Among the readership of this publication lurks a particular type of technophile: the gadget lover. You know who you are. You don't buy useless technological devices, not at all--but you do find amazing degrees of utility that spouses and other people sometimes cannot see. When something is new, you know it just needs a solid user base to become a big hit. And you love the device that merges two or more separate functions; the pocketknife with a built-in laser pointer makes perfect sense to you.

Well, the holiday season is upon us, and gadget lovers know that they should probably do their own shopping to get what they really want. You've probably already got your eye on a 100-disc DVD jukebox or motorized CD rack, but if you haven't yet found something that catches your eye, this is the gift guide you'll need.

Ceiva Digital Picture Frame
www.ceiva.com
877-693-7263
$249

Ceiva describes its frame as "the missing link in digital photography." Like other digital photography displays (such as Sony's CyberFrame and VideoChip Technologies' Wallet), the Ceiva frame is meant to be mounted on a wall or tabletop, like a glass picture frame, and displays a gallery of digital images. While its competitors store those images locally, transferred from a digital camera or PC via CompactFlash storage, Ceiva incorporates a Web-based subscription service where users can store images. The Ceiva has its own modem and needs to be plugged into a telephone jack as well as a power outlet.

Ceiva works by connecting to the Internet daily to download images selected by its owner, who must maintain an account ($2.99 per month) and upload and manage digital images at the hosted site. Although most Ceiva owners probably keep their own frames, another option would be to give the frame to loved ones and use it to send fresh digital images to them regularly. Ceiva also recently added the ability to select standardized Internet content, such as daily news or weather, to be automatically displayed through the frame.

Compressor Personal Juke Box
www.musiccompressor.com
800-835-7278
$749

A lot of techies will be getting MP3 players this year, just as many did last year. In fact, many current owners of personal digital music players will be hoping for a new model with increased memory capacity. Early players like the original Diamond Rio could only store about an hour of music, and only at lower sound-quality levels. Newer players usually sport 64MB of storage, but if you buy one now, expect to be lusting after a 128MB model by next Christmas.

The alternative is to bypass the solid-state memory price wars and step to another level: specifically, the 6.4 GB level. The Compressor Personal Juke Box (PJB) increases storage capacity a thousandfold by utilizing a standard laptop PC hard drive rather than expensive ($2-$3 per megabyte) Smartmedia or Compact Flash storage. Thus, the PJB stores 105 hours of music at CD quality--more music than an actual jukebox, and more than some of us own in our CD collections.

The PJB's enormous capacity comes with a bit of extra bulk. It is almost twice the size of the smallest MP3 players, about 6-by-3-by-1 inches. Its size accommodates an extra-large LCD screen, which is very handy for navigating the contents of a massive music collection, and at 10 ounces it is certainly light enough to carry comfortably. The music playback is also flawlessly skip-free, due to the fact that music is played not from the hard disk but a 10-minute DRAM buffer, and the PJB's rechargable batteries run for about 10 hours between charges. Of course, the Personal Juke Box's price tag is also impressive at $749.

Rome MP3 Player
www.romemp3.com
800-999-2734
$249

For those who don't want to lug around a laptop-size music player, Rome goes in the opposite direction. It makes an MP3 player with fairly standard features: 32MB of RAM, earbud headphones, and a very small case. In fact, its case is what sets the Rome apart, for it is exactly the size and shape of a standard audio cassette. The Rome works perfectly well as a standalone MP3 player--it has full controls and its sound reproduction quality is very high--but it can also be inserted into any cassette player. Rome's engineers built sensors into the player that pick up the activity of a mechanical cassette player and translate it accordingly. So when you press the play or fast-forward button on your cassette player, the Rome responds with the correct operation.

This very slick design feat means that the Rome can be used to play MP3 files on any existing stereo system with a cassette player, such as a car or home stereo. For people who want to take the same music from their workout to their car, but ditch their headphones while driving, this is a perfect device. At $249, the Rome is considerably more expensive than MP3 players with comparable features, so it realy is only worth buying if you want to play MP3s on another stereo.

Sonicbox iM Remote Tuner
www.sonicbox.com
650-967-4842
$99

MP3 and its advocates have made the most digital music noise in recent years, but there might be an even more significant change brewing in the form of Internet radio. Those who tune in through their PCs can find thousands of stations at any time, far more than the range of AM or FM.

Most people would rather listen to music on a device other than their computers, however, so SonicBox, which operates its own iM Band of affiliated Internet radio stations, has created a device that connects a PC to any stereo via a radio-frequency transmitter with a range of 65 feet. More than just an interface device, the Sonicbox Remote Tuner makes it easy to tune iM stations with presets that organize selected broadcasters by genre.

Brunton Multi-Navigation System
www.brunton.com
307-856-6559
$399

There are plenty of global positioning system (GPS) navigation units in the world, and some of them can show your position on a city street map, as well as quickly provide precise location in terms of latitude and longitude. But if you're a real voyageur-geek (like the editor of this publication), you're not liable to be found anywhere near a street sign, but on a remote hiking trail or mountaintop, and longitude might not be enough to help you get home.

The adventurer's GPS is Brunton's Multi-Navigation System (MNS), which incorporates a 12-channel GPS receiver and supercharges it with extra features, including an altimeter, to let you know if you have reached the summit yet; a continuous logging barometer, which computes trends to warn when storm conditions are approaching; a clock; and a magnetic digital compass that cross-checks GPS information and provides a backup navigation source when satellite sources are blocked.

What really makes the MNS the ultimate navigational tool, though, is the onboard software that ties these tools together. When you're hiking, biking, paddling, dog sledding, or otherwise exploring, the MNS can build a route memory that marks up to 1,000 "waypoints"--the points at which you change direction as you travel. At any point, you can tell the MNS to reverse its course, and it can either point a straight line back to your starting point or guide you back through the specific path you originally followed. It's dangerous to say you can't get lost with this device, but it should make the task just a bit more difficult. The MNS is waterproof, weighs only 12 ounces, and comes with a USB cable and software to download map information from a PC or the Internet.

Suunto Vector Wristop Computer
www.suunto.com
358-9-8524-050
$199

If you believe that any device taking up space on your person--even a narrow strip just above your wrist--should perform more than one function, you're a genuine gadget lover. It's also a pretty safe bet that you've already gone through the Timex Datalink or its kin (watches that let you load a small contact information database from your PC) and haven't really used it since you bought a PalmPilot. You're ready for a new watch, but even more ready for a wrist-top computer. Finland's Suunto Corp., maker of the Wristop, has a line of electronic devices that tell you a lot more than the time.

Suunto's most popular wrist device is the Vector, which was named product of the year by a consortium of European outdoors magazines. To all the functions of a good digital watch, the Vector adds an altimeter, digital compass, and barometric sensor, as well as recording and tracking functions for each. In fact, this watch is not too far from filling the functions of a navigation device like Brunton's MNS. And you're even more likely to keep the Vector with you at all times.

Oregon Scientific CableFree Weather Station
www.oregonscientific.com
503-639-8883
$549

A GPS or digital compass is a fine tool when you're out and about, and so much the better with barometric sensors. But let's face it: Most of us technology buffs aren't really venturing too far from the heat of our display screens. If we're interested in any weather, it's the kind that falls on our roof. If weather is your thing, your holiday shopping list should include a weather station that can relate to your PC, and there is none finer than Oregon Scientific's CableFree Weather Station. It's a wireless system, of course, and that's important. When you track 20 different environmental conditions, it would be a crime to connect 20 different cables.

Activity reporting for the station is actually routed through a standalone monitoring panel with a large, touch-sensitive LCD display. Half a dozen external sensors are included with the station, including wind, rainfall, temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and dew point. Connecting the system to a PC, however, creates the options for maintaining detailed long-term tracking information, and even creating localized forecasts. You still can't do anything about the weather, but the CableFree station gives you plenty of ways to talk about it.

Precision Navigation FB3000 Personal Breath Meter
www.precisionnavigation.com
707-566-2660
$39

The Personal Breath Meter is not one of those electronic devices that lets you know whether your blood alcohol level has exceeded the legal limit, although PNI does make such a device. No, the FB3000 offers help for a far more serious problem: detecting bad breath. The product literature warns that "getting caught breathing into your hand to smell your own breath is worse than the most offending breath!" Maybe so, but the genuinely paranoid will need to be careful about who notices them breathing into this tiny electronic device. The tool uses gas-sensor technology to measure the levels of ethylene and mercaptane, two of the chief chemical culprits responsible for halitosis, and rates your breath on a scale from 1 (sweet) to 4 (deadly). It's a clever gadget, but we hope you don't need one too badly.

CMS Automatic Backup System
www.cmsproducts.com
800-327-5773
$389

If you really want to give your computer something it needs, give it a backup. Few of us perform regular hard-drive backups, but it is the most powerful means of securing a PC against a system crash, a virus infection, or virtually any catastrophe. We all know we should back up regularly, but it seems more bother than it is worth.

CMS Peripherals has a solution: a truly automatic backup device. These external devices are available with either a USB or PC Card interface, and all a user needs to initiate a backup is plug in the Automatic Backup System; software is launches automatically. Of course, there is some management effort required, but this is such a slick, painless tool that it has a better chance of getting used than virtually any backup device I have ever seen.

Contributing Editor Joe Rudich joe@rudich.com is a network administrator with the St. Paul Companies in St. Paul, Minn.