Normally we stick our staff suggestions for holiday shopping into our annual gift guide. This year it came out so huge another group of picks would have been overwhelming. Never ones to pass up a chance to pimp our favorite geeky passions we're back with a second round, this time a little more free-form and more whimsical.

Somewhere along the way, we all grew up, became geeks, and began putting out Ars Technica. Then it dawned on us at some point that the old catalogs had lost their appeal, and that we needed a new holiday wish list by and for geeks (and their geek-loving friends, spouses, parents, and children). Putting together something on that scale proved a terrifically time-consuming endeavor and, though we had published the occasional gift guide, a truly geeked-out catalog eluded us.

Now, thanks to an expanded staff, Mountain Dew, and the power of the Interwebs, we bring you a 25-page cacophonous extravaganza of beguiling geek ravishments. Welcome to the 2008 Ars Holiday Gift Guide.

While nothing can match the horror of workers getting killed by stupid mobs and shootings in the middle of a Toys R Us, we keep receiving horror tales about other Black Fridays gone wrong. The biggest one is about how CompUSA/Tigerdirect online "sale"—the one with the Sony Vaio TT with a $5,000 discount was apparently a total disaster, according to readers. Update: A guy from the CompUSA "sale" wrote to us. Readers keep posting their stories about other places in the comments.

That time of year is coming. Call it the Holiday Season, call it Christmas, call it whatever you like, but the tradition is to rack up huge credit card debt to hurl gifts at your friends and family. As an ET reader, you know you have some real geeky friends on your gift list, so let us help you make their Holiday-of-Choice special with nerdy gifts that won't break your budget.

Each of the gifts in our staff picks is under $100, and hand-selected to please the pickiest techie. From gadgets to games, we're here to throw ideas at you for the giftacious season that officially starts on the Friday after Thanksgiving—dubbed Black Friday. Of course, online shoppers have their day as well: The following Monday has been christened Cyber Monday—evidently you're supposed to do your online shopping then.

Drinking any liquid in the weightless environment of space could be a messy affair. With hot coffee, it could be a potentially scalding affair. So astronauts use silver pouches and plastic straws to sip anything from water to orange juice to Pettit's beloved space java.

"We can suck our coffee from a bag, but to drink it from a cup is hard to do because you can't get the cup up to get the liquid out, and it's also easy to slosh," Pettit told Mission Control while sending a video of his new invention to Earth...

He used a piece of plastic ripped from his Flight Data File mission book and folded it into a teardrop-shape that's closed at one end. Surface tension inside the cup keeps the coffee from floating out and running amuck. "The way this works is, the cross section of this cup looks like an airplane wing," he said. "The narrow angle here will wick the coffee up."

Today is Black Friday, a day dedicated to our basest and most pathetic inclinations. The day after giving thanks for all that we have, we turn around and jump through horrible hoops to accumulate more at the insistence of sleazy, desperate retailers. It's a nice summation of everything wrong with this country and the holiday season, an appropriately named cancerous mark on our calendars. Our behavior today is the sort of thing an alien race would use as justification for our destruction. Let's run through the specifics, shall we?

1. Deals in Exchange for Dignity: You know what sucks? Not being able to afford something you really want, like an HDTV, unless you sacrifice your dignity by camping out in front of a mall in below-freezing temperatures on a night that should be spent with your family. The insane early-hour doorbuster sales force people, especially people with lower incomes who rely on discounts and sales, to physically suffer for their purchases. No cheap Blu-ray player is worth that.

OK, Black Friday has officially gotten out of hand. A 34-year-old WalMart employee was trying to hold back the crowds at a Long Island store this morning at 5am, when they took the doors off their hinges and stormed the store. The man fell down and was trampled by over 200 people as he gasped for air. It's sad and despicable, and it's equally the fault of the dehumanized shoppers and the WalMart store it happened at.

In addition to low-power quad-core processors for desktop computers, Intel Corp. also intends to release a broad family of chips with 35W thermal envelope designed for small form-factor, yet high-performance, desktop systems. The processors will be the same as the company’s mobile offerings in terms of specs, but will be compatible with desktop infrastructure.

As reported earlier, the first breed of 35W chips for high-performance desktops made using 45nm process technology will be released already this month, whereas additional chips will be added into family on the 28th of December, according to certain documents. The family of ultra low-power chips for desktop computers will include both dual-core and quad-core central processing units, which are projected to be compatible with already available LGA775 infrastructure.

Why don't we complete the games we start? The industry's common response is that people don't have as much time as they once did, or that the modern audience's tolerance for difficulty is markedly lower than it used to be. There's truth to both of these statements, but there's also a ridiculous nostalgia behind them. It implies there was a moment before Rock Band and Wii Sports when we all finished Super Mario Bros. and beat Metroid without the help of Justin Bailey. The late '80s and early '90s have become a sugar-coated era in game history that many game developers seem content with simply refining. In truth, the answer is more complicated than either of the aforementioned explanations.
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It bears mentioning that there's a cultural bias against videogames that keeps deep, prolonged engagement with a game from being socially acceptable. We bestow finishing difficult books or sitting through long, artistically challenging movies with a dignity playing videogames just doesn't have, perhaps deservedly so.

You might think that a Lego safe would be easy to open. Maybe just remove a few bricks and you’re in. But that’s not the case with this thing, the cutting edge of Lego safe technology. The safe weighs 14 pounds and has a motion detecting alarm so it can’t be moved without creating a huge ruckus.

The lock takes five double digit codes to open it. That translates into over 305 billion different combinations. It even boasts an electronic status display showing the numbers as you turn the combination dials. When you enter the combination, the door electronically opens itself. It’s a great place to store all of your valuable geek stuff.

The reason for DICE delaying the PC release of Mirror's Edge may be a little clearer.

DICE are retooling the PC version with enhanced graphics and - video card permitting - the NVIDIA PhysX engine to allow more accurate physics modelling of the virtual cityscape and the many, many things that can realistically fall off it.

Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven't been an integral part of Gmail. We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we're launching today, there's a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There's even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers -- it's not exactly practical, but it's great for testing out your geek cred. We've also done a minor facelift to Gmail's default look to make it crisper and cleaner -- you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there.

The original Barcelona is a 65 nm part and really the first of its architecture. Since its release and the subsequent shuffling around of design teams, AMD has refocused their energy on delivering a design that would not only have a better per clock performance than the older part, but allow the design to scale in clockspeed on AMD's new 45 nm process. So far what we have seen shows that AMD has done very well. While the 3.0 GHz Phenom II will likely not perform anywhere near that of the new 3.2 GHz Intel i7, it will show very well against the older Intel Core 2 quads. Not only that, but we will see how AMD scales clockspeed in the future, as well as how they handle DDR-3 support early next year. With AMD's constant process improvement program, and tweaks to the Phenom II design that we typically see in the manufacturing stage, AMD could theoretically have a 3.4 to 3.6 GHz processor at moderate TDP levels (think 125 watts) that would more adequately perform against the mighty i7 within the next 8 months.
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The Phenom II reached 6 GHz+ at 1.9v on liquid nitrogen (boiling point -321F/-196C at 1 atm). Testing looks to have been done on a Gigabyte 790GX motherboard that is currently available.

Einem japanischen Overclocking-Team gelang es nun, den Takt von 4x 3,20 auf 4x 5,73 GHz zu hieven. Zuvor hatte man sich an einem Core i7 940-Prozessor versucht, der sich bis 4x 4,44 GHz ubertakten lieB.

In the past, it's been noted that the RIAA has curiously avoided suing any Harvard students, with one of the theories being that Harvard had made it quite clear to the RIAA that it would fight back hard. And, with Harvard law school at its disposal, and various professors there indicating that they had serious legal problems with the RIAA's strategy, the RIAA simply decided to ignore any file sharing going on at that prestigious university.

However, for RIAA critic and well known law professor, Charles Nesson, waiting around for the RIAA to sue someone at Harvard was getting boring, so he went out and found a case to participate in. Along with two third year law students, Nesson has hit back hard on the RIAA's efforts in a court filing, where it's noted that the very basis for many of the RIAA's lawsuits is very likely unconstitutional.

There's a good news/bad news update on the rogue ISP McColo and last week's coordinated effort to drive the malware faucet offline. The good news is, the ISP has (mostly) stayed offline, and spam levels a week later are still running significantly lower than they had been. The impact of taking McColo offline seems to have reverberated longer than what we saw from the Atrivo takedown back in September. When Atrivo shut off, spam levels fell, but rapidly climbed back to near-original levels. Post-McColo spam counts have remained lower for the last eight days, but may unfortunately be on the verge of climbing again.

That's where the bad news comes in. McColo, it turns out, had previously negotiated the rights to a backup internet connection with Swedish ISP TeliaSonera. Once its own connection to the Internet was severed, McColo bided its time until Saturday, at which point it flipped a switch, reconnected via TeliaSonera, and began frantically updating its C&C servers, aiming them at new targets within our old friend, the Russian Business Network (RBN).

...More gaming PC's have been sold over the past three years than Xbox 360s, PlayStation 3s, and Wiis combined. The study, which tracks the sales of three different classes of gaming PCs over since Q3 2005, found that 196 million units have been sold between then and Q3 2008, compared to a worldwide total of 74.7 million consoles. As Edge points out, this of course doesn't take into effect handheld gaming systems like the DS and PSP, which sold a combined 125 million units during the same period.

The study goes on to conclude that the $20 billion dollar PC gaming market, predicted to rise to $34 billion by 2011, was bigger, worth more money, was growing faster and had better tech than the console market could provide.

ASRock has put out a video showing its new Instant Boot feature that can start a computer in 4 seconds. Thanks to this new BIOS feature (a BIOS update is available for some existing boards), when the operating system is shut down it goes through a process of rebooting and then hibernates / goes into suspend mode until the user presses the power button again. Pretty slick.

These "CupSpeakers" from designer Dmitry Zagga are MacGyverific. With nothing more than a large disposable drinking cup, a couple of toothpicks, and the included iPod earbuds, Zagga has constructed a sleek, cheap, and easy speaker system for his iPod. He claims the volume increase is "significant," and his photography makes this self-aware DIY project look like something straight out of a Steve Jobs PowerPoint.

A woman in Cornwall, England, has filed papers to divorce her husband on the grounds of "unreasonable behavior" after she discovered that his character in the online role-playing game Second Life had been having an affair.

Amy Taylor, 28, whose online alter ego is named Laura Skye, said that her husband's virtual infidelity exacted a pain that cut as deep as any extramarital liaison. "It may have started online, but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much," she said. "His was the ultimate betrayal. He had been lying to me." (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)

Taylor is now in a new relationship with a man she met in the online roleplaying game World of Warcraft.

Blizzard has categorically denied it is 'milking' the StarCraft franchise by deciding to release StarCraft II in three separate products.

At BlizzCon last month Blizzard revealed that the single-player campaign of the hotly anticipated follow-up to the still popular StarCraft will be divided into three products reflecting the game's three races - Terran, Zerg and Protoss. The first game in the series will be Terran: Wings of Liberty, followed by Zerg: Heart of Swarm and Protoss: Legend of the Void.

Some fans reacted angrily to the announcement, accusing Blizzard of milking the franchise, with some even openly promising to pirate the game when it comes out.

Currently CPG is contacting its customers telling them that they will need to yet again deposit money into CPG accounts in order for CPG to have the cash to cover rebate checks to consumers. This is money that companies have already paid CPG previously. CPG is telling its customers that if they do not pony up AGAIN, consumer rebate check payments are in jeopardy. In our example above, CPG is not sure where the $100,000 is that Company X paid them, but we are sure that they want another $100,000 or CPG will start bouncing consumers’ MIR checks.

If you have a rebate out with CPG, I would check into it quickly. If CPG is no help, contact the company that manufactured the product directly and explain your concerns.

Certainly MIRs are a mixed bag in the world of the computer hardware enthusiast. Some swear by them while others will not touch them with a ten foot pole. One thing is for sure, if CPG fails consumers and starts bouncing rebate checks, CPG will massively undermine the entire way that e-tail and retail computer hardware outlets do business as well as many other markets. It likely will not be for the better initially, but let's face facts, lower pricing up-front without the MIR hoops to jump through is what the consumer wants.

Running across an entire city isn't a hard thing when you're moving as the crow flies, and this is the feeling that DICE's Mirror's Edge wants to give you: freedom.

Unfortunately, Mirror's Edge has a tendency to trip over its own feet, keeping you slipping and sliding blissfully along, only to have a tedious jumping puzzle or hazy objective put the brakes on.

Mirror's Edge takes place in a futuristic society in which the people have acquiesced their right to freedom of speech in order to live safely. Well, at least most of the people.

In short: it's very good but not the classic it could have been.