{"id":13820,"date":"2012-11-21T18:07:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-21T18:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=13820"},"modified":"2012-11-21T18:07:00","modified_gmt":"2012-11-21T18:07:00","slug":"some-holiday-present-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=13820","title":{"rendered":"Some Holiday Present Ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some ideas for Christmas presents you can give for your techie partner, kids, or yourself \"Smile\"<\/p>\n

Lego Technic Unimog<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

We techies tend to enjoy figuring out how things work.\u00a0 Much of my childhood was spent playing with Technic Lego.\u00a0 Strangely, many of my hours last Christmas were also spent building this thing<\/a>!<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s a massive Unimog truck, with working steering, suspension, and differential. Even the engine block has moving parts. And the pneumatic crane is driven using pistons which are driven by a battery powered motor.\u00a0 If you want you can add another motor (not supplied) into the cabin to drive the thing. So whether you live in a rain soaked country and have time to burn, or you have kids who love this kind of thing, this is a cool one.<\/p>\n

Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Microsoft Surface RT might get the hype, but this machine<\/a> (that I bought) is a real work & play machine.\u00a0 On it you can play all those Microsoft Store games and install those apps.\u00a0 But you also can install VLC, Visio, Office including Outlook, video codecs, browser plugins, Silverlight, and manage your servers using RSAT.<\/p>\n

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The keyboard is functional on your lap when you\u2019re at a conference trying to take notes.\u00a0 And as I found a couple of days ago, the stylus (which hides nicely in its dock) is great with OneNote for handwriting your notes.\u00a0 The keyboard (optional) also adds battery life to the device \u2026 up to 14 hours, or 10 hours video play time.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m loving my device.\u00a0 When I bring it to work it\u2019s docked and a keyboard\/mouse device.\u00a0 At home on the couch, it\u2019s a touch device.\u00a0 And I\u2019m looking forward to using it to travel to the MVP summit and having enough battery to get to Seattle without hunting for a power point to top up the battery every time I move in the transfer airport.<\/p>\n

To Broaden The Mind!<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe you\u2019re the reading kind of person and you want to prep yourself for the new year of work!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Microsoft Private Cloud Computing<\/a> is out and will teach you how to configure the fabrics and manage the compute cluster of a Microsoft private cloud using System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).\u00a0 The reviews on Amazon and on blogs have been excellent so I\u2019ll let them convince you \"Smile\"<\/p>\n

Or you could pre-order Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Installation and Configuration Guide<\/a> which you can expect to arrive in February or March.\u00a0 The amount of information and level of detail is huge \u2013 there\u2019s no System Center in this book, and chapters that were planned to be 40 pages are turning out to be 80 pages more often than not.<\/p>\n

SanDisk Ultra 64 GB MicroSD With SD Adapter <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Got one of the 32 GB Surface RTs and upset you only have 14 GB of free space?\u00a0 Or maybe you have one of the Intel based devices like me, and want to synchronize SkyDrive onto the device?\u00a0 Then you want to take advantage of expandable storage.\u00a0 Most tablets are taking a MicroSD card (check your spec for type and maximum supported capacity).<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve ordered this 64 GB MicroSD<\/a> that comes with an SD adapter.\u00a0 That means that I can use the MicroSD card in my tablet and pop it into the adapter to use it in my ultrabook.\u00a0 Maybe I can even use it in my DSLR if I\u2019m caught without additional card capacity.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have mine yet; it\u2019s in the post.\u00a0 SanDisk is one of the reliable companies in this space (and before I get someone posting a ratty comment, even good manufacturers have the occasional glitch).<\/p>\n

For Entertainment<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe you want to have a read and get your mind off of work (sort of) for a while.\u00a0 I\u2019ll wrap up with some techno thrillers for you that I\u2019ve read this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Trojan Horse<\/a> is the second novel by Microsoft\u2019s Mark Russinovich of SysInternals fame.\u00a0 It features the same central characters as the first novel.\u00a0 It was written several years ago and, scarily, predicts hoy cyber-espionage would evolve before security services were (in the real world) able to defend against it.\u00a0 This book is much better than the first book, which had a rather dull ending.\u00a0 I read it pretty quickly which is usually a good sign.<\/p>\n

Kill Decision<\/a> is the third book (that I know of) by Daniel Suarez, a former tech consultant.\u00a0 Suarez is considered by many to be the ultimate tech thriller author, taking technology that is real, pushing it just a tiny bit, and creating a world that you can believe, instead of the \u201cthe-big-red-button-makes-it-magically-go\u201d type of thing that drives me nuts.\u00a0 This novel is not the third in the Daemon\/Freedom series; it\u2019s a whole new story line based on things like the predator drones that we hear of being used by the USA in the Middle East.\u00a0 It\u2019s a good novel, maybe not as addictive as the Daemon series, but still a good read.<\/p>\n

The last suggestion is in the political\/fantasy realm: A Song Of Fire And Ice<\/a>, which you may know as A Game Of Thrones on TV (by HBO).\u00a0 AGOT was the first novel of 5 that have been released so far.\u00a0 You can get the first four in a boxset<\/a>.\u00a0 I read them all back-to-back, followed by A Dance Of Dragons<\/a>.\u00a0 The TV show is good, but it\u2019s nothing compared to the books.\u00a0 There so much more story, detail, plotting, deceit, and so forth, in the books that a TV show could ever offer.\u00a0 The TV show does succeed at condensing it all and presenting a visualization, but the books are fantastic.\u00a0 Let me get this straight: the only other fantast books I\u2019ve read were The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings \u2026 which I hated<\/em> because it took Tolkein 10 pages to say something that should be said in 1 paragraph.<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s my tips.\u00a0 Do with \u2018em what you want \"Smile\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some ideas for Christmas presents you can give for your techie partner, kids, or yourself Lego Technic Unimog We techies tend to enjoy figuring out how things work.\u00a0 Much of my childhood was spent playing with Technic Lego.\u00a0 Strangely, many of my hours last Christmas were also spent building this thing! It\u2019s a … Continue reading “Some Holiday Present Ideas”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}