Inexpensive gadgets are great gift ideas

Once again the season is upon us, so here are some more of my inexpensive technology gift suggestions that will please any geek in your life.

Say it with a speaker

Nothing says it better than better sound. While we may have iPods, computer media centers and other devices that play our favorite songs, it’s for naught if the speakers or headsets that produce those sounds don’t measure up.

Of course there are the big-name speaker brands with which we’re all familiar, but there are some really great speaker systems out there that will blow you away when you see and hear them.

Do yourself a favor and check out the offerings from The Speaker Company. They have put together their own line of speakers, but they just don’t find something already assembled and slap their name on them.

They spec the whole thing out, finding the best loudspeaker companies that manufacture the needed components. Then they tweak the drivers and other electronic components, even design the enclosures.

The results yield high-end quality speakers at affordable prices. Check out their TST1 High Performance Tower Speakers for example. These 4-foot-tall speakers look like the ones costing thousands, sporting a beautiful black ash vinyl finish with inlaid glass tops.

They are magnetically shielded with tweeters, midrange cones and side-firing woofers. People will think you paid a fortune when they see them and hear their glorious sound. Only you will know you paid $199.98 for the pair.

www.thespeakercompany.com

Thumb your nose at hackers

There are lots of thumb drives out there you can get for next to nothing these days, but if security is high on someone’s mind, check out the IronKey.

This impressive-looking, brushed stainless-steel finished flash-memory device is available in 1 to 8 gigabytes of storage, and it protects what’s in there with military-strength encryption via a hardware encryption chip that scrambles the data so as to be completely unreadable without a password. And a hacker won’t get that either.

The built-in password manager application first locally encrypts with 256-bit AES using randomly generated keys encrypted with a SHA-256 hash of your device password, and then it’s doubly encrypted with 128-bit AES hardware encryption. After 10 incorrect password attempts, the encryption chip self-destructs, making the contents of the flash drive totally unreadable.

And if a physical attempt is made to get inside, the unit is filled with epoxy, so the internal chip would just be damaged, making it all worthless.

It’s even electron-shielded, so a scanning electron microscope can’t see inside the thing. In other words, your data inside is really, really safe. Works with Windows, Mac and Linux. $69.99 to $249.99.

www.thinkgeek.com

Desk cover a better way

You have a laptop, but your lap’s top may not be up to holding it. Check out Logitech’s Comfort Lapdesk for Notebooks.

Its four-layer heat-shielding design protects your delicate lap from overheating so you can work and play with your portable computer in comfort and style.

The Comfort’s soft, air-mesh fabric underneath its rigid surface fits snugly and feels really good on your legs without slipping. It looks really cool, to boot. And at $39.99, your wallet will feel great as well.

www.logitech.com

XCraig Crossman is a national newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. For more information, visit his Web site at www.computeramerica.com.

2008 McClatchy Tribune