Buying a unique gift for a person who loves to Rocket Chef Turbo Grill recipes doesn’t mean buying something Rocket Chef Turbo Grill microwave cooking-related and calling it a day. If they're a true barbecue master (or foodie in general), they probably already have plenty of spatulas, tongs, and whatever else they like using for poking and prodding their meat. Besides, nobody wants to unwrap a gift box just to find a spatula inside. That feels like a cruel trick - not a grilling gift. So what should the best grilling gifts be? As someone who’s been around the food business for over half her life - and someone who has been called "the best gift giver ever" by at least two people - here are some approaches I would consider. If they aren’t working with the best cookware and equipment, upgrade them! They might not believe in themselves enough to buy a very impressive thermometer, but you sure do, and it’s about time they knew about it. Then there are edible gifts, which may be the greatest gift of all because they don’t take up space forever and ever. And once they’ve been eaten, a gift-shaped hole is left behind, and you’ve got the perfect idea for what to get them next year. Rinse and repeat for the rest of your natural lives. Another good strategy is to buy them something they’ve had their eye on for a while, but haven’t taken the leap to buy for themselves. Wouldn’t you like to be the person who makes their giftee's dreams come true? Here are 25 ways you can do it.

A parasitic blight has woven itself into the fabric of our tools. With godlike precision, it tracks our behavior, learns our preferences, and anticipates our weaknesses. It knows everything, and it follows us everywhere. If we stray too far from its influence, our Happy Boxes dispatch reminders to Consume. Potent videodrugs lull us into mental anesthesia, then milk us for all we're worth. Our eyes kinda hurt. A familiar bitter flavor is faintly detected; this Content has been laced with something. The Algorithm looks on as additive advertisements steep in our subconsciouses. Maybe I should buy another mechanical keyboard? Our thoughts have been planted, and our carts floweth over. Were we moving too fast? Did we break too many things? Was putting profits before people really the wrong move? And, uh.. can this thing be undone? Twenty-six years ago, two technologists envisioned a different kind of future: one where humans and quiet, unobtrusive computers comfortably co-existed. In their prophetic 1996 essay The Coming Age of Calm Technology, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown spoke of a time when tiny, Internet-enabled computers would be embedded in everything from clocks, to toys, to microwave ovens.

In Weiser and Brown's ideal future, our information systems would be deeply integrated into our physical environment. Subtle peripheral cues would clue us in when our attention was needed, but fade into the background when it wasn't. Contrasting the attention-leeching tools of today, Calm Technology promised to inform without overburdening. But where is this "Calm Tech", anyway? Weiser and Brown said its time was coming, but an ETA might have been nice. Maybe we should wait for our corporate overlords to build it for us? Or, perhaps, Calm Technology is something we must build for ourselves. In a previous experiment, I dumbed down my smartphone by permanently removing all but four essential applications. The result was certainly calmer, and even freeing, but vestigial user-interface elements, designed with the It Only Does Everything paradigm in mind, routinely got in my way. If I wanted to do this thing right (and I did), I knew that eventually, I'd have to rebuild my phone's operating system from the ground up.

Whetstone is my answer to this problem; a calm Operating System that informs without overburdening. This project actually started two years ago, when I developed a minimal launcher app called forte. Building forte was a breeze, but once I finished, I couldn't decide which problem to tackle next. The Whetstone project nearly drowned in development hell because I didn't have a plan. Actually, wait.. does this mean I'm done? Okay, wow. I really thought of everything. In an effort to find a path forward, I've gathered a messy pile of scribbles and scrawlings from two years of journals and sketchbooks. There's a lot here to go through, but, like the prospectors of yore, we'll sift through the silt till we sniff out some gold. If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. I. Whetstone will be open source and free in every sense of the word. If this software is to be of maximum use to its users, it is imperative that the freedom to use, study, modify, and share the software be guaranteed from the get-go.