Gadget Gary

My 13-year-old son is an avid skier, skateboarder, and longboarder. From time to time, he’ll document his activities with a Flip camera.

There are two issues with the Flip, however. First, you have to hold it in your hand. Second (and more important), Flip is out of business.

Figuring out how to watch TV while I’m out of my house has always been a challenge. I got a black-and-white Sony Watchman as a gift for Christmas in 1985 that worked pretty well for the time; I took it to the pool to watch Mets baseball and to my son’s basketball games to watch Jets football.

My wife and I sent our oldest son off to college this fall. On the ride up, she and I laughed as we told him that when we first went to campus back in 1979, there was no Internet, no cellphones, no e-mail, no fax machines, and Federal Express was an overnight service strictly for businesses and rich people.

Logitech is a cool company. It took all of the top aspects of its best-selling universal remote control and made it so that you could control your TV, set-top boxes, music systems, and other home gear on your iPhone or iPad. My kinda thing.

When I was a teenager, I had these giant Koss headphones. You know the kind. They covered both ears with these giant cups. They sounded great. I remember listening to Blows Against the Empire, the 1970 album by Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship, with them. Music would bounce back and forth from the left channel to the right and back in glorious stereo.

I'm trying to get my holiday shopping done early this year. I have my wife, my kids, and the gang at work to shop for, so I need to make sure everyone gets exactly what they need. My 18-year-old is probably the easiest. He's the one away at college (I wrote about him in November), so for him, I'll get the Slingbox 500 ($300).

I recently mentioned how much I really dig my network-attached storage (NAS) hard drive and how I like to keep all of my music, photos, and videos on it so I can feed the whole house with media via Apple TV or Roku. Since I have a huge investment of both time and personal memories stored on this drive, I really need to protect it properly — and that’s why I’ve recently moved to a RAID drive.