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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 …

Filed under: Wearables

We’ve accomplished many an hour of restful, mugger-prone napping on the subway, but there’s always the danger of missing your stop — a problem we’re usually too drowsy to consider at 2am in the morning. Not clever hacker Pyocotan, however. This resourceful fellow has built the Noriko-san sleeping mask for fashion-forward commuters, which broadcasts your destination to fellow passengers on a garish LED display, while you’re busy getting some shut-eye underneath the mask — in the hope that they’ll be kind enough to wake you up at the right stop after they’ve rid you of your iPod and wallet. With a cost of $200 in parts, and considerable impracticality to boot, this device isn’t quite ready for the commercial sphere, but that’s of little concern to Pyocotan — he’s just busy being awesome. Video is after the break.

[Via Make]

Continue reading Noriko-san subway sleeping mask lets other passengers know to where to wake you, looks really cool

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Filed under: Desktops

With all these nettops, netbooks and plain ole motherboards flying every which-away, it’s hard to say if Portwell’s Atom-based nano-ITX board really is the first, but it’s close enough to count in our book. Utilizing all sorts of legerdemain and black magic, the engineers at Portwell were able to craft a Linux-friendly mobo that measures just 4.72- x 4.72- x 0.65-inches and supports Intel’s Silverthorne Atom while including six USB 2.0 ports, embedded audio and a gigabit Ethernet jack. The Nano-8044 can be ordered in two flavors — the Z530, which packs a 1.6GHz CPU, or the Z510, which clocks in at 1.1GHz. As you could likely guess, this one’s aimed primarily at point-of-sale machines, digital signage devices and other commercial applications, and the sub-10-watt power draw should keep energy costs to a minimum. Oh, and it should totally play Doom in a pinch.

[Via LinuxDevices]

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YouTube will now run a post-roll commercial after you watch a clip if you don’t click on the overlay advertisement that pops-up on partner videos. It’s the kind of exciting, innovative thinking from re-hire Ben Ling, who was brought back into the Google mothership to figure out how to turn YouTube’s revenue deficit frown upside down. It’s also the kind of thinking that YouTube once attempted to scientifically prove users didn’t like, but not the kind of thinking that Eric Schmidt has been telling anyone who will listen. The news also comes on the heels of YouTube’s release of “hot spot” tracking — so you can better craft your narrative to make sure people stick around long enough for the commercial to play. (Image via NewTeeVee)

Philips unveiled their 56-inch 3D display yesterday that packs a Quad Full HD resolution (3840×2160). Wired says the autostereoscopic display requires no glasses and is able to support such a high resolution because of its high data throughput rates. Those high rates also allow for a 3D effect that is high contrast, silky smooth and has a viewing angle of 160 degrees. Early word is that these displays will cost upwards of $25000, and will mostly exist in the commercial space. [Wired]

Philips unveiled their 56-inch 3D display yesterday that packs a Quad Full HD resolution (3840×2160). Wired says the autostereoscopic display requires no glasses and is able to support such a high resolution because of its high data throughput rates. Those high rates also allow for a 3D effect that is high contrast, silky smooth and has a viewing angle of 160 degrees. Early word is that these displays will cost upwards of $25000, and will mostly exist in the commercial space. [Wired]

Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo aircraft will be doing the world a favor when they start flying paying passengers into space: they’ll be carrying sensors aboard to monitor greenhouse gases at a little-monitored altitude. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has just signed a deal with Virgin to let it install sensors on the two vehicles, since it turns out that they will be one of the few aircraft that fly at around 50,000 feet. Most aircraft, with the exception of the sadly gone Concorde, fly below this altitude, and scientists would like to get their hands on air data from this height to help with environmental monitoring.

Luckily Scaled Composites, builders of the aircraft and spacecraft, planned for this sort of opportunity and designed their air-data probe systems, usually used just for avionics, to allow for other sensors to be attached in the hope that exactly this sort of science opportunity would come along.

The sensors will look for CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and will be aboard the 200-odd practice flights needed for testing and certification. After that program, Virgin and NOAA will decide if the equipment will go onto the commercial space flights alongside paying passengers. [NewScientist]

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

The second installment of the Bill Gates / Jerry Seinfeld saga has been released, and we’ll level with you: if they keep making them this good, we don’t really care what they’re about. See for yourself after the break.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Seinfeld and Gates get in touch with regular folks

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