I'm not a big traveler, but I have been around enough to know that you don't really want to buy anything at the airport.  A packet of peanuts for $5 is not my cup of tea, and neither is a $3 cup of tea.  You'd think that Best Buy Express, Best Buy's gadget vending machine, would be insanely expensive.  I would have, at least. 

As it turns out, the prices are actually the same prices you get at the normal Best Buy.  You know, a little overpriced, but not airport-level overpriced.  Color me surprised!

I do have to wonder just how much stuff gets sold at one of these machines versus, say, a normal vending machine with food inside, and what the profit margin is.  It can't be expensive to operate one of these, so I'd imagine they wouldn't have to sell much to break even, but who buys an impulse Nintendo DS at the airport?  Or digital camera?  I could understand magazines or books, but an emergency copy of Brain Training seems a little crazy to me. 

That’s why Dr. Carl Winter launched Food Safety Songs. He takes popular songs, like The Eagles, and turns them into food safety tips about proper cooking, washing hands, and proper food storage. As someone who has had food poisoning twice, I can only hope EVERYONE sees these videos so I don’t get sick anymore!

Here’s yet another recycled Christmas tree, this time made out of discarded green beer bottles. I love how they used the big lamp in the middle of it all to give it an internal glow (which is why I’d add it to my dream glass Christmas tree). The whole thing took 1050 bottles, which is an impressive amount of saving or a really big holiday party.

Now THAT is a Merry Christmas!

Let's go a little classier (and artsy) than a tree made out of Mountain Dew cans.  Let's go with one made out of discarded glass water bottles.  Not plastic, glass.  That's how you know it's fancy.

While I'm not crazy about the implementation of Paprika's Ice Tree, I love the way it looks.  Now, if it was me, I wouldn't hang the bottles from the ceiling like they chose to.  I'd put a lap in the center, make the base a small glass coffee table or lazy Susan with a central post, and build the glass pyramid around it.  I think it'd be a more ethereal, yet still Christmas-tree looking sculpture. 

That said, I love the fact that they reused those old glass bottles, and I love the way it looks with the lights hitting it just right.  It really is like a tree made of ice, but unlike ice sculptures, this one won't melt. 

One of my favorite gifts when I was a kid was the Nintendo I got about 20 years ago. It was the hardiest video game system I’ve ever had, and outlasted 3 TVs, 12 years of school, and a million smacks, kicks, and thumps. My dog had even relieved himself on it twice before it finally fried. That thing was as solid as a rock.

I wish I still had a Nintendo. I couldn’t get it to do holiday songs, but I could at least play Dragon Warrior with it.

"Waste not, want not" is a great motto to live by.  If you're MoxRogers over at Etsy, you can turn that techno-waste into awesome techno-jewelry!  There are a lot of beautiful, colorful components in things we throw away every day. 

If you can do something good with something that would otherwise just go in the trash, you owe it to yourself to make use of what you have.  For example, when we got a new handrail for the front porch, my dad used a piece of an old computer case to make a monogrammed letter H.  It looks awesome, it reused something that would otherwise end up at the dump, and it saves money!

It's hard to buy presents for people.  It's one of the myriad of reasons I'm not a huge fan of the holidays.  For most people, buying gifts is easy, but for me it's one of the most challenging, awful things to put myself through.  Anything less than a perfect present is unacceptable in my eyes.  That's probably why I still haven't bought any Christmas gifts.

Yeah, I know, seven days left. 

Anyway, if you need some last minute ideas for the geek in your life, Inventor Spot has a great list of 10 different gifts for 10 different kinds of geeks.  I kind of overlap several of these personally, but that doesn't make the list any less awesome.  I think my favorite practical gift would be the iPod Video Goggles, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit to really, really wanting that miniature catapult. 

I do love the fact that the goggles make you look like an extra from a bad sci-fi movie (which you could watch from your video glasses).  If I had a video iPod, or any iPod, I'd already have them.

I think just reading about this Christmas tree made of Mountain Dew cans gave me diabetes.  That takes a heroic amount of time, effort, and (most importantly) soda.  If you want to learn how to make your own, perhaps out of Diet Pepsi or Tab cans, follow the link and see just how simple it is to make it look like you and your family love the taste of squirrel meat. 

The fact that someone drank this much Mountain Dew is kind of staggering, at least until I look over at the collection of empty aluminum cans littering my work desk.  Then I realize that I could probably drink that much soda by myself in a couple of months, and if I had help, it'd take even less time to build my own aluminum soda can tree.  I guess I'm just as bad as they are, except I'm chugging diet and they're guzzling the real thing.

Plus, y'know, I'm not building holiday keepsakes out of my empties.  I just build pyramids.

This is one of the many reasons I wish I had a Nintendo DS.  Not only are they releasing all the classic SNES RPGs on the system, they're also doing things like publishing a portable collection of 100 classics of English and American literature in handy-dandy cartridge form, plus 10 free downloads.  It's an import game, which means it's going to cost differently, but given that the pound is weak now against the dollar, it's a steal at only about $22 American for what amounts to 110 classic novels!

Here's a link to the Amazon.UK page where you can find the collection. 

This is an amazing collection.  All three Bronte sisters, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson… it's a great list of novels that I think everyone should read at least once.  Even the Thomas Hardy books (and I'm not a Thomas Hardy fan in the least).  If you have any kind of commute to deal with, this is a great idea for you to get in a little reading without having to buy an e-book reader.

Christmas is very interesting, if you’re Jonathan Coulton. I know that’s a bunch of his songs for Musical Monday lately, but he’s just really good and there aren’t many holiday songs out there that appeal to me. I’ll try to sneak in a more upbeat one for a Feel Good Friday or something. Until then, stay warm and stay out of the ice storm!