Still need a few things for people? Too late to hit the store, or don’t want to get lost in the sea of all the other people who are still shopping? These can all be delivered via email.

1. Amazon Gift Certificates

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For the truly elite power user I present - the Happy Hacking Blank Key Top Keyboard - available in white or gray. This USB keyboard should be equally usable on PC, Mac and other systems. On sale now for only $259, why pay less when you can pay more for less?

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Part of my childhood I grew up in rural Maine, desperate for stimulation. There were a few kids my age nearby and fortunately we became friends pretty quickly, but my mind was hungry. I was all over the map, from learning from Radio Shack electronics kits my father would get me to taking apart calculators and reading Scientific American. I liked electronics, chemistry, math, computers, physics, astronomy and cosmology.

That was long enough ago that my sense of time is skewed. I have to work out when things happened by relating them to other things and deriving the dates and my age. Two of the most important things that I remember learning from are James Burke’s “Connections” and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and without looking them up online and seeing when they aired (Connections was filmed in 1978 but I’m not 100% certain when I saw it, and Cosmos in 1980), I was unsure how old I was when I saw them. It turns out I was older than I thought; I was 16 in 1980. I thought I’d seen them when I was younger… but many of my memories of TV from then are confused; were we living in the country or the city? When did we get cable? When did I see music videos? Were both my parents still there, or one, or none?
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I would have posted about this sooner had I run across it sooner. This deal ends today - December 20th. Buy.com offers Cables To Go’s iPod retractable travel kit for $50. The kit includes a retractable sync and power cable with USB and Firewire ports, retractable earbud headphones (which look like they take up more room than non-retractable ones would), an A/C adapter and a car power adapter. No FM transmitter or cassette adapter. It’s compatible with dock connector iPods - fourth and fifth generation models, the iPod nano, video iPods and photo iPods and the U2 iPod. You can find out more about it at Cables To Go’s web site.

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I’m not a big fan of screensavers… these days if I’ve been idle long enough for a screensaver to kick in, then I want my monitor off. This one’s very pretty, though, and I’m running it now. It’s from Russell Warneboldt and is free. It requires MacOS X 10.4 or later to run. Instructions follow after the cut.
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The iTunes Store has made Sufjan Stevens’ “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever” available as a free download. Free songs are usually available for a couple of weeks at the iTunes Store. It’s a pretty good song, and a welcome relief from most holiday music. Click on the icon to download it:

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Buy.com is offering 1GB Secure Digital cards from Kingston at $50, which is not a great price, until you take into account a $30 rebate, which drops it to $20. Google is offering a $20 instant rebate if you use Google Checkout for Buy.com orders $50 or over, which means you can get the card for $0. If you choose slow shipping, the card is yours for the cost of remembering to fill in the rebate form and mail it. The rebate allows for two rebates per household, which must be sent in in the same envelope.

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I felt very odd when I first ran across Canadian science fiction author and biologist Peter Watts’ work - “Peter Watts” was the name of a major character, sometimes-hero, sometimes-villain, always mysterious, in my favorite television show ever, “Millennium”. So of course I was surprised when I found that there’s a real person named Peter Watts, writing science fiction.

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I generally can’t wait for the holiday music to subside, but if you’re in the mood for it, iTunes’ free song of the week this week is Sarah McLachlan’s version of “Silent Night”. I you want a copy, click on .

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Finally, there’s an open source bootloader for Intel Macintoshes. Now you can install three versions of Windows, five different Linuxes, a BSD port and still be able to choose between them at startup. It’s an open source project called “rEFIt” (Intel Mac BIOS is called EFI, so “refit” — “rEFIt”, get it?). If you’re just interested in how an Intel Mac boots and what you’d need to use other OS’s, the rEFIt project has a very informative page on myths and facts about booting Intel Macs.

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