awesome

There's always at least one person on your holiday shopping list you put off as long as possible because he or she is such a pain to find something for.

You know these kinds of people. The insufferable wiseacre who insists he's easy to shop for when he's constantly looking for weird movies no one has heard of (more accurately, ones no one wants to watch), or talks about how he needs to add to his collection of '70s and '80s TV commercials. They're like gift hipsters. It would be too easy to just get them something readily available.

These are the people for whom gift cards were created.

Ah, but it doesn't have to be that way. With a minimum of fuss, you can get something unusual for that precious snowflake in your life without having to leave the house. Here, in no particular order, are five Crave-worthy ideas that don't involve your online shopping history being inexorably linked to movies with titles like "Blood Freak" or "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies." … Read more

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

Facebook set to launch "something awesome"later today

Google to drop Blogger and Picasa brands

Adobe and Avid offer deals to switchers

Steve Jobs biography gets title

iPad 2 jailbreak is live

CNET infringement case dropped

Aside from games, some of the most popular categories of iOS apps in the iTunes App Store are note-taking apps. Whether you're a student taking notes for class or your workday requires that you take notes in meetings, a handy app that makes it easy to jot things down and organize them can be incredibly useful.

Apple's Pages ($9.99) is probably the most obvious choice here, having been around since the first iPad was launched (now a universal app for iPhone and iPod Touch as well), but there are several third-party apps that offer different features that might be more in tune with your style of note-taking.

This week's iOS apps are all about taking notes. The first is all about taking notes that autosync across all your devices; the second offers a sleek-looking interface with several themes to categorize your notes; and the last is an iPad-only app offering an elegant system for keeping your class and meeting notes organized.… Read more

Awesome Screenshot: Capture and Annotate is a free extension for Google Chrome that adds a screen capture utility with a small built-in graphics app that lets you edit, annotate, and share captured images quickly and easily via a pop-up toolbar. Instead of opening two or three tools just to save a screen image, doctor it up, and e-mail it to your grateful friends, Awesome Screenshot can do the job in a few clicks.

Chrome extensions usually install virtually instantaneously, and Awesome Screenshot is no exception. Clicking the extension's icon called up a small dialog letting us save the entire … Read more

We're still not at the place where we can have real-time X-ray video like in "Total Recall," but that doesn't mean X-ray technology hasn't come a long way in the last 116 years.

To underline that point, researchers in the town of Maastricht in Holland have fired up an X-ray machine from 1895 and compared it with a modern machine.

As you can see in the photos to the right, things have gotten sharper. The original device was built by a local educator and doctor just weeks after the first "how to" on X-ray machines was published. It was found in a warehouse and then dusted off by researchers from Maastricht University Medical Center who wanted to show it off.

The old machine was originally produced and built in the Dutch town, and the team didn't just turn it on, they replicated as closely as possible the conditions that would have been available and used by doctors of that time.

But it's not just the better-looking images that make modern X-ray machines better, according to the BBC, but also the fact that they use 1,500 times less radiation, making them safer and cheaper. The machine wasn't just fired up for fun, but for science, by doctors who chronicle their findings in the journal Radiology.

Still, that doesn't mean that we can look down at the venerable old Dutch machine. If you hadn't been told that the image on the left came from a Victorian-era machine, would you have been able to tell? Probably not.… Read more

Regular readers will recall that I am a fan of almost anything Star Wars-related. So when news of "The Star Wars Craft Book" showed up in my inbox this morning I started thinking about all the things that could keep a nerd like me busy.

Sure, I get a lot of my nerd gifts from the wonderful people at Think Geek, but sometimes you want to give someone something with an "I made this!" feel to it, and that's what this book is all about.

It has such crafts as the Chewbacca sock puppet, the Cuddly Bantha, and the Hanukkah Droidel. (I want all of those.)

I'm not particularly crafty, but I'm going to give this a try and see what I can make. It comes out March 29, but is available for preorder for $12.02 at Amazon. For the number of geeky gifts I can get out of this, it's for sure worth the price. I might even try to come up with my own. Who wants a Sand People sock puppet? Anyone? … Read more

Duplicate images can take up a lot of space on your hard drive, but identifying and deleting them can be a major hassle. Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder promises to make this process easier, and it does, to some extent. Depending on the number of duplicates you have, this may or may not be the program for you.

The program's interface is attractive and intuitive. Users simply select the folders they want to scan for duplicates and then click the Start Search button. Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder scanned our hard drive quickly and then displayed the results as a list … Read more

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing has shot down on Twitter an idea for the last remaining thing that would have gotten me to visit that city again. He said there are no plans to erect a statue of RoboCop.

RoboCop, of course, is the titular character in one of the greatest films of all time. Set in postindustrial Detroit, the movie presents the half-man half-bot police officer as a fighter for truth and justice--even if it means going above the law (and other cliches).

It's an iconic film that could be considered a pinnacle of the ultraviolent action cinema of … Read more

A few weeks ago we wrote about Phylo, a Flash-based puzzle game that uses addictive gameplay to help scientists map human genetic code. It's part of the trend of making otherwise mundane things fun by adding gaming elements, especially Xbox-like achievements. Another good example is Foursquare, which awards users "badges" for checking in a certain venues. The idea is to give users reasons to use a service by providing bragging rights to those who achieve the most. And now Nissan is adding the concept to its new electric car, the Leaf.

It's been known for a … Read more