Three takes on one question: Top Tech Picks for Holiday '22

General
1

Hi all,
I’d love your opinion on the following three questions! Answer one, two, or all three!

Question 1:
What’s on the top of your tech wishlist this holiday season, and why?

Question 2:
What’s the best tech gift you’re giving this year, and what will the recipient like most about it?

Question 3:
Looking beyond your own gifting and your own wishlist, what do you think will be the hottest tech item for this holiday season, and why?

2
  1. My top tech wishlist gizmo is the PineTime watch. It’s a cheap and open source smartwatch, and I’m a fiscally cheap geek who likes programming gizmos running on processors like the one in this watch. It would replace another watch that I always wanted to write software for, but sadly no development kit was ever released to support it (Powerwatch2)
  2. My son asked for a tech gift using these very words, “a drone that isn’t age appropriate”. and yeah, he’ll get something with labels on the package indicating the recommended minimum age a few years older than him. He’ll appreciate being trusted with something fancier and more capable than kids his age general get to use, and done future moment he’ll appreciate that in this household we fix things when they break :slight_smile:
  3. Hottest tech item: battery powered thermal clothes; gloves, hats, pants, jackets. Batteries have gotten cheaper, this winter is expected to be especially hard, and people crave comfort for each other. I’m putting all my chips on “battery powered thermal clothes” for this one. Maybe I’m biased from living in the northeast, but I just keep hearing friends and neighbors mention these and they make a lot of sense to me.
3

This will be my 4th winter with these heated mittens. I first tried heated gloves but they didn’t do the job. With the mittens I can grip the handles on my snow blower for an hour at -20F and my hands stay nice and warm:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L489PPP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

4

@BillG said:
This will be my 4th winter with these heated mittens. I first tried heated gloves but they didn’t do the job. With the mittens I can grip the handles on my snow blower for an hour at -20F and my hands stay nice and warm:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L489PPP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

@BillG that looks like an excellent product. I live in Oklahoma, but this winter, I’ve been running outside. The coldest temperature has been maybe around 28-32F, and I’ve been okay; however, it’s good to know of something that can keep my hands warm. Typically, when I shake people’s hands, their hands warm mine up, so when it’s cold outside, I do need to pay attention to my hands. I put them in gloves, but I didn’t even know about battery operated heating gloves I could potentially buy in the future.

5

Being a lifelong resident of the south, I did not know battery-heated clothing existed! @BillG, I’m impressed you’ve gotten 3 years and counting out of that set of mittens.

@bitflung please keep us updated on what you’re able to do with that watch! It looks like a fun project.

6

  1. Though I’m not planning to buy it this holiday season, a macbook pro with at least a m1 chip is on my wishlist. I like to live stream, and I think my streaming quality could be better if I had a better laptop. For 3ish years, I’ve been using a PC with an i3 processor with 8gb of RAM, but it’s getting slower. Apple’s m1 chip apparently is giving Intel a run for its money, and I miss audio editing with GarageBand as well.

  2. I think the new Apple watch may be amount the hottest tech items for this holiday season because people can use it, and if they want, ditch their phone for all or some of the day. (See Apple’s official documentation what the new Apple watch can do without an iPhone nearby). Among other things, people can use the new Apple watch to make calls and receive texts without having an iPhone nearby.

My brother gave me his “old” Pixel 6 Pro and Garmin Venue smartwatch, and really like them. I’ll probably write a review of the Venue in this forum. I love all of the fitness/health data I receive from the watch, and yesterday, when I ran a 10K for my workout, I was able to leave my phone at home and still listen to audio from watch via my bluetooth headphones and track my run, which I thought was pretty cool. Then when I came back home, my watch was able to automatically sync with my phone and upload my run to a sort of social media fitness app called Strava.

I can’t call from my specific watch, but I can see people experimenting with leaving their phones at home with the new Apple watch. I think the Apple watch also has more general appeal than Garmin watches because of its bigger ecosystem and etc.

7

My original top tech wishlist item was the Amazon Astro… and my invitation came due just in time for the holidays…before I went ahead with the purchase, I looked at the reviews more carefully and realized that it not only not that useful but can potentially hose the rest of your Echo and Ring devices…so the search continues…and clock is ticking.

The item that is not that dramatically techie but I am enjoying while nursing a chronic shoulder issue is the
Hyperice https://hyperice.com/products/hypervolt-go/

8

@BillG said:
This will be my 4th winter with these heated mittens.

What’s the temperature up there, Bill? We started the day at 34¬∞ F and now it’s -1¬∞ F and falling.

9

A few days ago it was -17F but the next 10 days has all +F forecast.

10

I’m curious to know the rest of these stories!

  • Did @bitflung get the Pine Time, and if so, what cool thing does he already have it doing?
  • Has Lil’bit crashed his drone yet?
  • Who (other than my own daughter, though not from me) got battery-powered clothing, and what type of items?
  • Where’s that Garmin watch review we’ve been waiting for, @aFloridian?
  • How’s your shoulder, @amitl and are you using the app with that massage gun?

… and now that the holiday season is behind us, what turned out to be the best tech gift you gave or received?

11

For the first time in a long time, no electronic gifts were exchanged. The closest item to tech was the acoustic guitar my son received (16th century tech).

12

@southpaw said:
I’m curious to know the rest of these stories!

  • Did @bitflung get the Pine Time, and if so, what cool thing does he already have it doing?
    I received the PineBuds Pro (open source wireless ear buds) instead of the PineTime watch. I’m equally enthused with this gift and have begun tinkering with the source code, but haven’t burned my changes into the ear buds just yet:
  • setup the build environment and successfully compiled the existing code without alterations
  • downloaded the factory default firmware from the buds and stored on my PC for future recovery when (not if) i do something that really degrades the performance
  • short term plan: realizing that i really like the “ambient mode” settings (works kinda like hearing aids, making voices around you easier to hear) but that it takes NINE taps on the touch sensor to get into this mode every single time you turn the buds on… i plan to alter the firmware to just startup in this preferred mode
  • long term plan: i’d like to write an android app to control settings like whether active noise cancellation (ANC) should be on/off, or if the buds ought to be in ambient mode, all from the notification pane in android rather than having to tap the buds themselves. i’m thinking it would be nice if certain apps always caused it to switch, e.g. listening to pandora in the middle of the day should be in ambient mode, while watching netflix on the weekend should be in ANC mode, that sort of thing.
  • unrealistic long term: oh boy i’d love to dabble in the ANC algorithms and perhaps write an autocalibration function to recognize the subtle periodic noises that come from the PCB itself, then eliminate those noises via ANC processes. would also be neat to use the ANC mics to detect things like heartbeat, footsteps, etc and see if a basic activity monitor could be possible without the more common sensors used for that task. mostly just nerdy-fun-stuff and not actually useful stuff :slight_smile:
  • Has Lil’bit crashed his drone yet?
  • not a REAL crash yet, but a few rough landings. he hasn’t had as much opportunity to fly it as we hoped. we went through some rough stuff (our dog had lung cancer and we said goodbye over the holidays) and some great stuff (we just adopted a rescue dog from Thailand!) and all sorts of weather stuff… anyway, i’m glad you asked because i think he’d love it if i charge the thing up and hand it to him when he gets out of school today!
  • also, on Saturday he was promoted to orange belt in karate (Kukyu) - he’s doing great there and i’m really proud of him. signing him up, he requested that i join with him… and i expect to promote to the same level in about a month

… and now that the holiday season is behind us, what turned out to be the best tech gift you gave or received?

  • not technically a holiday gift, but Mrs. Bit and I splurged on Google Pixel 6a’s for each other right around the holidays. so far we are very happy - they work much better on the current RW service than our older phones did… i;ll miss the moto-mods, especially the snap-on battery pack and the projector mod, but it’s really nice living with a more modern feature set!
13

Thanks for the update, @bitflung. I hope you’ll let us know what neat things you do with those buds.

downloaded the factory default firmware from the buds and stored on my PC for future recovery when (not if) i do something that really degrades the performance

This is the step I need to be better about remembering when I start tinkering with things. I usually get so wrapped up in what I’m working on that I don’t even think of backing up the latest stable version.

but that it takes NINE taps on the touch sensor to get into this mode every single time you turn the buds on… i plan to alter the firmware to just startup in this preferred mode
Oh, man. My Bose headset drives me crazy with this… they were very kind upgrade me to a set that has 3 options for noise cancellation - none, medium, high - because, apparently, noise cancellation can be too much of a good thing for me, and I get seasick-ish. But the upgraded, three-level headset defaults to high, so every time I wear them, I have to tappity-tap-tap my way to the settings to change it.

long term plan: i’d like to write an android app to control settings like whether active noise cancellation (ANC) should be on/off, or if the buds ought to be in ambient mode, all from the notification pane in android rather than having to tap the buds themselves. i’m thinking it would be nice if certain apps always caused it to switch, e.g. listening to pandora in the middle of the day should be in ambient mode, while watching netflix on the weekend should be in ANC mode, that sort of thing.

This reminds me of the automation you created for turning WiFi on/off for RW members, and also reminds me of something I tried (but failed) to set up… I’ll post a new topic about that, maybe someone can get me headed in the right direction.

14

@southpaw said:

  • How’s your shoulder, @amitl and are you using the app with that massage gun?

Thank you for asking! Shoulder is doing better…not so much because of the massage gun, but the PT exercises that were prescribed by the same person that recommended the massage gun. The massage gun does see some infrequent use but I would characterize it more in the amusement category than therapeutic. It feels great when you use it but I am unsure if it has actually provided any meaningful change or relaxation.