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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!

As if things couldn’t get any better than our adorable and popular Super Mario Brothers Mushroom Candy and our imitation retro-controller Nintendo Power Mints, behold our motion sensor powered Wii Controller gum tins that are pretty much the same size as the real ones, but lacking the ever-important safety strap. After you’ve finished off the peppermint gum you can use the case to store useful things like pens, DS cartridges, memory cards, ball bearings, or any small thing you need to tote around inside a Nintendo controller.

If you’re feeling of a particularly DIY spirit you can attempt to mod the case into something useful like a toothbrush timer, pre amp, actual remote control, or any of the other projects featured over at Make.

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.

Here is a cool talk we found on TED about our favorite subject, fractals (of course!). Ron Eglash noticed Julia set patterns in they way villages were laid out while flying over Africa and it spurred his interest to investigate what was going on. Specifically, he talks about his research on the intriguing fractal patterns he noticed in African villages across the continent. He talks about his work exploring the rigorous fractal math underpinning African architecture, art and even hair braiding.

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.

Rhymetorrents has released an excellent compilation of Halloween-themed nerdcore hip hop tracks free on their site. There’s quite a bit of first-person zombie shooting, vampire berating, Satan-hating, and even some dice-rolling and router-rebooting gone wrong. Here’s some of the standout tracks:

Rocket Propelled Geeks - “No Carrier” [NSFR*]
What if you power-cycled your router to reboot your internet connection but ended up resurrecting the internet itself? Think of how scary it would be to have a cat watching you from the ceiling and a bunch of Nigerians in your living room.

MC Lars & MC Chris - “Roommate From Hell (Ice & Fire Mix)”
You’d be regretting not trying to find off-campus housing on Craigslist if your dorm roommate ended up being the Prince of Darkness himself.

Able-X - “Dark times”
A funky, bleepy, creepy take on Armageddon.

MC Loki - “Prince Of The City”
More of the n00b pwning.

High-C - “Schizo” [NSFR]
Best line: “I’m dropping more than clues if you want to hunt the Wumpus but you couldn’t find your rump with a motherf***ing compass”

ZeaLouS1 - “Zombie Killa”
A geeksta rap about owning zombies.

*Not Safe For Radio

Here’s the entire compilation: Rhyme Torrents Halloween 2.0.

• The Super Mario Brothers Flautist with beatboxing added
• Beating Super Mario Brothers in 5 minutes *SPOILER*
• The Super Mario Bros. theme song played on two Tesla Coils The nerdiest of the nerdiest.
• If you’re feeling bummed you can’t play the original SMB in 3D like your current favorite games, now you can
• Line Rider, Super Mario Bros. Style. No doubt you’ve played with making a track for the scarf-sporting little “dude” in Line Rider, but I bet you haven’t seen him ace the first level of SMB.
• How about Mario Bros. World of Warcraft style?
• Or even better, Live Action / Talent Show style.
• And the best alternate-universe version, a crazy Mario world that’s like a bad dream or extreme food poisoning where flower pipes float and gravity is somewhat… unusual

Yes, those fearsome aliens from Doctor Who can now be your cuddly buddies with a skein of yarn and a bit of time.

Download one of these “EXTERMIKNIT!” knitting patterns in either .doc or ..txt format and start knitting away!

The teeny little arms on these guys cracked me up. Hope you enjoy it too!

[thanks, Wonderland]

What’s a Nerdster? Well “super-nerds, artists, and the edgy, in-the-know” people with a dash of hipster thrown in, says Lauren Bell of DMNews.

Curious if you fit in? Well, we made a test! Take it now:
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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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