Gadget Christmas - ~ Gadget Man looks at Christmas gifts ideas

A low tech present from World Vision - Poverty in Rwanda means many children don’t eat a balanced diet. A goat provides child-headed households, orphaned by genocide, with a reliable source of milk and cheese. The surplus can be sold at the market for extra income. Your gift of a goat is the gift of self-sufficiency. Visit http://smiles.worldvision.com.au.

It is disheartening for early adopters of technology to watch the price of appliances they have just bought come down faster than the Nasdaq. DVD players are now somewhat old hat - and the gadget family picked up a new fully-featured DVD player this year for $185! With the capacity to also play audio and mp3 CDs, and surround sound capability, a model like this would have been more than $500 two years ago.

Now that we all have access to 57 channels with nothin’ on, the art of TV viewing is watching only those shows of real interest to us at a time of our own choosing.

If you’re not fortunate enough to have neighbours with an extensive DVD collection, you will need access to a DVD library. A subscription to redcarpet may be a good Christmas gift (www.redcarpet.com.au). Redcarpet is a DVD-rental-by-mail service that for $24.95 each month allows you to borrow up to three DVDs at any one time and exchange them as often as you like. They have an extensive collection of new and old DVDs (mainly older at the moment). You maintain a list of your preferred titles on their website, and they send you by mail your top three, with return postage-paid envelopes. Keep them as long as you like - when you post one back, they send you the next on your list to replace it.

You can’t record programs using a DVD player. If you want to tape the news to watch later when the little gadgets eventually go to sleep, you will still need your old video recorder. Or, you could be the first on your block with a DVD recorder.

DVD recorders allow you to record TV programs and home videos onto special blank DVD disks. You can then find any part of a program without the fast forward/rewind delay, and the disks don’t deteriorate with time like videotape. You can record your home movies onto DVD and send your video Christmas card along with your generic Christmas letter to long suffering friends and relatives.

There are some disadvantages. The units are more expensive than VCRs (Panasonic $1,699 at www.panasonic.com.au/catalogue/list.cfm?cat=5_1), and there are a number of different ‘standards’ for recorded DVDs - DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-R - so they may not play in other DVD players. The blank disks can only be recorded once, and although their price is dropping (~$13 for 2 hours), they are certainly more expensive than tape.

If you really want to be ahead of the pack, you need a digital hard drive recorder (also known as a personal video recorder or digital video recorder). Available in America for some time, DHDRs store TV shows directly onto hard drive memory, in the same way as your computer saves files - no disks or tape required. The larger units can store up to 80 hours of television. You can pause a show you are watching, skip the ads, or get an instant replay of action you missed - while the unit continues to record. (As a point of interest, although these look like video recorders and have similar controls, they are actually specialised computers that use a version of the Linux operating system).

In the USA, digital hard drive recorders can be connected (by phone) to a central server that supplies them with information about the TV schedule - so you can program them to tape all rugby matches automatically, or all episodes of Life Support, or all movies that are Australian comedies, for example (www.tivo.com). This is the next step in taking control of your own TV scheduling.

And there’s more - Panasonic Australia ($2,799) has released a combined DVD recorder/digital hard drive recorder, with hard drive space for up to 54 hours of programs. So, you can sit down to watch a rugby match live, press pause if you need to pop up for a beer, replay any moves you want to analyse, skip through the half-time ads to catch up with real time again, and save the game to DVD at the end, (if Australia wins), cutting out the ads and editing out scenes you don’t want (such as any All Black tries).

However, in my opinion the best online Christmas gifts are the smiles available at http://smiles.worldvision.com.au. Give your family a chicken and eggs, goat and milk, a toilet, fresh water or medicine and have it delivered to children in need in Palestine, Ethiopia, or Rwanda.

Low tech, I know, but far healthier for all concerned than a Playstation.

Happy Christmas.