no one is offering me a fellowship — yet.

And it doesn’t help that the MIT Museum is so incredible. If only I were twenty and didn’t have a mortgage. If only I didn’t like my job and were willing to drop it all and move out of this lovely state of Vermont. Am I? Probably not, so this video will have to do. For now.

I’m already sick of the whole shopping thing and yet every night lately I find myself trolling around the web looking for bargains. And there’s so much to buy — so many options, so many reviews to peruse.  Ugghh.

And yet…

Some geek demon is compelling me to offer you more to ponder. Instead of a long list, however, below are just five gifts for under $20. Just five? Yes, except each gift is offered on a unique website that I think you’ll find interesting.

Holiday Decorations
3D Christmas Tree Kit ($12.95) / LED Menorah ($10.00 / $14.00)
website: Maker SHED

Toys
6-in-1 Educational Solar Robotic Kit ($17.88)
website: Sundance Solar

Health
Nexcare Duct Tape Bandages ($3.95)
website: Boing Boing

Home
Solar LED Address Numbers ($15.99)
website: ThinkGeek

Head & Heart
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba (from $13.75)
website: Alibris

Be prepared! Each one of these websites has many more gifts to offer. Got a Secret Santa or Yankee Swap coming up at work? You’ll be covered. Five more next week…

This week I was going to give you tips on selling or recycling your old tech to make way for your holiday-gift tech. I was going to recommend you sell your stuff on eBay and Craigslist, that you make sure to archive all your data (to DVD or another hard drive) and then wipe your hard drive clean using a free download such as Eraser or Active@ Kill Disk.

But when I went to CNET to get the download links, I saw a great, short video on “Seven Essential Free Software Apps.” These are seven free apps to load on your new computer instead of all the crap that was on the old one.

Below are links to the seven apps mentioned (the ones with stars are those I already use and also recommend):

1. Virus protection: AVG Anti-Virus*
2. Browser/Email: Firefox*/Thunderbird
3. Instant Messenger: Pidgen [Windows]; Adium [Mac] (I don’t IM)
4. Instead of MS Office: Open Office* (I use MS Office for work)
5. Video/Audio Player: VLC Media Player*
6. Graphics Editor: Paint.net [Windows]; Skitch or Seashore [Mac]
7. Security: Hijack This (I prefer Ad Aware)

This software will keep your wallet fat and your computer nimble. What more could you ask for?

This past weekend when I was away I was asked about my pay-as-you-go phone by Marie, who runs the Turf & Spa Motel in Saratoga, NY. Like me, Marie doesn’t use her cell phone much and even the cheapest contract plan is too extensive/expensive for her. Which was my situation when I finally relented and got a cell phone a couple of years ago (I didn’t particularly want people to be able to get in touch with me anytime they wanted; then I realized the flip side – doh).

Anyway, I’ve never used anything other than a TracFone. Initially I got this pay-as-you-go phone because I wanted to see how much I’d use a cell before committing to a yearly contract. As it turned out, I use my cell even less than I thought I would – to call my husband from the bakery to see if he wants a muffin, to call a friend if I’m running late or when I’m traveling, which I don’t have to do for work. (In fact, I rarely call people when I’m traveling, because I want to be away; I tend to check email once a day instead.)

For this post, I dug out my one-time TracFone airtime bill and found that I’ve spent $6.75 per month for my cell. Pretty cheap, right? This is because I only used my phone about 36 minutes a month.

So let’s run a comparison: The cheapest contract plan I could find today is Sprint’s $29.99/month for 200 minutes. Now technically, if I needed 200 minutes a month, this plan would be cheaper than my pay-as-you-go because I pay about ¢19/minute on my TracFone, ¢4 more per minute than if I’d been on the Sprint plan. But since I use only 36 minutes a month, that would have come out to ¢83 per minute on the Sprint plan. Wow! That’s a big difference. But be aware: You must always buy minutes along with airtime, so don’t overbuy minutes – you can always add more.

Granted, I may be a poor example of a cell user because I’m not a big phone talker to begin with. But what about your kids? Another friend of mine, Cary, also recently asked about my TracFone because she’s planning on getting cell phones for her kids. Their phones are supposed to be for emergencies only. How many emergencies per month are there? Hopefully not more than a half hour’s worth. And what if your kids are out of control with their cell phone use? If they have a set amount of minutes and texting, they know what their limits are (when the phone is out of minutes, it’s out of minutes).

To get an overview of what’s out there, check out Best Rated Pay as You Go Phone Plans. You might also want to take a look at MyRatePlan, which offers info on both pay-as-you-go and contract plans so that you can compare.

The best thing is that it’s now easier than ever to get a pre-paid phone. They’re available at places like Target and Best Buy so you can actually see the various phones, hold them in your hand. Nice. In fact, I think I’m going to upgrade my hardware. Although my Nokia has a funky Star Trek communicator look, it might be time to get something new. And the one I’m looking includes double minutes for life – it keeps getting better and better.

Don’t duck — there’s no owl circling overhead, but there’s a bargain gliding right under your nose. Woot.com sells “cool stuff cheap.” Only one item goes on sale each day, from midnight to midnight (actually 11:29 pm), and you can’t buy any once the time’s up. What does Woot! sell? Stuff like the Neat Receipts Mobile Scanner for $79.99 when it’s listed at Tiger Direct for $199.99, or the Pioneer HD 1080p Blu-Ray Disc Player for $134.99 when its listed on Amazon for $199.95.

But Woot! doesn’t just sell technology. Today they sold out of the two-packs of First Alert Onelink Smoke Alarms with Voice Alert by 2:35 pm (okay maybe that’s tech, sort of). Another day they offered five random boxes of Marian Heath Xmas cards (which did not sell out).

So the problem becomes: How to keep up with Woot!? I don’t need one more thing to have to remember every day, nor do I want any more email than I already get (except from you, my blog readers). I decided the easiest way to get my Woot! on was to add Woot Watcher to my Firefox browser. Now I see a tiny listing of the latest Woot! item in the bottom right-hand corner of my browser. I mouse over it and see complete product info and whether or not the item is sold out; right-click and I’m sent directly to Woot!

Easy.

There’s also shirt.woot!, wine.woot!, and most recently kids.woot!. Recession shopping at your fingertips. Feel like wooting yet?

Meet Michelle Khine, uber-geek and uber-geek-on-the-cheap. She’s one of this year’s “TR35” — MIT’s list of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35. Why does MIT think she’s so clever? She figured out a way to make microfluidic chips using Shrinky Dinks.

What? Okay, in case you didn’t know, making a microfluidic device, or lab-on-a-chip, is dearly expensive because the equipment costs upwards of $100,000. Khine didn’t have an extra hundred thou laying around the lab and she was too impatient to wait for the next grant to materialize, so she improvised.

Shrinky Dinks are “space-age” sheets of plastic that shrink to one-third their original size and nine times their thickness. You might have used them as a kid to make all sorts of doo-dads from ornaments to pins to place cards. They were invented by a Wisconsin housewife and, according to the video on their website, Shrinky Dinks are enjoying quite the renaissance.

So for all you lab-less and grant-less inventors and innovators out there, don’t be discouraged. As the Shrinky Dinks video says, the things you can make are limited only by your imagination.

Michelle Khine has one helluva imagination.

Imagine taking a great photo on vacation and turning that photo into a postcard. Okay, you say, no problem — I can do that from home. But what about doing it while you’re still on vacation? What about doing it directly from your cell phone?

A new app, shoot it!, allows you to upload a photo from your phone and send it as a postcard. The downside? The app is only available for the iPhone (and iPod Touch even though, cruelly, you can’t take a photo with the Touch) and for the new BlackBerry Curve 8900, Bold and Tour. According to shoot it!, they’re working hard on expanding this list. Prices begin at $0.99 within the U.S. and rise to $1.49 to send to Western Europe. And if you’re an iPhone/Touch user, you’ll have to pay an initial additional $0.99 to buy the app from the Apple store.

Alternatively, if you don’t have a smartphone, which I don’t, you can do all this online through the U.S. Post Office at Premium Postcard. Who knew? Probably all those direct mailers, but not me. I visited my grandmother last weekend and used this service today to send her a postcard with a picture from our visit. It cost $1.25 and I know she’ll love it.

And for you letter writers, there’s Snailmailr. It costs $1 for 1-4 pages ($0.10 for each additional page) and you can include photos. They print on recycled paper and further reduce the carbon footprint of printed mail by investing in TerraPass carbon offset credits. But it’s the photo printing that charges me up. I have a decent-for-text printer that I got free with my computer, but I can’t print photos on it.

However, even the photo-printing argument didn’t convince my mother. “It must be your generation,” she said when I told her about Snailmailr. “How hard is it to put a letter in an envelope and stick on a stamp?” I had to laugh at how right she was.