Hasta La Gadget!

Our gift guide helps you answer the eternal questions of what to do for those finicky geeks on your list. Read on for the coolest gear that will please the nerdy and nice. (And enter to win the coolest bag stuffed with some of our favorites.)

The orgy of spending that is The Holiday Season begins in the US this weekend. Family, food, gifts, the whole daunting shebang.

Sure, you might enjoy spending the four-day weekend locked up in the house with the in-laws and stuffing yourself with leftovers, but why not escape? Here we give you five suggestions for healthier, cheaper, nerdier and, above all, funner things to do this holiday.

Photo: [177]/Flickr

Get Nerdy in the Kitchen

Face it. You’re going to have to cook a turkey, so why not make it fun? Deep frying is dangerous but gives a crispy skin, a Turducken is, well, it starts with the word "turd", so we’ll skip that, and you can even chop out the breastbone and flatten the thing for the grill (fast and juicy). There are many alternative turkey methods, but the main thing you need to remember is the temperature.

A probe thermometer is cheap, and it’s the only way to know when the bird is done. Turkeys have thin parts, thick parts, flat bits and round bits, so estimating the time you need is wildly inaccurate. An probe plunged carefully into the thickest part of the meat will tell you when the meat is just juicy, but not overdone. When the readout hits 161ºF, pull out the roast and let it rest for 15 minutes and carve. If you have a thermometer with an alarm that can summon you from the den, then that’s just gravy.

Make a Camera

You could buy a new Canon 5D MkII, as we suggested earlier today, and escape the family for a day of shooting. Better still, especially if you have kids, is to make a camera. Yesterday we posted a guide to building a giant camera from an old flatbed scanner, a magnifying glass and a stack of black cardboard. This will keep you from getting bored, keep the kids out of trouble and, best of all, you can escape into the den later to "process the images".

Hold a Garage Sale

All that junk you have accumulated over the last year? Get rid of it. While everybody else is out buying yet more plastic crap on Black Friday, you could clear out the cupboards, make little cash and even meet the neighbors. Don’t underestimate the feeling of wellbeing you’ll have when all the digital detritus has been cleared from your home. I do it roughly once a year and it’s both relaxing and satisfying. Bonus: You’ll make some cash to spend on newer, faster, better gadgets.

Get Out

Theoretically, once everybody has finished rushing about the country in planes, trains and automobiles, the roads on Thursday should be relatively safe and quiet. This is the perfect time to get on your bike or try out the in-line skates that have been sitting in the basement since last Thanksgiving. You’ll work off the post-turkey tryptophan-trance and probably have a lot of fun doing it. Just make sure you don’t drink too much first.

Rip Everything

If you’re the indoor type, perhaps a spot of organization is in order. If you’re a Gadget Lab regular, you may have done this already, but you could spend your spare cycles this weekend by clearing all the plastic disks from your home.

CDs might offer better quality but they’re a pain to use. Better to simply copy everything onto a hard drive and hide the coasters in the basement. Your computer will already have software to do this, but here are a few tips:

First, think about making actual, direct, full sized copies of your CDs. Hard drive space is cheap, and you won’t have to drag the optical disks out when you decide you didn’t encode those MP3s at a high enough bitrate. Once the copying is done, just hook up the disk to your computer, throw the contents into iTunes or Winamp and let it work through the whole lot in one go, turning the music into iPod-friendly, bite-sized MP3s.

DVDs will work, too, but it will take a little longer. Legal concerns aside, the best way to go is Handbrake, a free application for Windows, Mac and Linux that will rip your movies to the size and file format of your choice.

Now you have everything in one place, hopefully ready for the media center Santa is bringing you for Christmas.

Over to you. If you have any more cheap and fun ways to spend the weekend, stick them in the comments.

See Also:

• Suggestions for a Geek Thanksgiving | Geekdad from Wired.com
• How to Carve Your Thanksgiving Turkey Like a Pro | Geekdad from …

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Thanksgiving is traditionally a time of getting together with family and friends, cooking a delicious feast and showing off one’s most over-the-top kitchen gadgets.

Forget the perfect garlic press you bought two years ago. The rabbit-ear cork puller? Passé. What you need to make this Thanksgiving special is, of course, some new, high-tech cooking gear. Read on for the top picks from Wired.com’s Gadget Lab.

Left:

Frontgate Oil-Less Turkey Fryer

What’s the trick to a flawless Thanksgiving? Deep-frying a turkey to deliciousness without burning down your house and immolating your family in the process. Stop structure fires and spare your loved ones from third-degree burns with the Frontgate Oil-Less Turkey Fryer. This contraption uses propane heat, “infrared cooking technology” and not an ounce of oil to fry your favorite flightless bird to juicy completion.

$200, frontgate.com

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Hotshot chefs like Thomas Keller (and Wired’s Neil Gellar) are proponents of the sous vide cooking method: That’s French for “under vacuum,” and it refers to a process of cooking vacuum-sealed food at very low temperatures. Impress your guests with dishes made with devices like Clifton’s Food Range, which uses a combination of low pressure and low cooking temperatures to slowly imbue vittles with unparalleled flavor and texture. Stuffing sous vide? There’s a dish we can definitely, uh, gobble up.

$700 and up, cliftonfoodrange.co.uk

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If you want to give your turkey a smoky flavor this Thanksgiving, there’s a much better option than locking it in a closet with your cigar-smoking Uncle Raul. With PolyScience’s Smoking Gun, you can flavor virtually any food item by directly infusing it with smoke in a single shot, or you can trap the smoke in a bag to marinate meats and create more enduring aromas.

The Smoking Gun uses a pipe bowl to burn chunks of flavored sawdust. Once lit, an internal fan sucks air from the bowl and pushes the smoke out though the plastic barrel. The gun comes with a few chips of mesquite sawdust, but you can use a burr grinder to make your own woody flavors from whatever wood you like.

The best thing about the Smoking Gun is that it’s relatively cheap at $50. The downside is that anyone can buy it, and we’re sure not everyone has enough responsibility to take care of a contraption that sets fire to wood (or other cellulose substances — we’re just saying) for the sole purpose of creating smoke.

$50, cuisinetechnology.com

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The challenge of following a cookbook recipe is getting the execution and timing right while reading tiny, sauce-stained words on a page. The miBook, a portable video player, aims to solve that problem. The device comes preloaded with cooking video guides, walking you through recipes and stopping automatically after each step, giving you time to do what you just saw. If the company put Giada de Laurentiis clips on this gadget, I can guarantee it would have more male customers than female.

$130, mibook.com

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The Spice Gun is a chef’s deadliest weapon. You load the gun in the revolver with your spice bottles as if they were bullets; pulling the trigger shoots a burst of flavor into your dish. Pepper? Blam. Basil? Bang! Paprika? Kapow! Awesome — it’d probably be an effective weapon for torturing Guantánamo Bay prisoners, too. It’s a shame the gun’s still just a concept design. But maybe if we wish hard enough we’ll be tucking this bad boy under our apron strings one day.

Not yet available, designboom.com

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It’s never advisable to place your whole hand in a fire, but the promise of a rich, juicy, deep-fried turkey will make otherwise smart people do really stupid things.

Enter the Litwin Turkey-Frying Safety System. This rig is a locking attachment used with turkey deep fryers (of 30 to 40 quarts). It holds the bird upside down as you crank it down into the oil. This is not only safer than trying to chuck it in by hand but also allows the cook to prepare the rest of the feast without worrying that the turkey will fall neck first into the fryer.

$50, litwinsafetysystem.com

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If you’re especially nervous about food-borne bacteria, this food sanitizer will put most of your fears to rest. The CulinaryPrep mixes up citric acid and basic salt powders (at $2 a package) with water in a washing machine/vacuum-style contraption that kills 99.5 percent of all food bacteria.

You can put in everything from chicken to fish (except chopped meat), and can even use the tumbler to marinate foods and speed up the prep process. Granted, it takes up quite a bit of space on the counter and its price is a bit steep given the state of the economy, but it might just be worth it: With this on your counter, you can rest easy about your food and go back to worrying about the germs on doorknobs.

$350, culinaryprep.com

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Like magicians, experienced cooks can measure the temperature of a pan with the wave of a hand. But beginning chefs — and the extremely neurotic — will appreciate that ThinkGeek’s pan has a digital thermometer built into it, along with a digital readout on the handle. Cooking is an art, sure — but it’s a science too, meaning precision is key.

$50, thinkgeek.com

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Yeah, you could be boring and toss your yams into a standard blender to puree them. Or you can bring the fight to the food with a device like the Immersion Blender. Basically the lovechild of a handheld drill and a Cuisinart, this 9-volt portable blender can chop, dice, slice or grind virtually any foodstuff you have at the ready.

$100, brevilleusa.com

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Those Oakleys are so last year. For Thanksgiving, these onion goggles are the way to go with their hip wraparound frame. The idea is to help ward off the sulfuric compounds that sting and tear up your eyes when you’re peeling and chopping onions. With fog-free clear lenses, they are handy for most kitchen prep work. It may sound hard to believe, but even Consumer Reports gave these specs a qualified recommendation. And when you’re done, maybe you can even step out in them and start a new fashion trend. Then again, maybe not.

$20, rsvp-intl.com

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Carving the bird is a job that few people look forward to. But if you are the man of the house and need to step up, then it’s a good idea to be armed with an electric knife. The power tool promises to produce no-mess thin slices. Bonus: You can hold it menacingly when Uncle Jimmy and the rest of the family are driving you crazy.

$50, cuisinart.com

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Sure, you are a great cook. Proof? The pie in the oven, the stuffing in the baking pan and the potatoes boiling on the stovetop. But occasionally — just maybe — something happens and you forget to take the pie out soon enough, the stuffing burns and the potatoes boil over. Suddenly, your Thanksgiving meal is toast. Worse, it’s on fire. It’s situations like this one when you need a handy — and stylish! — fire extinguisher like this one to put the blaze out in a hurry. And when you are done, head to Denny’s.

$30, homehero.com

: Photo: Alexander Martin, 1929

We tour the history of man-made lights, from oil to arcs to neon. See how far we’ve come.

Left: Often cited as the most profound and significant human discovery, humans finally were able to manifest light by using fire. Providing civilizations’ artificial lighting needs for thousands of years by combusting fuels, fire was replaced only when electricity was discovered.

: Photo: Library of Congress

Gas lighting was first used around the end of the 18th century. Early lamps were fueled by several different gases including methane and ethylene. Through most of the 19th century, gas made from coal was the standard. The lamp in this photo (taken around 1880-1893) may have run on natural gas, which began to replace coal gas at the end of the century.

: Photo: Library of Congress

Kerosene lamps date back to the 9th century, but the first modern kerosene lamp was constructed in 1853 in Poland. These lamps were widely used in rural America in the 1930s. Here, a 1939 migrant worker lights a lamp using a campfire flame.

: Photo: Schenectady Museum; Hall of Electrical History Foundation

The arc lamp concept was demonstrated in the early 19th century, but the technology didn’t really catch on until the 1880s. Arc lamps consist of two electrodes separated by a gas such as neon, argon or xenon, which is ionized or ignited by an electric charge. The lamp shown here at General Electric’s Schenectady Works used mercury.

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Limelight, typically used in theaters in the 19th century, is created by directing an oxyhydrogen flame at a cylinder of calcium oxide, or lime. Though limelight has been replaced by modern electric lighting, the phrase “in the limelight” lives on.

: Photo: Library of Congress

Among Thomas Edison‘s most influential inventions is the incandescent light bulb in 1879. Edison, shown here around 1911, had a total of 1,093 patents in the United States alone. He also held patents in several European countries. By the time he died, he had improved the life of the light bulb from around 40 hours to 1,200 hours using a filament made from bamboo.

: Image: Library of Congress

During World War I, Americans were asked to cut back on electricity use to conserve coal as demands related to the war escalated. The railroads compounded the problem by working double time as part of the war effort, leaving fewer cars to deliver coal to the country. Many people turned to wood in place of coal to keep warm through the winter.

: Photo: Library of Congress

Neon lights work by applying an electric charge to a sealed tube of neon gas, which causes it to glow. Neon glows reddish orange. Using other gases, such as argon or krypton, or mixing them with neon produces different colors. When neon signs were first introduced in the early 20th century, they were known as “liquid fire.” This photo of the Pabst Blue Ribbon advertisement was taken in 1943.

: Photo: Hermann J. Knippertz/AP

Fluorescent lamps are filled with mercury vapor, which produces light when an electric current is passed through it. The mercury atoms are excited, causing them to emit ultraviolet light, which in turn causes a phosphorescent coating on the tube to fluoresce. Both Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla experimented with fluorescent lighting in the 1890s. By the middle of the 20th century, fluorescent lights became more common than incandescent lights in the United States.

: Photo courtesy Mikael Martinez and the Texas Petawatt Project, led by Todd Ditmire

The word laser is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.” A successor to the maser, which amplified microwave radiation rather than visible light, the first working laser was built in 1960 after Bell Labs developed the technology. This laser at the University of Texas at Austin has a peak output of more than a quadrillion watts of power.

: Photo: emilgh/Flickr

Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, seem to be everywhere these days, from flashlights, to signs, to electronic graffiti. But they were not always the life of the party. The first LED was created in the 1920s in Russia when Oleg Vladimirovich Losev noticed that radio diodes emitted light under a current, but his discovery sat for decades without much notice.

In 1962 Nick Holonyak Jr., an employee of General Electric created the first practical LED. The lights quickly became the standard for indicator lights in electronics, and as the technology advanced, they became useful light sources. Losev died of hunger in 1942 during the blockade of Leningrad, unaware of the modern sensation that would stem from his invention 60 years later.

Left: The cartoon image LED placards that were part of a Boston area guerilla marketing campaign for a 2007 film set off a bomb scare.

: Photo: EJP Photo/Flickr

Energy efficiency is on everyone’s mind today. With a recent push from GE, compact fluorescent bulbs have become increasingly popular. Built to last up to 15 times longer than regular incandescent bulbs, they use as little as a fifth of the energy of incandescents. CFLs have some drawbacks: They emit an unpleasant hue and some versions tend to flicker when they start up — both those problems have been addressed, so the lights perform more like classic bulbs. But the CFLs contain mercury, so they require special disposal and must be kept out of the landfill.