It's the second weekend of December, I've got a cup of coffee that's gone lukewarm next to me, and I still have exactly zero of my actual shopping done. So in the spirit of procrastinating on my own list by making a different list, here's what I'd actually buy for the geeky people in my life this year, in no particular order.
The Kindle Fire, if they don't already have one
It's $199, which for a tablet still feels like a typo in the best possible way. I played with my buddy Dan's over Thanksgiving and yeah, the touch response gets a little laggy when you're flipping through the carousel fast, and the lack of physical volume buttons drove me nuts within about ten minutes of picking it up. But for the price, and if the person you're buying for just wants something to read on and watch stuff in bed, it's hard to argue with. Just don't buy it for the person who already has an iPad and expects it to feel like one. It doesn't, and it's not really trying to.
Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography
This one's not really a hard sell at this point. It came out back in October, right after Jobs passed away, and I know at least four people who've mentioned wanting to read it and just haven't gotten around to buying their own copy. It's the kind of book that's somehow better as a gift than as a self-purchase, you feel a little silly buying it for yourself but you love getting it from someone else.
An iPhone 4S, for whoever's actually due for an upgrade
I'm still not totally sold on Siri, if I'm honest. Half the time it nails exactly what I'm asking, the other half it seems to think I said something about ducks. But if you've got a family member who's been limping along on an old flip phone or a 3GS with a screen so cracked it looks like a spiderweb, this is the one to get them onto a contract for this year. One tip: do not let them plug it into a shared family computer and sync it over yours. Learned that one the hard way over Thanksgiving and I'm still finding my aunt's ringtones in my library.
A case of good coffee or a Moleskine, for the person who genuinely has everything
Sometimes the geekiest person in the room doesn't want another gadget under the tree. Sometimes they just want something to scribble code notes in that isn't the back of a receipt from the hardware store.
Something that isn't tangled up in the Carrier IQ mess, if you can manage it
This is more of an anti-recommendation than anything. If you've been near tech news the last couple of weeks you've probably heard about Carrier IQ, the software sitting quietly on a lot of Android phones (and apparently some others too) logging a lot more than most people would guess. Nobody outside the carriers seems totally sure yet how bad it really is, and the fact that they're being so cagey about explaining it is its own kind of answer, honestly. I'm not saying panic and return every phone in the house. I'm just saying if you're buying a device for your mom this holiday, maybe skip whichever carrier's been the most evasive about it in the press this month.
A "let me put Ubuntu on your old laptop" gift, if you're the tech support in your family
This one's mostly a joke, but only mostly. I've got a friend who does this every December, takes someone's five-year-old laptop that's crawling under an ancient copy of Windows and hands it back running Ubuntu 11.10 like it's new again. Full disclosure, I'm still not sold on Unity, the new default desktop in that release. It moves around enough of what I'm used to that it makes me a little grumpy every time I sit down at his machine to help him with something. But as a "make grandma's old laptop usable again" project, it's a genuinely nice thing to give somebody, and it costs nothing but an afternoon and maybe a coffee for your trouble.
A little bit of hope that SOPA doesn't happen
Not exactly something you can wrap, but there are hearings on that bill in front of the House Judiciary Committee coming up in a few days, and if you care even a little about how the internet works, it's worth reading up on before your cousin brings up piracy at Christmas dinner and you want to actually have something to say back.
That's my list. I'll probably think of six more things the second I hit publish on this, that's how it always goes, but the coffee's officially cold now, so I'm calling it here.