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I finally got round to watching Monday’s episode of The Gadget Show and it’s got to have been the best episode of the series. A Christmas special, this episode reviewed the best gadgetry gift you can get for children, women and men. As you can imagine, I was in awe of all the gizmos that featured on this show and I thought I’d let you know of them in case you are stuck for ideas for the ideal Christmas present this year.

In the category for children the following gadgets were featured:

Pleo
A Part-robot, part-tamagochi, this pet dinosaur learns and grows with your interactions, becoming a unique creature in the process.
Price guide £249.99

Sakura the Remote Controlled Futuristic Female Robot
Dancing, answering questions and even keeping secrets – this robot is designed to be a girl’s best friend.
Price guide £49.99

Dr Who Dalek Sec Hybrid Voice Changer
Play at being one of the Doctor’s deadliest foes with this gruesome voice-altering mask.
Price guide £24.99

Squawkers McCaw The Parrot
A scarily lifelike animatronic parrot that belts out cheeky phrases, responds to over 40 words and even dances to your music.
Price guide £51.99

Tyco Rapid Assault
This RC pain-bringer unleashes a payload of 12 foam darts at targets up to 20 feet away.
Price guide £39.99

Digital Arts and Crafts Studio
A PC-compatible arts package for kids, complete with stylus and pad.
Price guide £39.99

The winner in this category was:

Smart Cycle
A TV-linked exercise bike that also teaches kids with its range of educational games.
Price guide £80

In the category for women the following gadgets were featured:

Perfect Skin Analyser
A space-age probe that gives you the skinny on your skin: moisture, oil and softness levels are displayed on its LCD panel.
Price guide £14.95

Pocket Surfer 2
A dinky clamshell device that delivers mobile web-surfing at scorching speeds. And there’s no contract to sign!
Price guide £175

Tefal Quick Cup
Drink enviro-chummy tea with this device, which boils no more water than you need – and delivers a cuppa in three seconds flat!
Price guide £49.99

Olympus 770 MJU
Crush, freeze, shock and waterproof, this might well be the toughest compact camera on the planet.
Price guide £230

Humax PVR 9200TB
Freeview’s answer to Sky+, this clever box lets you record 100 hours of TV shows onto its hard drive, as well as pause and rewind live telly.
Price guide £169

And the winner was:

eStarling 2.0 Wifi Photoframe
With Wi-Fi and its own email address, this super-smart photo frame can be sent snaps from anywhere in the world – and even link up to your Facebook account.
Price guide £199

The gadgets featured in the category for men were:

PicoZ Sky Challenger Battle Pack
Two radio controlled helicopters do battle with lasers. Shoot your opponent’s weak spot and he’s going down!
Price guide £49.95

Power Tour Guitar
Have a rock ‘n’ roll Christmas with this miniature axe, which lets you belt out hard rock classics like a poodle-haired metal god.
Price guide £24.95

Wireless Electric Skateboard
Too tired to ride a skateboard the traditional way? This motor-toting deck takes the hard work out of -boarding, and is controlled with a wireless remote.
Price guide £160

iRecord
Record TV shows and movies directly onto an iPod or USB device with this hub. No computer required!
Price guide £159.99

Cybex Squirrel Bike
Bob, weave and pull off outrageous stunts with this balance-based street tricycle.
Price guide £299

LG BH100 Dual Player
The world’s first dual format hi-def video player, capable of spinning both HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs and delivering pixel-packed razor-sharp pictures from both.
Price guide £850

Sony HDR-SR7
A dinky hi-def camcorder that stuffs its gloriously detailed pictures onto a 60GB hard disk drive.
Price guide £995

Sound Asleep Pillow
Let your iPod supply the lullaby with this MP3-friendly pillow complete with speaker tucked inside.
Price guide £20

The winner was:

My Sky
Ever stare out at the stars and wish you knew what you were looking at? This raygun-like device will tell you – just point it at your celestial body and pull the trigger!
Price guide £299

But the prestigious status of ultimate Christmas gadget this year was awarded to:

Apple iPhone
This year’s biggest gadget icon, the iPhone is a mould-busting touchscreen phone delivering an awesome web-surfing experience and multimedia nirvana.
Price guide £269 plus contract

I’ve got to say, I completely agree with that last choice. So go on… get shopping…. only 12 days left to Christmas!!

… you find yourself whistling the tune of “Pop goes the weasel” around the house rather than “Beautiful girls”

… you know more about each character in Teletubbies than in Ugly Betty

… you start looking around for Buy One Get One Free offers on batteries

… you find it hard to speak in full sentences

… you can be in a million places at once

… your idea of a sleep in is waking up at 8am

… you get eyes in the back of your head

… and last but most importantly, you discover your parents were right!

On The Gadget Show on Monday night Suzi Perry and gang launched a campaign to get to the bottom of actual broadband speeds that customers are getting against what they are paying for. If you’ve noticed most service providers say that you can get up to 8Mb or up to 10 Mb bandwidth but that does not mean that you are actually getting that every time (or for that matter any time).

As Suzi explained it’s like driving on a 5 lane motorway – you can legally drive up to 70mph… there are the magic words again. But if it’s a bank holiday weekend and you are on the motorway at 5pm on a Friday evening, you’re going to find traffic and although you can go up to 70mph you’ll find yourself more at 40-50 mph. This is what happens when you connect to the internet – the bandwidth is the motorway and the traffic is, well, just that, other users. If this happens once in a while it’s understandable but if there is constant traffic on your ’super information highway’ then either they need to increase the lanes or charge you less for not providing you with the potential to use the 8/10 Mb bandwidth that they promised.

If you want to take part in this campaign and test out your speeds The Gadget Show have set up a page for you to do this and then to email them your findings so that they can use this to apply pressure on our internet service providers to give their consumers a better deal. Visit http://gadgetshow.five.tv/ and try it out for yourself.

I’m trying to get my British passport sorted out but before I can apply for one I need to take a test – to see if I qualify in my “Britishness” before I can claim to be a British citizen.

I’ve been reading through the handbook “Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship” which is the official test book and study guide – written by the Home Office Life in the UK Advisory Group, the people who set the citizenship test. I need to know facts like how many Chinese are living in the UK, how many children go on to pursue further education, where Santa Claus (oops Father Christmas) comes from, in fact I’m surprised I don’t have to memorise the recipe for fish’n'chips!!

I just wonder how much of what I need to know is relevant to my becoming a “Brit” – is this stuff that all Brits know?? Will it help me better converse with another fellow citizen if I know these facts? Evidently not, as we saw on “Are you smarter than a 10 year old” last night, where a young British woman was not even aware of how many countries make up Great Britain or that Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland. Is this test perhaps going to make me more “Brit” than the British? In which case it really will not help me blend in any more – in fact I will stand out like a sore thumb. You know what Sky One should do? Make a show called “Are you smarter than a foreigner” – only British citizens can take part and all the questions will be selected from the “Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship” handbook. Now that would be an interesting show…

I heard about Second Life – the internet based virtual world – quite a while back and so decided to give it a go a few months ago. This is like nothing I have ever seen on the internet. It’s essentially a role playing online “game”. I say “game” in inverted commas because although you play along with your role it’s not a game in the traditional sense, or in other words there’s no real winners and losers. It’s just living your life on the internet, meeting other people, making money, spending it and so on. But it has taken the online world by storm.

I logged onto the main site secondlife.com where I registered my details and downloaded the software I needed. Once I had installed the program I logged on and found myself transported to the Orientation Island within Second Life (SL). This is were all the “newbs”, a term of endearment for new users of SL, first arrive and begin familiarising themselves with the environment. You are given a basic male/female body, which you can then customise the way you please. You’re also given the standard “newb” clothes but you can always buy new ones within SL or hit the freebie stores and pick up some bargains. On Orientation Island you find quite a few regular SLers who hang out waiting for the newbs to arrive so that they may help them in what can be a rather daunting arrival into the virtual world.

I bumped into a girl who called herself Cottyeto from the East Coast of USA, and she taught me how to “pimp” myself up. My Second Life avatar is a rock-indie chick who is an intelligence analyst, speaks 5 languages, and is the drummer of her own rock band!! Hey, it’s MY second life ok! When you first enter SL, you are given certain standard animations… the standard robotic walk, the standard pose to sit down, the standard pose to stand waiting… but in SL you can, if you’re so inclined code your own animations or hunt for some free ones. MY SL buddy Cottyeto gave me a few animations she had coded and now I walk like I’m on the catwalk,I stand with one hand stylishly resting on my hip and I twirl everytime someone looks like they are “checking me out”

What I found most amazing about SL is the ease with which you can meet all sorts of people in this world. Never in a million years did I think I’d be having a detailed conversation with someone from Japan and someone from America at the same time. For some reason I tend to bump into more Japanese and Americans on SL than any other nationality. The Japanese are always just about to go to sleep – it’s late at night for them when I log on and the Americans are also just about to sleep as it’s still yesterday for them! It’s weird, weird, weird!! But exciting… and all the big multinational corporations have caught on to how SL can be a whole new platform from which to market themselves which is why huge companies like Cisco are already on SL using it as a means of communicating to their customers.

I haven’t used SL too much recently… my first life is keeping me busy enough without my having to worry about a second one. But as soon as I have some time on my hands I intend to explore it further. I suggest you do too if you haven’t already. It definitely is an eye opener. And if you do get yourself onto Second Life let me know and I’ll look you up the next time I’m there.

She makes the rest of us look bad!! Katie Holmes, mother to a one year old baby and wife to one of Hollywood’s most successful actors, with a successful acting career of her own, completed the 26.2 mile New York Marathon in 5 hours 29 minutes and 58 seconds. She then posed for photos (looking as glam as ever) and then rushed home to freshen up so that she could make it to the premiere of her husband’s movie “Lions for Lambs”. Well done Katie! Tabloids across the world are casting a suspicious eye over how she managed to complete the race without looking like a drowned rat. Perhaps she trained?? Perhaps she is fit?? Why is all that so hard to believe? Just like it was so hard to believe that she was pregnant – but she had Suri didn’t she? So it wasn’t the huge conspiracy that the tabloids were making it out to be. Is it so hard for us to accept that there can be a person out there who is successful, glamorous, fit, a loving mum, a caring wife??

After all, I’m not that different from Katie. I’ve got a 6 month old baby, I ran the 5km Race for Life (ok walked it but still!) and I’m sure I could put on a bit of lippie and manage to look presentable if Mik offered to take me to see “Lion for Lambs”. You know what, I’m a scaled down version of Katie Holmes

I must admit I had forgotten about Boyz II Men until I watched X Factor on Saturday where they made a special appearance. And the memories came flooding back when I heard them perform ‘End Of The Road’. What a brilliant group. The songs, the voices, the melodies – you can’t fault these lads. They are, and always will be my favourite ‘boy band’ if they can even be categorised in that way.

The good news is that they are back with their new CD, Motown: A Journey Through Hitsville USA. The album is to be released on 13 November and contains Motown favorites such as, “Just My Imagination” (The Temptations), “Ain’t Nothin’ Like The Real Thing” and “Mercy Mercy Me” (Marvin Gaye), “Tracks Of My Tears” (Smokey Robinson) and “Got To Be There” (Jackson 5). Also included will be a cappella versions of Stevie Wonders’ “Ribbon In The Sky” and their own “End Of The Road”.

Incidentally, I recently came across a video on YouTube of a group called Naturally Seven. They were on the Paris Metro singing an a capella version of “In The Air Tonight” and if anyone comes close to being as talented as Boyz II Men it would have to be them. Until they get discovered and enter the charts, I’ll be happy with a copy of Motown: A Journey Through Hitsville USA. Is anyone making a note of this?? After all, Christmas is only round the corner…

I didn’t realise that X Factor was down to the final 9 until I tuned in to ITV last night to see the live show where Dermot O’Leary announced that the youngest contestant, Emily Nakanda, had withdrawn from the competition. It turns out that a video showing Emily allegedly attacking a teenage girl had emerged and, following this, Emily’s family took the decision to withdraw her from the show. Earlier in the week, another video emerged of Emily with her friends, laughing at and threatening a teenager. One of the group was carrying what appeared to be a weapon.

I was shocked, even horrified, to learn about this side of Emily. Seeing her on X Factor, I imagined her to be a timid, shy little teenager who probably stayed at home most evenings singing songs in her bedroom, dreaming of a life as a pop star. I guess I’m not that good a judge of character. Her mother said that although Emily regrets her actions, there was no way her behaviour could be excused. Well done mum! It’s become more and more common for parents these days to justify their children’s actions no matter what they have done. That’s why they become even more notorious living under the belief (false or otherwise) that no one can touch them. But what Emily’s family have done is commendable. Let’s hope she will learn from this and change her ways.

Heroes star Hayden Panettiere has been in the news recently, very much living up to the name of the show that brought her into the public eye. She tried to intercept a dolphin hunt by fisherman in Japan, showing her support for animal’s rights. With five other activists, Hayden paddled out on her surfboard to a cove in the town of Taiji in southwestern Japan on Tuesday to interfere with the annual hunt.

According to People magazine, they were intercepted on Tuesday by fishermen on a boat who told them to leave and prodded them with a pole. They were eventually forced back to shore, unable to prevent the hunt. Video footage that captured this heroic feat shows Hayden breaking down in tears as she describes what happened. “This baby stuck its head out and kind of looked as us, and the thought that the baby is no longer with us is very difficult,” she said.

Apparently, some 14,000 dolphins are killed for food in Japan every year. Local fishermen say hunting them is a Japanese custom, and outsiders have no business interfering with it. What I want to know is when will Hayden and her troop of activists gallop on a horse into a farm in Surrey to try to protect the chicken from their ill fated destiny? Not quite as glamorous as surfboarding in your bikini off the shores of Japan, I’m sure her agent would point out…