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

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.

Got a guy on your gift list who’s got every gadget you can think of, and you’re not sure where to turn? Check out our suggestions for great geeky yet stylish gifts.

< Odin’s Rage Watch - $120.00
This futuristic watch has a novel way for displaying the time. You know how you’re expected to recall the position of numbers on a watch with a blank face? Well this watch operates on the same principle, but substitute a large inner dot for the hour hand position and a small outer dot for the minute hand position. Cool huh?

High Voltage Laptop Bag - $65.00 >
Watch yourself! Any guy who’s dreamed of having superpowers can indulge his fantasy just the slightest by suggesting that his mega gadget fascination has made him electrically charged himself. The army-green laptop bag has a padded laptop sleeve a roomy interior, and pockets under the flap to store a variety of other electron-pushing gear.

< Electronic Musician’s Emergency Adapters - $65.00
Even if the gift-recipient in question isn’t an electronic musician, he’ll be just as overjoyed to sift through this “first aid kit” and know he’ll be the hero when an audio emergency strikes. It has common audio adapters as well as ones used in professional audio situations, and there’s even an LED light to make following cables around in the dark much easier.

< Duct Tape Hybrid BiFold Wallet - $25.00
Raw industrial style meets clean minimal design with a touch of futuristic aspiration in this wallet made from real duct tape. It’s made from a specially-designed duct tape that won’t lift, peel or get sticky like the normal stuff, so your man won’t have to worry about trying to delicately detach a fifty at the cashier while the line of impatient shoppers behind him grows.

MIDI Cuff 1″ - $40.00 >
Get your geeky rockstar boy one or two of these cool cuffs made of four sequential black MIDI cable segments arranged in rows to form 1″ cuffs. On a few of the strands you can read a segment of the phrase “VTG Audio Low Noise Quad Balanced Cable. Made in the USA.” Perfect whether he’s a world-class electronic musician or could simply pass for one.

Microcontroller Cufflinks - Rectangular - $40.00 >
If your boy isn’t into our green circuit board cufflinks then make him rock these instead. Classy and subtly nerdy at the same time, these swank cufflinks are made from two matching black microcontrollers.

< Testosterone Keychain - $22.00
Quite possibly the “manliest keychain ever,” this pewter keychain cast in the form of the testosterone molecule is the perfect thing to adorn your guy’s keys, especially if they’re for a sportscar (appropriate, right?). And it sort of even looks like small brass knuckles–totally tough!

Hex Standoff Necklace - $12.00 >
If the guy you’re gift-shopping for is stylish with a streak of geek, this subtle aluminum-and-black necklace will be his new favorite accessory. The horizontal “pendant” is actually a hex standoff, a bit of hardware commonly used to connect circuit boards to their cases or each other.

Peter Kirn from Create Digital Music pointed to an article reviewing their Make> / CDM / Etsy night in Brooklyn and remarked that the author’s coinage of the term “nerdster” was one he could get behind.

Last night, on the not-so-anonymous urging of a PR company that represents Make magazine, I went to “Handmade Music” at Etsy Labs in downtown Brooklyn…

On handmade music night, super-nerds, artists, and the edgy, in-the-know, 20-something crowd converge on the Etsy labs, drawn by promises of newly-invented instruments, techno music, and free pizza…

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Which guys 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 guys.

Guys 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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