The holiday season is here, and the pressure is on to find the right gifts.
It is a harder task if you have to come up with just the right thing for someone deep into technology. Here are some suggestions, from cheap to costly, that might be a hit:
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$15 to $100
A laptop owner will appreciate Laptop Legs/Mac Feet (Lapworks, $14.95, www.laptopdesk.net).
They raise the laptop, making its keyboard easier to access and use. The lift also helps the computer breathe, keeping it cool. Laptop Legs paste on easily and tuck out of the way when not in use.
Appreciated, too, may be Wi-Fi Finder Plus (Kensington Technology Group, $29.99, www.kensington.com).
Laptop owners whose computers connect wirelessly to the Internet at airports or city parks have to turn on their laptops to determine if access to a network is available. If a network cannot be found, battery time will have been wasted.
Wi-Fi Finder, which fits on a key chain, lets them search for a connection without firing up the computer.
For the digital photography fanatic who wants to show off pictures when a PC is not available but a television is, there is Photo Album (SanDisk, $49.99, www.sandisk.com).
Photo Album connects to a TV and shows photos stored on a CompactFlash, Memory Stick or SD memory cards, among others.
Gamers will like VirtualDrive Pro 10 (FarStone, for Windows 2000/XP, $49.99, www.farstone.com).
Many games require that their CD stay in the CD-ROM drive. At home, that is inconvenient when it’s time to use the CD player for other purposes.
Taking game CDs on the road can be a bother as well.
VirtualDrive’s virtue is that it creates an image of a CD on the gamer’s hard drive, allowing him or her to play the game free of its disc.
$100 to $300
Like breaking up, backing up is hard to do.
But Portable Hard Drive (Iomega, for Windows and Mac, 40 gigabytes, $119.95 and up, www.iomega.com) can make the task much easier.
It also can be used for storing original files and for making them available on different computers. For good measure, the drive comes with a decent program that automates the backup process.
If that someone special just cannot live without radio while working out or walking around town, he will appreciate the Delphi XM MyFi portable satellite radio receiver (XM Satellite Radio and Delphi, $149.99 plus $12.95 monthly radio subscription, www.xmradio.com).
It works in the great outdoors as well as downtown.
MyFi can record five hours’ worth of broadcast music, just in case its owner finds himself underground for long periods of time.
Those one-hour printing services are great, but nothing beats being able to turn out several 4-by-6 pictures at home at a moment’s notice.
Two good printers for this sort of thing are the HP Photosmart 385 GoGo Photo Printer (for Windows, $199.99, www.hp.com) and the Epson PictureMate Deluxe Viewer Edition (for Windows and Mac, $199.99, www.epson.com).
They have built-in memory card readers, are easy to use and produce nice prints.
Serious photographers, meanwhile, will appreciate Spyder2 monitor calibration (ColorVision, for Windows and Mac, $109 to $299, www.colorvision.com).
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Spyder makes sure that the monitor represents faithfully the colors in digital photographs, an important step toward printing them correctly.
$300 and up
Want to please an exercise enthusiast? Hand over the Forerunner 301 (Garmin, for Windows, $324.98, www.garmin.com), a nifty device that combines a portable global positioning system with a heart monitor.
Among other things, it keeps track of the runner or speed walker’s heart rate and the exact number of miles covered.
For that lifelong learner, Rosetta Stone language learning (Rosetta Stone, for Windows and Mac, $195 to $499, www.rosettastone.com) offers instruction in French, Spanish, Hebrew, Mandarin, Welsh–you name it.
The total-immersion language programs are excellent teachers for those who prefer to learn at their own pace and in the privacy of their home.