Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, I thought I’d hand out my yearly list of online gift guides. This is just a handful of the guides out there on the net. These are probably more geared towards geek-gift-givers (which is how I do my shopping). If you run across another one that you think might be useful, drop me a comment, and I’ll get it added to the list.

• CNET Holiday Gift Guide
• 2007 Ars Shoopping Guide
• Uncle Mark Gift Guide and Almanac
• Federated Media Holiday Gadget Guide
• Wrapables Holiday Guide
• ThinkGeek Holiday Gift Center 2007
• ExtremeTech’s Geek Gift Guide
• CoolHunting 2007 Gift Guide
• Washington Post Holiday Tech Guide
• iLounge iPod + iPhone Buyer’s Guide 2008
• Gifts.com
• Lootist - Specialist-Guided Product Discovery
• TreeHugger’s 2007 Gift Guide
• Cool Stuff: Your 2007 Holiday Gift Guide
• Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide, 200: For Him - For Her
• NOTCOT Holiday Gift Guide
• Kotaku’s 2007 Gift Guide of Obscene Nicety and Sublime Naughtyness
• Coolest Gadget Gift Guide
• MightyGoods 2007 Holiday Gift Guide
• USA Today Guide to Holiday Shopping
  
• DealHack Gift Guides
• MAKE Magazine Open Source Gift Guide (added 12/3/07)
• CrunchGear Holidays 2007 (added 12/3/07)
• Ars Technica 2007 Gaming Gift Guide (added12/3/07)
• 77 Design Gifts Under $77 from Core77 (added 12/4/07)
• Lifehacker Gift Guide 2007 (added 12/11/07)

Songza is a new service that launched in early November that lets you find and listen to new music. It’s similar to Last.FM and Pandora, but instead of of a radio station-type system where you’re provided with a stream of similar songs based on your ratings, Songza lets you search for an artist or song and listen to the entire song. In this nature, it is probably closer to Hype Machine (which my brother has been a big fan). It doesn’t quite have the rating system that HypeM does though. You can tell Songza if a song the you’re listening to is a high quality track, but I think that only makes the song show up higher in the searches. What I have found useful about Songza is the ability to find some nice additional tracks or covers for an artist or song that I’ve not heard. From what I can tell, the music is coming mainly from YouTube videos (based on the “share” menu’s “watch on YouTube” option). The site itself has a nice interface, which makes sense when you look at the creator, Aza Raskin, who is Jef Raskin’s son. Jef Raskin was the creator of The Humane Interface, and Songza’s interface is based on many of his ideas. So if you need another site to add to your collection of online music finders, give Songza a try. At the very least, you should be able to find some tracks by your favorite artist that you haven’t heard anywhere else.

As if being in marching band wasn’t geeky enough (I can say that… I was in band!). Check out Cal’s video game marching band show… it is awesome!

This brings new meaning to the term “Band Geek.”

I ran across a really neat web app today that looks very similar to what was being demoed in my previous post on Advanced Photo Resizing. Go to rsizr.com, and upload an image to resize. This little web app will resize your photos by taking out unimportant information. I uploaded a photo of myself and then shrunk it down without losing much data or detail. You just highlight the most important part of the photo, and Rsizr does its magic by slowly shrinking the un-highlighted unimportant parts of the photo.

rsizr is a Flash application that lets you resize JPG, PNG, and GIF images on your computer. With rsizr, in addition to normal image rescaling and cropping, you can also resize images using a new image resizing algorithm called seam carving (a method of image retargeting) that tries to keep intact areas in your image that are richer in detail.

Give it a spin… it’s a pretty cool little web app.

As a balloon artist myself, I had a general idea of the balloon dog anatomy, but this chart shows everything. I’ll have to whip this out the next time a crying child comes back to me with a broken balloon animal requesting me to perform balloon surgery.

After months of observations, dissections and a 25 minute intro to clown school, I have finally successfully mapped the inter workings of the domestic balloon dog.

(Also check out Jason Freeny’s other art)