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All I want for Christmas is

It's that time of the year when I take a look at what cool things you can get a geek or a tech-head for Christmas.

Given that it's still the first week of November and Christmas is still seven weeks away you might be tempted to say "too early mate". However, odds are that many of the must-have gifts this year will be ordered online from some foreign website so we have to allow for shipping time.

In previous years it's been pretty easy to come up with some low-cost, high-interest techy gifts but this year, perhaps not quite so much.

Of course we'd all love a new RTX5090 GPU and a "state of the art" CPU in a box with gobs of RAM but few people will be willing to mortgage the house or sell their children into servitude in order to raise the funds that would require.

There are perenial favourites of course... such as those cheap retro-gaming hand-held consoles that come with a bazillion and one pre-loaded games along with a multitude of emulators. To be honest (based on reviews I've watched online), some of these things are pretty decent and provide a huge "bang for your buck" ratio. It would be silly not to include one of these on your Christmas stocking list.

Of course if you really did mortgage the house, one of the new Mac Mini desktop computers would be rather nice. Get one fully-loaded and you'll be able to install a number of AI LLMs, effectively freeing you from the grip of the hyperscalers like Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, etc.

There are also a range of AI-centric laptops coming onto the market but to be honest, I've never warmed to laptops. There are too many compromises in the laptop form-factor and thermal throttling is always just a keystroke away when you're talking high-performance units.

Perhaps the most attractive (to me) tech gifts are those which open the door to learning new skills and experimentation. Now we're talking about low-cost tech evaluation boards and kits, many of which can be found selling for a song on Sino-etailers like AliExpress.

There are so many ESP32-based development boards to be had for single-digit dollar amounts or slightly more if you want an integrated LCD, OLED or ePaper display.

These boards offer Wifi support and often need only a single USB connection to both power them and flash software onto them.

Even if you're not a programmer, vibe-coding means you can still create some fantastic little projects using these boards. Quite truly, your imagination is the only limitation.

I've also been doing a lot of playing with the little Raspberry Pi Pico which is another "cheap as beans" microcontroller board. Unlike some of the other options, the Pi Pico can be programmed in Python which makes life a lot easier if you want an easy-to-learn/use language.

For those feeling a little more adventurous, an FPGA development board might be the way to go. FPGAs are a significantly different paradigm to microprocessors and can often deliver performance far greater than even top-tier processors. Beware, there's a very steep learning curve but learning a new skill is the real fun in such cases.

The ultimate gift however, is a subscription to Aardvark Daily. Give one to a friend and it won't cost you a cent. Make sure the people you love are aware of the huge health benefits of getting their "daily dose" of commentary, right here on these pages :-)

Carpe Diem folks!

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