In recent years, Google has sent holiday gifts to large AdWords purchasers and AdSense publishers, but this year is instead donating $20 million to a variety of charities. Kudos to Google for putting its money where its "Don't be evil" mouth is, and for not adding to the world's ever-increasing layer of cheap plastic crud.

Scrambling to come up with last-minute presents for those lingering on your gift list? If you and your recipient are Facebook users, consider an iTunes Store gift card. You can now purchase virtual iTunes gift cards through Facebook, without needing iTunes at all. To purchase one, you must become a fan of iTunes on Facebook, then click the iTunes Gifts tab to follow customization and purchase instructions. The certificates come in $5 (which isn't available normally via iTunes itself), $10, $15, and $25 values.

Hopefully you've finished all your holiday shopping - at least if you were planning on ordering a 27-inch iMac. In a statement to CNET, an Apple spokesperson has apologized for a two-week shipping delay on all 27-inch iMacs. While Apple isn't giving a specific cause for the delay, other than implying the 27-inch's wild success has made filling orders difficult, it would seem likely that the delay is related to the recent reports of broken displays (see "New iMac Screens Cracking and Flickering," 10 December 2009). The 21-inch iMac is still shipping within 24 hours.

TidBITS editor Glenn Fleishman spent weeks driving aimlessly for Macworld, where his overall look at GPS navigation for the iPhone appears, along with reviews of nine apps and the TomTom car kit.

Chuck Joiner interviews a slew of electronic book authors about electronic book readers, like the Kindle and Nook. Chuck talks to Michael Cohen, Glenn Fleishman, Joe Kissell, Kirk McElhearn, and Matt Neuburg, all Take Control authors who have strong opinions about print books, too.

As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, We-Envision.com has created an unusual iPhone app that provides a visual overview of 75 key world events from the last ten years. Bush v. Gore, the September 11th terrorist attacks, the Southeast Asia tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the French student protests of 2006 and Burmese monk protests of 2007, Barack Obama's election, and many others are presented via full-screen photos from news sites, organized by date or subject, and bolstered by Wikipedia-derived details.

It's hard to remember everything that made Apple news in 2009, but Adam and host Gene Steinberg roll through a variety of headlines from the past year, talking about what Apple has done well and not so well.

We're big fans of iPhoto's print products - prints, books, cards, and especially the calendars - as holiday gifts, but keep in mind that to receive your order by December 24th, you'll need to place orders by December 18th with regular shipping or December 19th with express shipping. Although iPhoto makes the mechanics of building books and calendars easy, it can take some time to select and tweak photos as desired, so we recommend getting started soon!

David Pogue reviews the Barnes & Noble Nook electronic reader at the New York Times, and finds it a poor competitor to the Kindle for identical features, while its unique features don't measure up to a real difference.

Expanding vaguely on previous threats, AT&T's head says that the firm will offer "incentives" to have heavy users reduce their usage. Incentives is 1984-speak for penalties.

In this most recent MacNotables podcast, Adam and Andy Ihnatko talked with host Chuck Joiner about the demise of the CrunchPad tablet briefly before focusing on iPhone GPS apps and what they do right and wrong. (Don't miss the outtakes!)

The inimitable Andy Ihnatko writes on his Celestial Waste of Bandwith blog about testing Dragon Dictation, the free iPhone version of Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation software. Andy accidentally discovers that Dragon Dictation censors naughty words, which practically forces him to read it George Carlin's famous "Seven Words" routine, with predictably amusing results. Why censor? Perhaps to get it through the App Store approval process?

AT&T has released a free iPhone app called AT&T Mark the Spot to let you report network trouble directly to the firm. The app uses GPS data to report your location when you tell the company of a failed call, no coverage, data failure, or poor voice quality. This is a superb idea on AT&T's part; let's see if it results in noticeable network improvement.

Editor Glenn Fleishman discovered that Apple boosted the highest possible speed of its AirPort Extreme Base Station and Time Capsule in the October 2009 hardware refresh. The top raw rate is now 450 Mbps - but new adapters will be required to use those speeds.

Brad Stone of The New York Times reveals that Apple has agreed to buy the digital music company Lala. In contrast with iTunes, from which users must download purchased music before playing, Lala lets users play their music directly from the Web on a computer or smartphone with Internet access. Lala's streaming music licenses are not transferable, making engineering skills and knowledge the most likely reason for the acquisition.