With Valentine’s Day approaching – it’s happening February 14, you know – we want to give everyone the opportunity to be a little extra lovie-dovie and cheesy to the geek in their life.

Now we know that many of you will flock to ThinkGeek or some other geeky store to pick up some more or less well thought-out Valentine’s gifts, but that’s not good enough for us.

With just a simple tweet, you can win a gift certificate to be spent on flowers and chocolates for your geek this Valentine.

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How about paying almost $4,000 for a basic PC? Or $7,600 for a printer? That’s how much you would pay for some classic tech items if they were sold today with prices adjusted for inflation.

After having looked at classic hardware before here at Royal Pingdom, we now thought it would be interesting to dip into the pool of great gadgets again, this time focusing on prices.

So with the help of the Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator, we’ve brought prices of a few classic tech items into the current year.

As you will see, we should be very grateful for what we pay for most tech today.

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Besides the pocket protector, every geek has to have a wristwatch. The problem is that it can’t just be any old watch. It has to be connected to the Internet, work as a calculator, show the weather forecast, and of course also tell time.

But of course only a small percentage of geeks will actually wear a wristwatch, relying instead on smartphones. However, we feel obliged to point out some alternatives should you choose to put a timepiece on your wrist.

We scoured the web to find 10 wristwatches that we think would work perfectly of you.

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We’re all fans of cool screensavers here at Pingdom so we wanted to pick a few of our favorites and share them with you. A great screensaver is a good way to personalize your computer and to make a statement.

Digging deep through screensaver history we found these 10 that we find especially impressive.

Many of the screensavers below work with both Mac and Windows (and at least one with Linux too) but you should probably check the system requirements before downloading a particular screensaver. All the screensavers are free.

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It’s interesting how quickly we humans start taking things for granted. In a fast-moving landscape like technology, especially IT, this becomes all the more obvious.

When you start thinking back to how things were just a few years ago, it’s amazing how different things were. So many of the gadgets, services and sites we all take for granted today simply weren’t around.

In that spirit, let’s take a few steps back in time and look what you DIDN’T have a few years ago. We’ll jump back five years at a time.

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Top500.org recently released updated statistics about the fastest supercomputers in the world. They do this twice per year, and every time the reports make computing enthusiasts drool with mind-boggling performance numbers. You think your souped-up server or gaming rig is fast? Think again.

We cherry-picked some of the more interesting numbers, and made a few additional calculations for your reading pleasure. Enjoy.

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Happy Holidays everyone!

Like much of the world, we here at Pingdom will be taking a short Christmas break. Since we won’t be updating the blog until sometime next week, here is a selection of posts from the past year that you might have missed.

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Text and numbers are all good and well, but sometimes it’s nice to just be presented with a nice visual.

This post is full of videos of just that, interesting visualizations of data. Being the geeks we are, they’re of course all related to the Web and the Internet.

Enjoy!

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We computer geeks are a breed of our own, and as with any group of people with mutual references, we often make jokes and observations that are totally incomprehensible to outsiders.

So consider this post a litmus test. If you laugh at these jokes, then you are most definitely a computer geek.

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Supercomputers. There probably isn’t a tech geek out there who doesn’t find them intriguing. Huge, hulking computers with performance that’s ages ahead of what we have on our desktops. They are the most powerful computing devices on the planet.

But where in the world do we find these supercomputers? Where are the fastest ones located? Which countries have the most of them? Read on to find out.

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