I participated in a secret santa this year for my Team Fortress 2 team and my sender asked me what I wanted.  I replied “something that promotes human connection or something unique to the sender”,  the response was “ooh”.  Today I received in the mail I received this:

It’s a portable stove that plugs into the 12V outlet of a car and can heat up a can of soup in about 20 minutes.  I thought it was neat.

For my aunt and uncle I wanted to provide a family photo of my father, mother, brother and I.  Since we have no family photos taken within the last… 14 years, I faked it by doing a 4-up print with one pane per person.  This was the only photo of my mother I had so I needed something else and I contacted her travel partner for a trip she took last year and grabbed copies of the photos they took.  The best I could find was:

I had no interest in the woman on the right appearing in the family collage so I used a bit of context-aware fill to create the following:

I think I did an almost Stalin-esque job of zarching her from the picture.  There’s a bit of deformation in the wall and around the ice, but no one’s noticed so far.