1. Flickr Account - That's right, flickr. Everyone's got digital photos these days, even if they're just taking them with their cell phone, and yet people still aren't backing them up. Who has time to burn them all to CD and put them in the safe deposit box anyway? So why not give the gift of easy, online, permanent backup. It's only $25/yr. Now, to be honest, you'll probably want to spend some time finding a nice card and creating a dummy e-mail account you can give to them as part of the package because I don't believe they offer gift certificates. But you'll figure it out. Oh, you might want to use words like "backup" and "posterity" and even "future" in your gift message.
2. Jungle Disk - If you need to save a few more bucks and you're willing to spend the time setting things up for your loved one, why not get them a $20 (lifetime) Jungle Disk download. Yes, they'll have to sign up with Amazon's S3 service (which the Jungle Disk instructions walk you through), and though that part isn't free, it is VERY cheap--say $1/mo or less for GIGS of storage (in fact it's $0.15 per Gig stored and $0.10 per Gig transferred up). They'll thank you later. I'll grant you that it's still not easy to pull stuff down again, but you can't beat the price for the knowledge your stuff is backed up securely. Once again, the key words for your card in the paragraph above still apply.
3. Computer Cleaning Gift Certificate - WARNING!!! You risk two, nay, three things with this gift. First, it's very 6th-grade. I suggest not creating the gift certificate using crayon. Second, you had better have your act together and know what you're doing. We're not talking about tweaking their system, we're talking about cleaning. You know, updating the AV, cleaning out spyware/malware, defragging and disk error checking, and if you're really brave: cleaning the registry. Don't install Firefox without permission, don't change their background or screen resolution, don't move a single icon on the desktop. Just clean. Don't say I didn't warn you. And third, you're really giving the gift of time--you're time. It's gonna take a while to do all this, but if you play your cards right you could end up getting a free meal out the deal. Please, please, please be careful with this one. Sure it's useful, but it can blow up in your face real quick if you're not careful. You have been sufficiently forewarned.
So there you have it, Hutch's guide to last-minute, frugal holiday gifts. Think carefully about your options--we'll all do better next year.
- Hutch
