A few days ago a friend and I were talking about gifts for geeks, and she told me about a "smart pen" from a company named Livescribe. When I went to their website and looked at the Livescribe pen, I originally saw the price as $24.95, and I thought wow, that's a pretty good deal; you must have to buy their paper refills, and that's probably where they make all their money.
After that, I had a very good laugh.
It turns out their pen isn't $24.95 -- it's actually $249.95 (two HUNDRED forty-nine ninety five). Ouch.
If you have money to spare, this might actually be a cool geek gift. The Livescribe pen has some type of infrared recording device built into it, so you can apparently record your handwriting. And it also has a built in audio recorder, so you can record conversations (meetings and classes, or people you want to extort money from later).
But wow, that's expensive. They actually have cheaper Livescribe pens at Amazon, but even at $169, that's pricey.
Geek gifts - Audio recording devices
On a related note, if you're looking for a good audio recording device as a geek gift, I love the quality of the Olympus DS-30 I bought back in 2007. They probably have newer audio recording devices by now, but the DS-30 rocks, especially the sound quality.
Warning: The Olympus DS-30 is not great for Mac OS X users because of their use of WAV files. But, if you're buying it as a geek gift, a geek will presumably know how to mount the device as a Mac filesystem and then copy the files off of it, so that's pretty cool. Really, you just have to plug it into your Mac to see it as a filesystem, so that's not hard. The harder part is "Hey, I have this WAV file on a Mac, now what do I do?"
books by alvin
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