Guided By Gifts
Tedium’s annual last-minute gift guide is here to buy you a little extra time around the holidays—plus it gives us an excuse to highlight our year.
Today in Tedium: Usually, this annual wrap-up/gift guide is something that we’ve published as an issue and emailed to our subscribers. But earlier this year, I had an idea to just leave this issue online and promote it in other issues of Tedium, something I’ve done with a couple of our product reviews. The reason for this is partly practical—it’s a no-no to share Amazon affiliate links in emails for some reason, despite it being fine to throw an affiliate link on Bluesky or Threads. But I also think it helps level-set this project as commercial satire. While most guides of this nature recommend things people might actually want to buy, we recommend things that you would have to be crazy to want to buy for a loved one. And we do it while digging back into our archive of content in a big way. Anyway, here’s our latest gift guide—our tenth, if you’d believe it. May it lead to holiday cheer, or at the very least, awkward conversations. — Ernie @ Tedium
Ah, woodgrain. (via eBay)
One of our first big issues of 2024 made what even two years prior might have been a bold call, but instead played out to be a fact of life: The cable industry is in tatters, a problem that can be blamed on a combination of high cable prices and strong streaming alternatives, with carriage fees making even cord-cutting alternatives like YouTube TV not particularly worth it. That said, cable’s rising obsolescence is creating an opportunity for cable television nostalgia, and that might mean that 2024 could be the year you buy a neglected loved one a vintage cable box from the 1970s or 1980s, not because it’s particularly useful, but because of the cool factor. eBay has plenty of options, most of which sell for less than $50. I might suggest woodgrain, or even a newer CableCARD model.
Have a camera enthusiast in your life? Want to get them a camera so limited that it may make suck the joy out of their interest in photography? I suggest the Barbie Photo Designer, one of the first mainstream digital cameras and a key element of our listicle on early digital toys. The camera was very popular in its day, making it easy to find on eBay, but it lacked a key feature of many digital cameras: an LCD viewfinder that showed you what you actually shot. That meant that when you took the photos you had to guess whether the picture was any good before you loaded it up into a CD-ROM-based app. If you want a slightly more technically capable digital toy, might I suggest a precomputer? Oddly enough, VTech still makes those.
EEPROM flashing tools: the gift that keeps on giving.
It’s not a rite of passage for the children in your life to flash their first BIOS, but honestly, it should be. The average kid should flash a dozen BIOSes by the time that they hit puberty. They should know their way around low-level EEPROM flashing before they’re left in the dust by every other aspiring YouTuber. Firmware is an essential but often-neglected part of computing and one that we focused on in our March piece on the topic. You can guy them a simple EEPROM flashing kit or a complex one, but don’t miss your opportunity: Buy them an EEPROM flashing toolkit. Like the ability to replace a flat tire, you’ll never know when they’ll need to use it.
MKBHD could have it worse. He could be the Jay Sherman of tech.
If anyone has had a rough 2024 from a PR standpoint, it’s Marques Brownlee, a.k.a. MKBHD, who started his year bumping up against the heights of his power and ended it watching as he started to fall to the ground—or, if we’re going to snark about what happened, deaccelerate—a little. (Essentially, his arc was basically the opposite of Jesse Welles.) As I pointed out in September, Brownlee had attained a level of success that put him at risk of critical tomatoes for simply sticking his neck out, which he had recently done with a poorly reviewed app. For my piece on Brownlee’s unusual position as critic-turned-creator, I ran with a GIF of The Critic, a hidden gem of ’90s adult animation, starring Jon Lovitz as Jay Sherman, a third-rate Roger Ebert wannabe with a complicated personal life. The full series is on Tubi if you’re a cheapskate, but it feels like a good option for a DVD box set. Just saying.
We have been delivering sealed air from other parts of the country thanks to Amazon.
Earlier this year, Amazon announced that it was going to stop shipping its products with massive bubbles of plastic air, which neatly expand the bubble-wrap concept to air pillows that could, in a pinch, be used to cradle your head during a long night at the warehouse. (Is that why they’re getting rid of them? To discourage sleeping?) I wrote about air pillows in a piece discussing the parallels of the paper vs. plastic debate in shipping compared to retail, and I am happy to report that, despite Amazon no longer shipping air pillows for free, you can still buy them in bulk—or better, buy a machine that will allow you to make as many as you want. They should wrap the air pillows in air pillows to keep them safe during shipping.
A vestigial element of input devices in the optical mouse era. (via Amazon)
You know what someone under the age of 25 has probably never seen? A mouse with a weighted ball in it. (Not a trackball. Those are different.) Optical mice have dominated the computing market ever since Microsoft introduced the Intellimouse Explorer to the world in 1999, but for years (as we noted back in May), mice usually came with roller balls and metal weights—a common source of lint. If you want the Zoomer in your life to better appreciate how good they have it, give them the gift of a vintage 1990s mouse, or, as an alternative, buy them a 5-pack of replacement mouse balls. Tell them they’re marbles.
Willie Nelson’s contribution to the technical capabilities of the compact disc is on this album.
Willie Nelson, 91 years young, is a man known for many things. One of those things is not technical innovation. But the country singer-songwriter nonetheless represents an interesting technical footnote in the history of the compact disc: He was one of the first artists to release an album with a dedicated pregap on the disc, something we covered in July. The album is not available on streaming, thanks to its release on Justice Records, the relatively obscure label that patented the technique, but Moonlight Becomes You is available on Amazon in CD form. If you have a Willie fan in your life, tell them to pull out their portable CD player, because you have a holiday treat for them.
The owner of this box of cassingles gets around. Twice over. (Eric Steuer/Fllickr)
Speaking of musical formats tied to the ’90s, the cassette single, also known as the cassingle, was another music-industry quirk we covered back in July. That format, which saw its moment in the sun around 1992 or so, doesn’t really have much to recommend it for from a quality or nostalgia perspective—CD singles are significantly better in every way, and 45s much more convenient—but one thing they are good for is as something you can reliably find on eBay being sold in bulk lots for not a lot of money. If you have a ’90s music fan in your life that you don’t particularly like, send them literally dozens of tapes that they have to sort through and listen to one by one. Make them realize how much easier Spotify is.
The Sharp EL-805, which helped define the direction calculators were about to go in. (Wikimedia Commons)
We write a lot about old computers on Tedium, but you know what we haven’t written much about? Old calculators. We took steps to fix that in 2024 with our breakdown of the history of the segmented LCD calculator, and honestly, our decision to research the history of that technology started not with calculators but with Tiger Electronics games. But it reminded us that calculators were once far more than cheap commodities—they were state-of-the-art devices that people paid hundreds of dollars for. If you feel like collecting vintage calculators, may I suggest the Sharp EL-805, one of the first calculators with a liquid crystal display? If you want to go in a slightly more visually appealing direction, you could always splurge on a Nixie tube clock.
This ring’s quality for its cost kind of blew my mind.
OK, this last one is actually a legit good gift recommendation. Back in October, I bought a smart ring that I heard about on Hacker News, and I have found it to be one of my best purchases all year. The Colmi R02, being sold by various sellers on eBay and Amazon, is effectively a fitness and sleep tracker that you wear on your finger. It isn’t as advanced as an Oura ring, but as I noted in my review, it is hackable, and can be used without either a subscription or (if you have an Android device) even a cloud-based app. If you just want a ring you use to track steps and heart rate that feels like it’s barely even there, you can’t go wrong with it.
This past year in Tedium has been an interesting one for us. One of our pieces, which described a strategy to work around a controversial change to Google search, led to a single-serving site that has as of last count drawn a million visitors, people curious about a way to get rid of something designed to break your flow during a Google search.
(udm14 is of course free, but if you like it, we’d love it if you supported us on Ko-Fi.)
The piece describing the technique has itself drawn 200,000 views this year, making it one of Tedium’s most successful pieces all-time. (The biggest hitter is still this one, though it’s lost some steam as it’s gotten older. This more recent one is another heavy-hitter.)
And honestly it’s an anomaly in Tedium history, as most of Tedium’s pieces until last summer were completely off the news cycle altogether. It’s a reflection of Tedium’s shift into being more of a timely newsletter during the week, and an off-cycle one on the weekends. We’re still learning new ways to be tedious after all this time at this, and honestly, it’s still kind of fun after all this time.
That said, most of the gifts in this article are terrible and you should consider carefully who you give the gifts to. Just some practical advice.
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