Love it or hate it, it’s old skool time! Wondering what to wear? What to write in? How to carry stuff? Here’s our top five recommendations for BTS time:

1. High Voltage Laptop Bag
Carry your school gear in this shockingly original, roomy laptop bag that announces your electric personality. It’s got two spacious pockets under the main flap where you can stuff things like cellphones, game systems, school IDs, and snacks. The main compartment has a padded sleeve for your laptop and enough extra room to fit your gym clothes and sneakers, lunch, and more.

2. Circuit Board Composition Notebook
This is a pretty big notebook featuring 100 8.5″ x 11″ college-ruled pages held together with the familiar spiral binding common to most regular notebooks. Actual circuit boards serve as the front and back covers, keeping your pages secure and crush-free. Pretty cool.

3. Caffiene Earrings
Ah, caffeine–that magical substance that keeps college kids awake and alert during all-night cram sessions and early morning lectures. Girls with a love of chemistry and caffeine, take note, because these silver earrings featuring the diagram of caffeine’s molecular structure will become your new favorite accessory. Perhaps they’ll also help you win favor with your organic chemistry prof and work in your favor should your grade sit on the border between two letters… but we don’t make any guarantees!

4. Solar Backpack
Picture this: you’ve got two hours between classes and your cell phone is about to die. Your dorm room is across campus and you only got 3 hours of sleep last night, so making the trek home is out of the question. The library’s always filled with people who’ve snatched up all the outlets. How do you get the juice back into your cellphone to keep up on all the gossip? Well, find a sunny spot on the quad, and plug your backpack into your cellphone and let that little guy charge. These backpacks with solar panels on them output 4 watts of power, allowing you to charge most small electronic devices like cell phones, cameras, MP3 players and portable game systems.

5. Electronic Musician’s Emergency Adapters
If you’re studying anything along the lines of Music Composition, Electronic Music Performance, Theory of Digital Music or the like, at some point you’ll inevitably find yourself staring at two audio plugs at 2am in frustration as you try to figure out how to get signal to pass through them. You can’t exactly run out to Radio Shack at that hour, but if you have this comprehensive set of adapters, you’ll surely be able to solve most tech-audio emergencies.

While Etsy does have its charms, when things go ugly, they go very ugly. All of these are truly hideous things that have never taken physical form, and will only dissapoint and anger the recipient. Observe:

Exe Funtown Brooch

G33k Keyboard Choker

Luigi toadstool wacky helmet hat

10 Sad DIY Geek Gifts You Should Never Buy

Instead, (and definitely if you lack the crafty skillz, like most of the preceding folk) shell out some cash for these equally geeky but far more chic choices like:

Circuit Board Business Card Case - Jumbo - $29

Teal Triple Capacitor Necklace - $30

Caffiene Keychain - $22

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Liz McLean Knight, the main human behind Fractalspin is featured on the cover of the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye free magazine for a feature about geek girls, and especially those in Chicago.

“Geek Chic: New generation of women embracing inner geek” [via the RedEye]

If dissassembling computers is geeky and making jewelry is girly, then Liz McLean Knight has found geek-girl nirvana. From her Wicker Park office, Knight, 30, runs a line of accessories make from computer components and sells the “fashionably-geek hipster gear” on a Web site she created, fractalspin.com.

There you’ll find necklaces made from capacitors. Handbags made of diskettes. Cufflinks made from microcontrollers. Woot! Those wrist cuffs made of MIDI cable are super neat!

Transistor Cufflinks - $45
*NEW* Normal cufflinks in standard materials will make your geeky boy go “meh.” Cufflinks made out of the stuff of circuits will make him go “woot!” These silver-toned cufflinks are made from real transistors–components that are used to amplify current or act as a switch.


Goa Wave Binary Watch - Blue LEDs - $129
Your nerdy guy likes to be on time, but he probably would rather glance at a futuristic watch face than ordinary, analog watch hands. The Goa Wave Binary Watch is exactly the right combination of stylish form with geeky function. To read the watch you have to add up the numbers in the first row to get the hours and the ones in the second row to get the minutes.


MIDI Cuff 1.5″ - $45
At first glance this black cuff looks like some kind of funky rockstar-ish accessory, but a closer examination of the surface shows it to be created from MIDI Cable — Musical Instrument Digital Interface cable that’s used in electronic music creation. Whether your boy likes / makes electronic music, or just appreciates unconventional material, he’ll love owning a MIDI Cuff or two. Most guys will need the “Large” size option.


Fuse Necklace - $25
Here’s some geeky guy jewelry that looks good as well as being pretty nerdy. The rubber, electronic wire-type material has two real wire terminals at each end and a real glass fuse as a pendant. Hot.


Silver Wallet - $38
Here’s a cool gadget that will help your boy consolidate his pockets filled with loose credit cards, receipts, and cash. This aluminum-toned wallet will allow him to organize select up to six credit, ID and membership cards quickly and easily at the push of a switch.

“Less Than Three” Sterling Silver Necklace - $75

What better way to share your love with your nerdy girl? This silver necklace features a less than character (shift + , on US QWERTY keyboards) followed by the number 3. Turn your head to the right… and you see love. Aww.

Teal Triple Capacitor Necklace and Teal Capacitor Earrings - $42

If your girl sees diamonds as merely ultra-hard carbon, soon to be replaced and devalued by the technological advancements made with synthetic diamonds, then she’ll love these necklace and earrings pair that use teal capacitors instead of gemstones.


Silver Compass Ring - $78
Show your loved one that you truly care with this silver ring featuring a real compass instead of a gemstone. Because, let’s face it, a rock would be pretty useless when you’re lost.


Diskette Handbag - $55
From the tag: “CARRY YOUR STUFF IN GEEK-CHIC STYLE WITH A PURSE MADE FROM TWELVE (12) GENUINE 1.44 MB COMPUTER DISKETTES. ALLOCATE INTERIOR POCKETS TO MANAGE INTERNAL FRAGMENTATION. TOTAL AVAILABLE MEMORY: 17.28 MB.” Now that’s a pretty cool purse.


Dopamine Necklace - $75
Dopamine is what we’re really celebrating on Valentine’s Day–it’s the chemical that your brain produces when you’re in love and results in a feeling of bliss. What could be a more perfect gift than the dopamine molecule cast in silver to give on Valentine’s Day?

If you loved our original Smiley Necklaces but hoped for a more affordable version, you’re finally in luck. Check out these Mini Smiley Necklaces that are just 1cm in diameter and only $38. Instead of a chain like the original they have a thin velvet cord that comes in black, java, denim, or plum as well, and are available in either :-) or ;-).

If you’ve already got either version of the Smiley Necklaces, our sterling silver Smiley Earrings at $68 make the perfect accompaniment. Also at just 1cm in diameter you can choose from “Wink” or “Smile” to dangle from your earlobes. Both come in a cute little gift box.

Which girls best exemplify geek chic? Post your ideas in the comments. Once we have a strong list we’ll post a survey and let you rank the ladies.

Girls can be real people or fictional characters and should be fairly well known enough where a simple web search can return the person in question.

Not clear on what’s geek chic? Here are some resources:
AZ Central: “It’s chic to be geek!”
Wikipedia: geek chic
USA Today: “Geek chic”

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Pink Nerds are Cool T-Shirt
The absolutely essential first step in proclaiming your nerdy allegiance is to rock a t-shirt that shows the world what you think is worthwhile proclaiming to the world. This pink faux-vintage tee features a distressed graphic featuring Nerds—as in the cartoon versions of the Wonka-created candy—romping around an exuberant statement of the cultural significance of technologically sophisticated individuals. Check it out. $20.

Estrogen Necklace
Nothing says “girl” and “nerd” quite as beautifully and literally as this sterling silver necklace featuring the estrogen molecule. And, not only is estrogen essential in making a girl into a woman, it also influences bone density, body temperature, cholesterol levels, and skin and hair health. Who knew girlie stuff could be so useful (and totally nerdy at the same time)? $40.

Smiley Necklaces - Sterling Silver
As anyone who works with computers and language (including computer languages), text and western punctuation are great for conveying logical instructions and data, but expressing emotions require a more artistic approach. However, we’re lucky to have a system to communicate emotion with common ASCII punctuation–Smileys. Why not express yourself in a totally geeky way with one of the many options in the silver Smiley Necklaces. $65.00.

Credit Card Organizers - Pink - 6 Card & 12 Card
This neat gadget holds 6 credt cards that correspond to each of the switches on the top. If you want to grab your Visa, just push the VISA switch and that card gets nudged out just enough so you can grab it. When you’re done, just put it back in the slot and you’re ready to go. No more leafing through your wallet at the store while the crowd behind you in line gets angry! $39.50

Diskette Handbag
And here’s a cool way to tote around your new pink credit card organizer, along with your essential gadgets, make up, keys, and the like. This black pvc handbag features six real floppy disks on each side, and the inside has pockets to carry around the essentials, and enough interior space to stash those less essential things. Totally geek chic. $55

Floppy Disk Earrings
There’s no way to undermine how nerdily-cool floppy disks are. Entire operating systems and programs used to be distributed on floppy disks, but as time and technology progressed, floppies were superseded by CD-ROMs, then USB and high speed internet connections as a way to distribute data and programs. However, when cast in silver, they make very cool earrings. $40.00

Customizable Dot Matrix Wrist Cuff - Pink
Hacking and DIY go hand-in-hand. Just check out MAKE Magazine and all the cool projects they have for modifying everyday objects into increasingly useful things. So why shouldn’t your fashion accessories represent your DIY spirit in a way that wouldn’t warrant a visit from the fashion police? Grab yourself a blank Dot Matrix Wrist Cuff and punch out the dots to spell a word, acronym, or expression in pixelated form by punching out dots on a 5 x 30 grid to form words or patterns. Here at Fractalspin we’ve provided templates so you can easily express your geekativity with patterns like “WTF,” “MYSQL,” “APACHE,” “</ARM>,” “LINUX,” and more. Check out either of these templates we’ve made to help you out [1] and [2], choose your favorite, punch away and out your closeted nerd self. $30.