Flashlights all around!

One year I gave every member of my wife's family a flashlight. Cheap $1 ones from the impulse buy end cap at Sears. It was pretty much an afterthought and they were so cheaply built that I had about 30% of them fail before I even gave them. Even years later I'm remembered for giving all those flashlights. They forgot the $20-30 gifts, but they remember the $1 flashlights.

Today's LED flashlights are amazing. No burned out bulbs, longer battery life, and often they're brighter than the older non-LED lights.

There are plenty of $10-20 cheapies available in almost any store you go into. At $20-40 and available everywhere, the new LED Mag Lites, whether the little AA version or the big 4D cell version, are great gifts.

But for a lot of flashlight geeks like me, a Fenix light with a Cree LED is the next step. For about $50 , you can get a tiny pocket light that can be as bright as a massive D cell Mag Lite. My personal favorite is the Fenix L1D which runs from a single AA battery. The Fenix L0D takes a single AAA battery and makes a great keychain light. The Fenix P1D runs from CR123A lithium battery which can get expensive, but it's the brightest and highest-end of the single-cell Fenix lights.

Battery Caddy

Personal Battery Caddy. These are so cool they glow. They're battery carriers meant for pilots to safely carry spare batteries for all their gadgets from radios to GPS units, but every geek I know needs one or more. They'll keep all your batteries together. They protect the terminals from shorting out, which is good if you carry rechargeable batteries that can put out enough current to melt metal. I love the glow-in-the-dark models. $5 to $15.

No I Will Not Fix Your Computer Shirt

A must-have before you go home for the holidays!