This year, Sharp kept the same size, but made their bags inflatable. The result is that you had the same morons colliding with you everywhere, but at least it didn't hurt your legs, arms, or body. And with that, I really mean crotch.

Plus, as a bonus, I was able to use them to lie down, take a siesta, and tan in the Berlin Messe gardens. Thank you Addy, you make the world go 'round. [More IFA 2008 Coverage]

Not only did she bring a unique presence to Giz in that her boobs could be described without being prefaced by the word "man" (she's a lady, get it?), she was a normal person. That's a pretty hard quality to find when you're talking about people who asphyxiate themselves with tech news for the majority of their day. Features like why she's an ultra late adopter served to balance out the rest of our "gimme gimme now now" outlook on gadgets. In fact, her favorite Christmas gadget ever wasn't even a gadget. Luckily for us, she agreed to keep on writing her Sunday columns, so you'll still be able to soothe your Saturday night hangover with her charmingly seductive words.

The shitty part of having a virtual office connected by chat rooms and instant messaging is that unless you're traveling for an event, you don't actually get to meet and interact daily with your coworkers. Based on Addy's posts, isn't she someone you would like drink five bottles of wine after work with? We're forcing her to do a cross-country US tour later this year so we can all (maybe even you readers) feel her presence in person.

Here's one of her earliest IMs to me. "Breastion. Ever seen anything USB with tits?" That, my friends, is Adelaide Dugdale. So long, queen of Gizmodo.

And now a note from Addy:

Guys. Guys. Momentous indeed today is. Right, that's the Yoda impersonation done for the Star Wars fans, now TFSU. I'm leaving Gizmodo for pastures bare. Yes, that's right, as the world teeters on the brink of recession, someone is stupid enough to wave goodbye to her current job with nothing lined up next. And that stupid someone is me.

I've had 17 months at El Modo de Giz and I've loved it all (apart from a few teething problems with HTML to start. And then there was Flickr uploadr. And Photoshop. Oh, all of it at first, you know me well enough now.) But that's all changed—no virginal blogger me any more. Oh no. Well, a bit, I suppose.

Leaving the site has not been an easy decision at all. In fact, I ummed and aahed about it for a couple of months, before taking a deep breath and writing to Blam. He, bless him, gave me a couple of weeks just in case I wanted to change my mind, and I confess that my resolve wobbled a couple of times.

But I need a break. Pro blogging is pretty relentless, and it takes a toll on people. I think it should come with a mandatory week off every two months, but then I'm a soft European pussy and I should STFU, I guess. So, rather than burn out, and end up with that sad little dead-iPod face, knackered, squinty-eyed and suffering gadget blindness, it's time to go and do something else. I'm going to have a month off, get our house sorted out as much as possible, then think about the alternatives.

But, my lovelies, I won't be gone forever. I'll be back in August with a brand new shiny fabulous column (er, still haven't worked it all out, but trust me, it'll be the embodiment of the bastard lovechild of Addy and Giz. That is, if a website could have sex with me. Or if it would want to. Or I with it. Um, like I said, I need to work on the idea a bit).

All your gorgeous comments, especially those of you who have defended me against my detractors (scarbrtj, Drewdraws2, ANoel, SonofMagicFact andFreddicvsMaximvs especially spring to mind) have been brilliant—there's nothing like a bit of encouragement to make you really want to write your socks off for your readers.

And as for the guys I work with—Blam, Wilson, Chen, Mark, Kit, Benny et all —I can't thank you enough for helping me go from really shit blogger to not-so-bad one, really. But most of all, it's down to the Jeezy Weezy, who got me into blogging in the first place. He's the one who deserves most of the credit, the Debbie Allen to my Leroy, or something. Kissy.

Oh, and one more thing. LindsayJoy, easy on the nearly-nekkid pictures with just a bit of LEGO to preserve your modesty that you keep sending to Jesus. It's not pissing me off. Yet.

See you all in August, and my first cocktail tomorrow night will be raised to you all. Cheers!

you don't know me, well maybe you do. i am that guy who took mr sir lord king gadgetporn out of commission on friday, yeah heh heh that was me! the past year i've been studying the two-legs i live with and i'm jealous. yez. jealous that she and master get all the cool stuff to play with and i get nowt. sometimes i just have to sit there and watch them as they work or play around with their gear. sometimes they use me as a live model for their camera work—and their photoshop tutorials—but i want a piece of the action. so back off bozos its my turn now.

for startz, lets look at four things i like better than the iphone

what? you say i thought you were apple fandog but its not true. i can't dial out on it, can't send text messijis, my nails play havoc with the touchscreen, can't take pictures, wont use it to listen to my bonzo dog doodah band songs because master doesn't have bonzo dog doodah band songs on it, cant read email but i can poze with it. do you know how cool this makes me look in the hood? thought not. i get respect with a capital ruff from the dogs out there.

here are the better gadgets

old computer cases
hear me out. it's a new obsession and it probably wont last long because you know what i am like oh yes no sense of time or memory at all but yesterday i was out with addy in the street and there was this old pc casing and oh before i knew it i had just lifted up my leg and aaaaaah yeah i'm the computer case modder of madrid and i'm a dog. skill!

kettle
when the two-legs go into the kitchen and make their tea i know that when the blue spouty thing with the forked tail that hides in the wall starts going hufffffblowpschww that its dinner time. it's dinner, it's dinner time, you know its dinner time when i'm wearing my socks that's why theyre called dinner socks oh yeah i'm a conchords fan too. do the doggy bounce do the doggy bounce, keytar solo heh heh heh heh heh.
central speaker for master's home theater thingy
i tell you why i like that heh heh, that's because i broke it yeah i broke it. came back from a walk, went loop-de-loop freakzoid crazy to see the master and addy, and somehow, dogmagically, i managed to wrap the retractable leash around the leg of the table the speaker sits on. at the same time i liked the feel of the speaker cable on my wiry coat and i wanted to dance the polka with it and oops bangcrash jooonnnnnnnneeees shouted master and this big block of audio kwipment came crashing down. so exciting pant pant my pink pencil is kwivering at the thought of it. Master spent two hours with screwdrivers and glue and its still barked i mean borked.

hoover
when it's pushed and pulled around the house its like its speaking to me in my language. its like a robotic friend for me, you know, puffs and pants and growls and makes mucho noizo and it slides around the house with its nose to the carpet, sniffing sniffing sniffing. i know, i should get on her—i am pozitive it's a sleek and sexy silvery lady that is just begging to be ridden like seabiscuit. people say that if you talk about doing it doggy then you're not doing it at all and probably a virgin but its not for want of trying oh no one day. one day.

now you wanna hear about stuffs i dont muchreally care for even worse than iphone thank you very much

laptops and dezktops
the black thing that goes click click click when addy tickles it and makes me so jealous i want tickles i do i do. down a bit down a bit left a bit up a bit oooh there, yeah, right there pant pant pant. and the big thing that master goes clicktapbangtap clickclickbang on—i make my gooey dog-eyes at them and if theyre on the clicktapthingy i get nuthin. nuthin i tell yous. if i wasn't such a handsome studmuffin i'd have a complex.

r-c super mario cart
there's this thingy with round paws that goes vroom vroom and a wire sticking up in the air, and a moustachioed two-leg in a red cap and dung-rees on top doing to the thingy with round paws what i'd like to do to hooverbiscuit. i don't like that one bit. master sits on the sofa with a box with a wire and tickles and fondles that and the round paw and its jockey come and chase me round the room. i bark and i bark and i stare him down and i say in my own special language "back the fur up you muthafurrer you is on my rug and you is chasing me round like some mutant vigilante carpet cop. begone you doggone spazwagon-on-battery acid."
oops oh dog almighty gotta go. master is at the door. last time he came in he was all antiseptic and numb and stitched and a bit high and I don't want that again. he wont be happy if he comes in and i'm humping the black clickety thing and addy is lying on the bathroom floor tied up with my leash. oh no i must cover my pawprints or there will be merry hell to pay. im serious now bye. bye.

Disclaimer: No animals were harmed during the making of this video. Mario, on the other hand, is a write-off.

Ed. note: Some dogs have an easier time with the iPhone than Jones does.

The following objects are no-nos:
• Blogger, Orkut and Facebook The first of these surprises me, as Iran has the fourth largest community of bloggers in the world—even Ahmadinejad has one. (His latest entry reads "My package from Amazon arrived today—although it took its satanic time. Canceled cabinet meeting and the Ayatollah and I hit the games room all morning. GTA IV FTW." ) Anyone who wants to start one up has to inform the authorities, however.
• Celebrity magazines "Using photos of artists, especially foreign corrupt film stars, as instruments to arouse desire, publishing details about their decadent private lives, propagating medicines without authorization, promoting superstitions," goes the explanation.
• Boots and hats Only when worn by women, although I suspect that the Village People's steel toe-caps and leather cap might not make it past the "Down With This Sort of Thing" crew.
• Neckties Although they're not averse to slipping a length of rope around miscreants' necks, I guess a skinny number with piano keys down the front is just taking it too far.
• Breasts on mannequins Some shop windows display clothes on showroom dummies with mastectomies that look like they've been done with an ax and covered with flesh-colored duct tape. Yeah, lose that image from your brain now.
• Western music The artist worst hit is, apparently, Kenny G, so for that let me just say Viva la Revolución!

What, no gadgets banned? Wrong. camera phones are off limits. High-speed internet, too. The reckoning is that denying these items will allow citizens to remain in a state of moral purity. The state has even invested in US-built software that can scan images and files sent by phone to ensure that the morals of its citizens remain pure. And, in a way, they've got a point. Can you remember life before broadband? Yeah, it wasn't pretty—half an hour to open a single hi-res image. Porn traditionalists who like basic missionary sex must have been dying as they strained to see what was going on below the protagonists' expressions of ecstasy as the pic revealed itself, millimeter by agonizing millimeter. Not quite the skin smorgasbord Westerners now enjoy.

Nuclear reactors aside, what does the Iranian gadget freak get to play with? LG, apparently. The Korean electronics company is big in Iran, which gave it the green light last year to produce five cellphone handsets in collaboration with an Iranian manufacturer. LG stuff is advertised all over the place. Switch on the (silicone-free) Iranian music channel and you'll find the commercial breaks clogged up with plugs for LG's RoboKing robotic vacuum cleaner.

Whoah there! So, Barbie is about to be sacked, but autonomous vacuum cleaners are totally fine? Mullahs! Ahmadinejad! Do you not realize what you are doing? Now, I'm no great defender of Barbie (as a kid, I read war comics, climbed trees and played Doctors & Nurses) but these robot vacuum cleaners may be more of a threat than the blonde, pneumatic doll. In the grand scheme of things, I would think Barbie is a more traditional symbol of womanhood than a robotic floor cleaner that does the drudgery of housework, freeing the ladies of the house to dream of getting jobs, drivers licenses and other sorts of trouble. Are you sure you've got the correct target?

So, consider if you will, my preeeties, the current options I have open to me.
• A canister of pure oxygen. Well, shoot, I didn't make it to our local oxygen shop before I crawled into bed this morning.
• A gadget that "staves off" wine headaches. That's a bit disingenuous, because it doesn't cure your hangover, it just reads the chemicals in the wine inside your glass and tells you if you shouldn't drink it.
• A chilled hangover mask that's so cold I think my eyes need a de-icer.

Some people might have popped a bunch of RU21 pills before they went out. The drug was developed by the KGB so that their spies could drink all they could and stay sober while they loosened up their contacts with a vodka or seven. It sounds a bit creepy—and as for the name. "Are you 21?" Nope, that's why I get hangovers. So no storebought gear, no creepy Soviet pharmaceuticals. I think I'm gonna have to invent a hangover buster of my own.

If I were good with my hands, I'd pull an A-Team on you all and build a flotation tank complete with butler 'bot using a saucepan, plastic guttering, the drum from the washing machine and a lawnmower. But I'm not—and I HAVE A HANGOVER. So I'm just going to have to imagine my way out of it. As a nipper, my point of reference was illustrator W. Heath Robinson, the British equivalent to Rube Goldberg. So, let me channel my inner Rube.

Balanced on top of the sofa at the end of our bed is a cushion. I reach out a toe and push it onto the seat, which dislodges a tennis ball. The ball rolls down a ramp, bounces once on a mini trampoline, ricochets against the bedroom door and boings its way down the corridor. It hits a plank of wood which has been propping up the strut on a home-made trebuchet. With a flick of the knicker elastic I used to secure it, the spoon of the trebuchet catapults a dart with a homing device on it. The dart buzzes into the kitchen, veering towards the electric kettle, and lands smack in the center of the kettle's On button (where I will have placed a homing beacon). As the kettle boils, shaking violently with the hot, hot heat bubbling away (I hacked it, okay?) a one-directional pulley yanks farther and farther, until a rope tied to the kettle's handle tips it towards a Velcro-covered mug containing a squeeze of lime juice. You still with me?

The mug, now three-quarters full of hot water and lime juice, is sitting on a USB beverage heater (why, thank you, Thanko) modified with wheels, and a rocket firework. The firework's fuse is fired up with my prototype RC piezoelectric lighter, controlled via a handheld unit dangling conveniently above my bed. The firework fizzes away and shoots the USB heater (mug and all) towards the edge of the counter, where it scoots onto a wire cradle, suspended from the ceiling on wires that slope gently downwards—think "ski lift," only small and in my apartment. The cradle trundles slowly downward, turning the corner back into the corridor, until it comes to rest just outside the bedroom door.

So how does it get from the bedroom door into my clammy palms? Well, this is the bit that I'm having trouble figuring out. At the moment, I've got a monkey, dressed in Evel Knievel leathers with Velcro stripes down the arms and a helmet, riding a tricycle down the corridor at full tilt. Monkey draws level with the mug—which you'll recall is covered with Velcro. Velcro meets Velcro, it's love at first feel, and the mug hitches a ride on the leather sleeve. The monkey trundles up the ramp that the tennis ball rolled down not five minutes earlier, stands on the sofa, takes off his helmet, smiles and passes me the mug. But here's where the system breaks down: the sodding monkey drinks the brew down in one, burps, tosses the mug behind him and then just jumps up and down, pointing and laughing at me.

Anyone know how to hack a monkey?

In nine years, I've gone through five mobiles. A Nokia brick my dad gave me (left in the back of a taxi), an Ericsson flip T28 (the flip eventually flopped), an Ericsson T68 (honestly, the best phone ever, lasted three years), a cheapo, tiny Panasonic I picked up at Dubai airport for 50 bucks, and the RAZR.

Perhaps its because, as phones have become more sophisticated, they have become more fallible. The RAZR promised so much—and I'm not talking about bumping into Beckham at the supermarket checkout here—and failed to deliver.

As my first cameraphone, it made pictures that looked like something I drew on Etch-a-Sketch a couple of decades ago, but I can live with that. What I can't live with is the sluggy interface. Or the buttons that don't work, with their eerie backlight that just shows up all the hideous detritus that my phone has picked up from being chucked into the black hole-esque dustbin that is my bag. Or the seemingly random volume control. I can't see a thing on the screen when the sun is shining. And I have room for just 13 incoming SMS messages at any one time before I have to start deleting them.

So, let's talk about the good times with my RAZR. *tumbleweed blows across the page* I was pissed off the day I bought it because the shop didn't even have the black one I wanted. I'd liked the look of that when it came out, but by the time my Panasonic gave up the ghost, all that was available was silver. Why did I go through with it? It was small enough to fit into my pockets without making me look like a ladyboy, and I'd heard good things about Motorola from other friends. They're not my friends any more.

I asked myself what I liked about it, and there was one thing: the wallpaper is a picture of Jesus taken the day after he asked me to marry him, and I'll be sad to see that go. But the quality is so shite—honestly, I'd have got better results from a pinhole camera—I know that it won't travel. Plus, for some reason, I can't send photos via SMS.

I can't even lose it, like older more beloved phones. I left the RAZR in a club a couple of months ago, and I'd made it halfway down the block when some guy came running up behind me. "You left this on the bar," he wheezed. (Everyone in Spain smokes, and I'm a fast walker.) As he palmed the RAZR back into my hand, I could swear there was a look of pity on his face.

In truth, this isn't about the RAZR, but what comes after. I bleeding know it's time for a new phone, but which? No prizes for guessing which one Jesus wants me to get. But even when the 3G model of the iPhone eventually deigns to park its arse at an Apple Store near me, I am still digging my heels in over certain issues—internal memory too small, eminently crackable screen for my klutziness, a rather larger size than a closed RAZR, etc etc. I also know that the largest-capacity 3G iPhone would be molto 'spensivo, and I don't know whether I really want to spunk that much on a phone. Pathetic, isn't it?

So here I am, willing but unable to put the RAZR out of its misery. Until it breathes its last, when the ringtone that sounds like J-Lo bellydancing sputters to a halt, as the little screen with the M logo fades to gray, when the buttons lie dull and unresponsive beneath my desperate fingers, that will be the time to replace it. Got any recommendations?

The beauty of Flickr is its serendipity. I found Mr Perverso's oh-so-perverse materials by innocently typing "I love Jesus" into the search box. Usually I'm on the hunt for stuff at work such as "Treo unboxing," "broken iPhone" or "computer dungeon," which gets you some guy's basement server farm, screenshots of PC-based RPGs, and, for some reason, a shot of a dude's first computer, an Atari 800. But "dungeon", all by itself, gets you into much more trouble: French châteaux, a shackles-and-rubber-gasmask outfit attached to a cross, a girl in stripy socks and a picture that is so NSFW I will only tell you that the person whose stream it is has a blog devoted to the art of the blow-job.

The crazy thing is that, unlike some photo sites, Flickr uploads are public and searchable. Why are people so interested in sharing their most tender or outrageous or embarrassing moments with the world? My theory is that beyond friends-n-family photo sharing, many people on Flickr are amateur photographers and artists who want to show off what they can do, but beyond that there are the crazy cakes just dying to have themselves a bunch of virtual friends who will write a testimony like "April-May's deep-throat technique just has to be seen to be believed." And what keeps me coming back is that it's always changing. A search from one day to the next can yield totally different results.

Here are some quick fun tag safaris to illustrate the point:
• Taxidermist
• Foshizzle
• Space Pants or, better still, Spacepants
• Repossession - Note the Jude Law cameo
• Disco Biscuit
• Junk In the Trunk

I get a tingly sensation looking into the private lives of random people. Sure it's mostly mundane stuff—weddings, parties, vacations—but on occasions you can get a sudden rush of tenderness mixed with guilt, like when stumbling on these secret stolen moments of a couple of strangers at Glasto.

There's a knack to celebrity stalking on Flickr. Direct searches turn up eclectic results. Bill Gates brings up pictures of bananas, a subway escalator—even windows as opposed to Windows—before fielding a couple of shots of the actual software baron with Michael Arrington, with Steve and Walt, and, heh, with an iPhone. There was nothing at all interesting for either Clooney or Madonna. Hayden Panettiere turned up a few shots of the saved cheerleader licking things, if you're into that sort of stuff. Looking for particular celebs, it seems, is a waste of time; you've got to cast a wider net (like using the actual word "celebrity" in a search") and just see which A-Listers (or B-Listers or C-Listers) get caught.

All of sleb life is here, from A(niston) to (Jay-)Z. Look! It's Tara Reid and Tommy Lee hanging out in a bar. What they might lack in make-up they sure make up for in drunkenness. Here's a giant, beige John Goodman queuing up for some bar-b-que. It's Twisted Sister's Dee Snyder actually looking cool, and Keanu Reeves actually looking irritated. Kirk Hammet from Metallica seems to have taken the time and effort to have his shirt match the shopfront he was photographed outside of. Here's a great back-of-the-head shot of Paris Hilton and a wax model of Lady Di that I thought was a tranny lookalike.

You can actually play games with Flickr as well. Rather than going on individual tag safaris like the ones above, you can embark on a sort of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: How far can you get from one subject in six moves? I started off with Porkins, going via POTUS, Pewkus, Poker and Bummer before ending up back in Star Wars country (sort of), at Clones.

I've made some peculiar discoveries. For one, Konaboy, whose Spring Clean picture cropped up in about 60% of my searches, seems to be Flickr's Kevin Bacon. Another, Pisces Romance, showed me how to say "I wuv woo" with roses and sunsets. Best of all (especially Jesus), I found a recently-uploaded pic of—I'm guessing here—the upcoming series of Flight of the Conchords. It's Brett and Jermaine in roller-disco mood. Because, my little friends, on Flickr, it's always Business Time.

Er, no, that's not right. E-Z Sex, is it? Or something like that. CES. Right. Yep. I knew that all along. We shed tears at the farewell ceremony. I fired a party popper and played my kazoo. Blam made a stirring speech all about fighting them in the booths, fighting them in the corridors, fighting them in the virtual theaters of war. The troops all had lumps in their throat—especially Wilson, who's been grappling with a nasty cold this week—and I could only stand and and marvel at their certain sacrifice all in the name of freedom and liberty consumer electronics.

Reader, it is a sacrifice. Barely have these young men recovered from Slut Machine's New Year's Eve Party, their reward for the earlier horrors of chatting up Great Aunt Ethel on Christmas afternoon in the Old Kuntz home, than it is time for them to brave the horrors of Homeland Security, remove their shoes, belts and electronic devices (trust me, Muscles, you don't want to be on the wrong end of a "You want me to put my iPhone in that tray? Seriously??" look from Blam) and get on a Vegas-bound plane that is Wi-Fi un-abled. I mean, you don't expect them all to have actual spoken conversations with each other, do you?

Having just fought my way through the new-gadget desert of December, I can understand why the powers that be want to hold CES in January. The beginning of the year is all about hope, it's a shiny and new time for everything—except people's livers and wallets. But do they have to go and hold it in Vegas? Sheesh, those guys have got a lot to learn about mankind. At least they should give everyone a couple of months to recover from cocktail and credit excess before dangling expensive, sexy bits of metal, plastic and silicon in front of their eyes.

Wilson, between sneezes and swigs of Robitussin, described CES as a "masochistic feat of machismo." I, sadly, will not be able to verify that, as I have been instructed to stay in the office, rather like Miss Moneypenny. Guarding the door, keeping everything ticking along, a little bit of co-ordinating here, some dusting there, checking out Jason's nekkid lay-dee collection that's on that secret hard drive he thinks I don't know about, reading Matt Buchanan's dear diary, that sort of stuff, waiting for the special red CES-emergency telephone to ring and Blam to tell me breathlessly that he put his foot through the paper-thin Pioneer 118-incher, and does Giz have insurance?

Then the doorbell will ring, and I'll open it, and standing there will be a stacked young man from the Geek Squad, wearing funny overalls with no shirt underneath. And suddenly all my clothes will fall off and excruciatingly cheap-sounding R 'n' B will start playing before the bloke says "Ja, Ja, Das Is Fantastiche, Grossen, Filthen Schlutten" and drops his pants.

Anyway enough about my fantasies—and the Adult Entertainment Expo. Salute the bravery of these guys. The crazy-assed figure of 250 posts a day was being bandied about our chatroom the other day. That is five times our daily post rate. Over 10 an hour. One every six minutes or so. And let's not forget the surprises, like one-on-ones with the innovators, the exceedingly rich and geeky, and of course all those booth babes.

Readers, they're doing it all for you—and without an in-suite hot-tub between them. I'm not going because I've got an unbreakable engagement in London, but I wish I could be there to do more than the dusting. Next year, I guess. Viva Las Vegas!

• A new sofa cover
• A cute, copper-colored snakeskin clutch—that's a handbag, not something found on a car—by Luella
• A pile of new books (or just an Amazon gift certificate, actually)
• Some fabulously sexy piece of art to hang on the wall

Well, I typed, at a push I'd like an iPod classic, because my old 60GB, video-free version is a bit rickety, but it does still work, so I think I'll wait until the sad, dead-iPod face appears on the screen. And my other half, Jesus, has been tempting me with the iPhone (like any of you are surprised). He is right; I do need a new phone as my horrible Motorola currently has a battery life of around 10 minutes and I HATE IT, I REALLY HATE IT, but since the iPhone hasn't got 3G, I thought I'd wait until Mk 2 comes out. But apart from that? Nope, nothing.

My gadgets are as follows: one sickly iPod; one MacBook; one shitty original Motorola RAZR that I will feed to the gadget-eating unicorns once I can be bothered to get a new phone. We've also got a TomTom for the car, but I lost the charger for it, so that's that, and, truth be told, we don't need it because I'm pretty damn good at map-reading.

Gadgets are my job. I write about this stuff from morning to night, so when it comes to going-home time, I'm pretty happy to close my laptop and start on a book. And no, before you suggest a Kindle, I love books. I like them stacked up dustily in my house, I like making them dog-eared and sticky-paged and taking them places. And another confession: I am the clumsiest git in the world, so an iPhone/Kindle/Thanko USB Trouserpress will probably suffer a bathwater-electronics interface in the first week.

Just because I don't want a gadget for Christmas doesn't necessarily mean that I begrudge everyone else their bundles of bytes and pixels. My husband is of course crazy about stuff like this, hence the iPhone, the brand new iMac that we don't really have room for, the Nintendo DS—all three of them, actually—and the remote-controlled Mario Kart that drives the mutt nuts when we play with it. Both my father-in-law and my brother have gone crazy over the iPhone, my bro changing his service provider in order to get his hands on one, the f-i-l sending someone over to NY to pick one up for him to use in Spain.

Nevertheless, Blam's question bugged me for several days, until I remembered one stand-out Christmas present from my childhood, when I was eight or so.

My parents weren't quite altruistic enough to buy me a drum kit I'd asked for, but they did buy me a cheapo cassette player. Not some fabulous ghetto blaster that I could strut around the bad-ass farm track at home with, like Radio Rakeem, but a tiny little mono version, and three tapes: The Jungle Book; and The Young Person's Guide(s) to Mozart and Beethoven which, when I think about it, must have honed my obsession with '70s disco, funk, Chicago House and the Sugarhill Gang.

Crap tapes aside, I hearted my tape player. I hearted it with everything I had. I took it to school to show off in the playground, duly getting it confiscated for a week—no more Baloo for you, you wicked girl—and it remained the closest thing to heaven. I can't even remember what brand it was, probably something uber-shonk, like Alba, or Crown. But I loved it. I customized it with my sister's carmine nail polish, stuck cute Japanese stickers on it, and graffiti'd the sides in gold pen that made me high when I got too close to the nib. Until one fateful day three years later, when I snapped off the red record button while singing à la Siouxie Sioux into the mic.

So, I'm sorry, dear Gizmodo readers, who imagine their perky AM gadget reporter to be as plugged in as the Borg Queen herself. The truth is, a quarter-century on, I can't think of anything made of metal, plastic and silicon which lights up, bleeps, or goes "Pew Pew," which will bring me anywhere near to the joy of Christmas back then, and that dear, beautiful ultra-cheap cassette deck.

Happy Holidays!