The holiday season is here, with lights and festive celebrations of all kinds. Normally, I am loathe to offer holiday product endorsements, perhaps because, like you, I’ve been jaded by too many marketing campaigns and late night infomercials. (See The Ghosts of Holiday Shopping: Past, Present and Future.) Other than filing my taxes on time, acting before midnight tonight has never changed my life. However, in a spirit of beneficence, I do make one exception to aid two connected, but suffering groups. I speak of course of geeks and their gift giving friends and family.
Let’s be honest; it’s hard to buy for geeks. Few would know that a signed copy of The Art of Computer Programming is a rare and precious thing, perhaps exceeded in value only by a Knuth reward check. A copy of a Big Bang Theory DVD or a word of the day calendar just isn’t the same, though it helps if it is Klingon.
So what’s a friend or family member to do when your geek smiles wanly and says thank you – for the socks? Fear not; even though the holidays are here, it’s not too late to trade those socks for a gift that will bring a delighted grin to your geek’s face, whatever their age.
Turing Tumble: Logic Is Child’s Play 
Maybe you have a young geek, one interested in all things science related, and computing in particular. They may be too young for “the talk,” where you explain the dangers of unprotected ports, the subtleties of functors and futures, or the central dogma of the Church-Turing thesis, but they are still old enough to avoid specious logic, develop algorithms, and create working code. (See Just the Facts, Ma’am: Reasoning is Not Dead, Jim.)
Turing Tumble ($69.95, ages 8+) is a game where players can build mechanical computers powered by marbles to solve logic puzzles. In the spirit of LEGO-powered Turing machines, Turing Tumble exposes the logic of computers in a tangible way. Developed by University of Minnesota professor and backed by a Kickstarter campaign, Turing Tumble is the real deal, combining marbles, levers, gears, and bits to teach logic and algorithms in an accessible way. Just don’t let the adults play with it, or your child geek may never get it back. And yes, I’m playing with mine over the holidays.
AWS DeepRacer: Start Your Engines
If you have an adult geek, particularly one who writes code for a living, this is the gift for you. AWS DeepRacer is a bit pricey at $399, but it’s the only gift your adult geek will want or need. AWS DeepRacer is a 1/18th scale model car and Amazon Web Services (AWS) reinforcement learning toolkit to train your car for competition in either a real or a virtual racing league.
The DeepRacer can be also be driven manually via a joystick, and with an Intel Atom processor, HDMI port, and Ubuntu Linux, it can double as a serviceable, albeit somewhat slow, desktop computer. (Pro tip: Your GPU-accelerated Jetson Nano ($89 from Nvidia) is a great offline reinforcement learning training tool.)
If your geek is throwing around words and phrases like TensorFlow and generative adversarial network, while railing about deep fakes and social responsibility, relax. Even if you think Sagemaker is the nom de plume of the family matriarch and her secret stuffing recipe, your geek knows that a reward function is more than a second helping of gravy and stuffing. I will be racing mine in the living room tomorrow.
PDP-11 Emulator: When Nostalgia Reigns
If your geek’s native language is FORTRAN and they speak wistfully of the days when toggling absolute binary into the computer front panel was a rite of passage, you have an aging geek. They are likely to grow pensive when someone mentions the Great Editor War, modality, and meta keys. Viva Emacs; viva vi; those were heady and difficult days, when friends were forced to choose sides, and flames filled the nascent Internet. (See You Might Be a Computing Old Timer If …)
The PIDP-11 ($250) is a Raspberry Pi emulation of the iconic PDP-11/70, complete with hardware front panel lights and switches. If you want to impress your geek friends, comment on the orthogonality and beauty of the PDP-11 instruction set and smile knowingly. Even better, tell them the simh software supports all the old PDP-11 operating systems your geek knew and loved – RT-11, RSTS/E (my favorite), and UNIX V5, V6, and V7.
With the PIDP-11, you can toggle in code, or boot your operating system of choice, play with all the old system software tools, and even write or run old code. TECO lives! (Warning: Some soldering is required to assemble the front panel, or you can skip the kit and do everything in software, albeit without that heady joy of blinking lights and toggle switches.) Mine is on order.
Save the Detritus
Now it is possible you live in one of those increasingly rare places where the gray fog of nothingness lurks in the distance and same day or overnight package delivery is not possible. However, you still have the raw materials in your possession needed to satiate the emotional and intellectual yearnings of a nascent Time Lord, Dungeons and Dragons role player, Skywalker acolyte, or wannabe Gandalf.
Wired’s 2011 review of the All Time Best Toy Ideas ($0) exposes the truth: the detritus of your gift wrapping, along with some yard debris, holds the key to happiness. Stick (Glamdring), box (TARDIS), string, cardboard tube (lightsaber), and dirt, these are the enduring toys for geeks and the rest of you, though the purist might insist on the addition of rock, hole, and mud puddle.
I’d explain more, but a launch window has been posted for my LEGO Saturn V. I need to finish the LEGO launch gantry before the Mobile Launcher Platform can roll out of the Vehicle Assembly Building to pad 39A. If you were a geek you would understand why that is important.
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