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Christmas List Ideas

Posted By: Stick
Date: Wednesday, 15 November 2006, at 6:01 a.m.

That time of the year is rolling around and I thought I'd try to give out a good idea or two (the only ones I hav) to anyone who hates trying to find the right gift.

• My best idea is to make someone a DVD collection. Here in the US we have both Blockbuster and Netflix that will ship you DVDs, up to 8 at a time depending on the package you get. [8 at a time costs $50/month for unlimited DVDs, as many as quickly as you can turn them over they just keep sending them] Who wouldn't like to get a collection of DVDs? Any titles you want, all DVD quality, and rather cheap depending on how you do it. There is software available now [anydvd & clonedvd the most well known] that allows you to *back up* your dvd collection. What a lot of geeks do is sign up for Netflix or Blockbuster (or both, or multiple accounts on one) and get all the movies under the sun basically. With this software it takes only 30 minutes, give or take, to encode and write a new DVD. That means you could easily burn 16 a day and within' a month or two have all the movies you could ever want and cancel your subscription to Netflix. The price of owning all the dvds in the world? Depends on how honest you are I guess. First of all you have to pay for a membership to one of the online movie places, so we'll say that's $50/month. After that there's the software that enables you to "make copies of your dvd colletion". Trial versions are available good for up to 21 days I believe. After that you can buy both programs for a combined $50-$60. There are of course cracks for these programs too [and other programs like them that may be freeware] which means you wouldn't have to pay for them at all but would also be unethical and you wouldn't get the product updates. I wouldn't advocate using cracks of course. The cost of quality blank dvds varies but if you keep your eyes open you can find some pretty great deals. I bought my first 200 blanks for only $56. This was an awesome deal and I bought all of them in the store. They were Verbatims (the best kind) -R. Almost all computers nowadays come with a dvd write drive already installed so we won't discuss that. (make sure your drive is a write drive and not simply a ROM drive) You can buy dvd books, the easiest way for storing dvds in my opinion, for under 20 bucks and stuff them full of dvds anyone would be happy to get. I think this is a great Xmas present but takes a little work & a little planning but if you want to pimp out your own personal DVD collection anyway, might was well kill two birds with one stone.



• A spinoff of idea #1 is of course the music collection. This is even cheaper than the DVD route but more of a hassle nowadays. You can get any music you want online somewhere for free. Whether it be torrents, limewire, someone's ftp, or snatching them from various sites, music is out there to be had. I find this idea best for mom's and dad's. What you need to do is look up "Timelife Music" or any other best of the 50s, 60s, 70s collection and get all that music. Your parents loved music too, and they would certainly listen to it if they had all the 'oldies but goodies' around. Since this won't be as extensive as the dvd collection I think you should take the time to buy/make nice cases for them.




I have more ideas but am tired of typing for now. Going to go pick on Snowie for a bit and will add more if anyone is interested.

Stick