Father's Day Gift Guide: Geeky Patriarch Edition

9. Quirky Mantis Task Lamp

Need to buy a gift for your technophile of a dad before Sunday? We have 13 top-notch recommendations to satisfy that special someone's inner geek.

A flashlight? A desk lamp? A reading light clip-on? Any one of these items individually would make for a really lame fathers’ day gift. But somehow, when you put them all together and add even more functionality, this lamp becomes a clever jack-of-all-trades that any techie man would admire, and perhaps covet for his own workstation. Tack on the creative story of its provenance and this gadget is suddenly full of geek cred.

Here’s the deal: this lamp was invented by a guy who submitted it at Quirky.com, a crowd-sourced engineer’s Etsy where only the most popular and well-vetted ideas actually make it into production. The lamp is shaped like a 9.5-inch long alien spacecraft dotted with 11 powerful LEDs. There’s a power button on one end (and 2 AA batteries inside that light the lamp up for 30 hours—though it automatically shuts itself off after 2), and a detachable clip that allows the Mantis to attach to just about any ridge at just about any angle—e-reader, tablet, laptop, monitor, etc. Finally, the lamp can prop itself up on its own two tiny flip-out legs, without the clip. The light itself is powerful, though there are two intensity settings.