To help you fill any holiday holes, InfoWorld.com has looked beyond the obvious to uncover and that will appeal to the geek in all of us. You won't find the iPhone or Droid here, nor will you light upon the latest home media server; more likely than not, you already has those. Instead, you'll find items aimed at satisfying every geek's innermost desire: to explore.

Because if there's one thing we geeks all love to do, no matter what type of science, engineering, or tech discipline floats our boat, it's to play with technology that is both cool and useful. Sometimes that means toying around with a somewhat esoteric gadget. Other times that means soaking up new tech know-how we can apply at home or at work.

This year's includes the 55-cent Animal Clips for budding young geeks to the seriously useful and cool personal Pogoplug cloud storage device to a touch-based laptop that could show the way for real tablet computing.

This year's has recommendations in seven categories: "something different" explorations, personal tech guides, hands-on deep technology how-tos, cloud and architecture expositions, business management primers for IT people, IT management how-tos, and tech best-practices "rethink" books.