Gadgets

Entertainment Liteon 5005 DVD Recorder/Player Affordable DVD recorders have been promised by manufacturers for a couple of years , but they're only now getting into the price range of home electronics consumers. The Liteon LVW 5005 ($400) makes a great addition to any home entertainment center. For one, you can record DVD plus and minus Rs and RWs along with CD-R and RW. It will play regular DVDs, DVD+VR, Video CDs, SVCD, audio CDs holding MP3s, JPEGs and other files. You can record up to six hours of television onto a DVD and it won't fade after repeated playbacks.

Offering holiday gift suggestions is a guilt-free way of giving without incurring a January credit card bill. It's nice to think about the item, about it being unwrapped and about how much pleasure it will bring in the field or on the water. The question is always how much debt to encourage. It would be easy to reel off a bunch of $500 trolling motors or $1,500 shotguns as must-haves, but that might leave little room for that Sunday Sun subscription, if you know what I mean. So here, in no particular order of importance, are a few of my favorite things this year.

Mosquito Repelling Wrist Watch [pricelessdeals.net] $16.05 If you're sick of slathering on bug repellent, just to hazard about with the barbecue grill, this watch might just save your skin -- literally. Put it on, and it emits the sound of an approaching male mosquito. Why is this effective? Apparently, only pregnant female mosquitoes bite, and they avoid male mosquitoes like the plague. The ultrasonic waves act as a force field and allow you to reclaim your backyard. WI-FI DIGITAL HOTSPOTTER [thinkgeek.

I latch the seat belt on my three-year-old son's airline seat.He begins to study how to unlatch it, so that I'll latch it again, so that he can unlatch it, so that I'll latch it again. But it's a challenge for him, which gives me a chance to reach into the seat-pocket in front of me and enter another world.Skymall, says the on-board catalog. I like the sound. I like the slick, crisp pictures, the cooing copy. Skymall is consumer pornography of the highest order. It is salve for the human condition, in which satisfaction seems always barely out of reach, always on order but never quite arrived.

YOUR DECK should be coming along nicely now, with the structure in place. You've even seen the neighbor's cat picking its way along the joists. Now it's time to install the decking, so people can walk on it, too.You can use any 2-inch lumber (actually 1 1/2 inches thick) for the decking. Most people use 2-by-6s, as anything wider would tend to cup, and anything narrower would take forever to install. You can, however, use a form of decking called "five-quarter," with boards that are 1 1/4 inches thick and have rounded edges less prone to splintering.

The nation's early switchover to daylight-saving time Sunday is likely to interrupt more than your circadian rhythms. It could make life tougher for computers, smart alarm clocks, personal data assistants and other gadgets that automatically switch over to daylight-saving time. And that could make life tough for you. The reason: Many devices manufactured before last year are programmed to expect that daylight-saving will begin the first Sunday in April, as it did for 20 years. They have no way of knowing that Congress changed the law to extend daylight-saving time by a month, starting this year.

THIS WEEK'S angst over a vacancy on the Supreme Court makes it obvious how many Americans believe that a single vote can change the course of American history. But beyond a handful of hot-button social issues, you'll find a court that splits in some very unpredictable ways over issues that are less visible but just as contested - and in many ways closer to our day-to-day lives. In some hot cases, the justices don't split at all. Consider last month's decision in the Grokster case, in which a unanimous court held that businesses that affirmatively encourage copyright infringement can be held responsible for the actions of their customers.

When I started this column 20 years ago, my kids would get excited whenever a new gadget came in for review. As they grew older, they also grew more blase about technology. Today, as adults, they're rarely impressed by anything less than a 50-inch HDTV. So my eldest son surprised me this summer when he stopped by for a visit one day, spotted a box from Netgear and asked if he could try it out. He has a more adventurous network setup than I do, so I told him to go ahead - with one condition.

This is the best tech holiday season I can remember - and for a very simple reason. It's the first time I can say with reasonable confidence that the cool gadgets we buy for family and friends will work when they take them out of the box. That doesn't mean we've reached a state of digital nirvana. It just that yesterday's cutting-edge technologies are a lot less edgy than they were. Take computers. PCs are so cheap and powerful that for basic computing purposes - Web browsing, word-processing, financial records, e-mail, music and even digital photography - almost any machine on the shelf will do. Yes, I promise to produce the annual PC buying guide column this year, but it's becoming less and less critical.

Using your cell phone and other hand-held electronics in a movie theater or a restaurant booth can be construed as rude behavior - that's why many businesses forbid it. Now even workplaces are echoing a similar refrain: Mind your technology manners. More companies are banning the use of BlackBerry devices, mobile phones and other portable technology in company and client meetings to better ensure that customers, clients and even bosses receive a worker's undivided attention. Other employers are enforcing strict rules on workers using instant messaging and iPods in the office - a growing trend now that younger employees who grew up with the technology are entering the work force in greater numbers.