Tech Gift Ideas Every Valentine Will Love

foreign [Music] I'm Jason Bitner CEO of triple helix Corporation and Welcome to our Helix Insider podcast I'm joined today in studio with my senior web developer Andy Webster and my other senior web developer Sam Sheldon hi everybody today we're going to talk about uh something near and dear to our hearts is we're very close to Valentine's Day and we wanted to talk about some tech gifts that you can get for your resident Tech geek in your life and there's some ideas that we have that would make some suitable gifts so uh Sam why don't we start with you uh you were going to tell us about uh your idea yeah so the first thing that I think of whenever I think of gifts for Tech Geeks is always raspberry pies because you can't go wrong with Raspberry Pi they're little little tiny computers you know probably a little bit about the size of a phone I'd say um and you the things you can do with a Raspberry Pi you can do pretty much anything you can imagine with them there you can make little desktop

computers out of them you can use them for you know a home media server if you're you know web developers like we are I know I've used mine for setting up a little web development machine on my home network um if you're a little bit more Hardware geeky you can get you know an external board and connect up you know you can make your own circuit boards and you know lots of cool projects you can do with them and the great thing about that also is that they're pretty appropriate for basically any age if you're old enough to use a computer you can probably get something out of a Raspberry Pi so they're a fully self-contained computer right and I understand they're really cheap like they're only like 30 or 40 dollars right oh I think they're a little more expensive than that I haven't checked recently I know there's been you know supply issues you I know they're a little hard to get right now but yeah they're a self-contained computer and I think that the official Raspberry Pi you know organization

actually has kits that you can use to put your Raspberry Pi board into basically a little keyboard that you can bring around and hook up to a monitor so really good yeah they're they're not especially powerful you're not going to be running you know you're not going to be running the latest games on these or anything but if all you want to do is browse the web or have a media server to put all your movies on or things like that they're really going to be good yeah I mean I I used to run a Minecraft server off of mine they're they're powerful enough and that was the Raspberry Pi 2. I think they're up to Raspberry Pi 4 now yeah so and they've got like uh if I recall I think they've got eight some of them have eight gigs of ram in them now so you can you could do quite a bit yeah I mean I've probably my personal uses for all will be a Minecraft server be like a personal media so while we're talking about Raspberry Pi you know we refer to these devices at a type of a certain class of computing

called embedded computers or embedded hardware and it reminds me of these other types of computers called Arduino boards so like unlike a Raspberry Pi which is like a full up server and you can do anything with it an Arduino board is a little bit sort of like a dove board in that it doesn't have like an operating system it has an embedded operating system and has its own programming language a little similar to C C sharp and what you do with Arduino boards is more sensor based so if you want to like put a temperature sensor on a board and then have it outside so it can read the temperature or if you want to send signals from it they actually have all of these pins that you hook things up to the Arduino board and because it's very uh small and lightweight small footprint you can do a lot of interesting programming um exercises with this so if you're if you're Tech geek in your life actually loves to program and it loves to like Tinker with like hardware and stuff that that's a really good

gift the other thing about Arduino is there's literally thousands of what we call daughter boards that actually go on top of them that extend the functionality and and that could be anything from motor controllers to for sensor Suites because you only have so many inputs on the main board so you add these extra boards that give you lots of additional sensors so it's a really great gift for someone who likes to Tinker with electronics um let's take a little shift uh Andy why don't we talk a little bit about uh the drones and the cameras you were talking about earlier yeah so um I mean drones that's a uh more expensive but also a good gift they do make less expensive drones now too that you can just kind of um hook a camera to and uh fly around take aerial shots pretty cool for um if you have somebody who likes photography you can get some very unique shots with the Drone um you mentioned you can get it drone to follow you too right yeah some of them are um high-tech ones actually people

they'll like they'll do they'll track you so you could bring it with you while you're walking or running or something like that and um you know take some epic shots and put some epic music to it or something but um yeah you can get pretty good landscape Thoughts with them too yeah you can go way up high and get angles you wouldn't ordinarily get without like a plane that reminds me of like the GoPro cameras too right I mean like not necessarily drone based but I mean like those people that do all that action adventure stuff they strap a camera to themselves or or to maybe their pet or something like that and they they see the the video footage from a different perspective there might that reminds me for some reason of uh people who are just curious where does their cat go during the day so they put a GPS tracker collar on the cat curious in us um speaking of curious another interesting idea is that security cameras I mean they're for your safety per se um but for people like me sometimes

I just want to like see what's going on outside middle of the night or um or set them up pointing at um you know some place where animals usually run out of the middle of the night I for the Curious people Watchers in us we uh we're not creepy we just we just like to know what's going on the camera that I'm in it's less specifically techy but game cameras that you can mount on trees oh yeah I live out in the middle of nowhere so we actually got that for Christmas was a game camera that we can set up somewhere to watch see what see the deer go by or whatever other Critters might be out in our field that's a really good idea yeah my dad my dad has one of those he uh he really likes them it's it's interesting to see like what lives in my backyard actually funny story about that he told me he saw a bobcat never knew I had bobcats in my my parents home growing up but apparently we do so I feel I would be remiss if I didn't actually address um the video game and the gamers in us and and our

friends um there is actually one very specific really cool um gaming platform called a steam deck so if anyone has heard of the steam platform which is basically a video game a distributor uh platform for all things video games that company made its own uh portable um gaming platform called a steam deck so if you're familiar with like a Nintendo switch this is like that but it's actually quite big uh got a very beautiful screen on it and um it actually runs Arch Linux which is another reason we like it because um we're very fond of Linux and those operating systems but if you've got this theme deck and you're tied into your steam account you can actually add um the Steam games in your library and play them portable on the device the only caveat I'll throw out there is that steam deck is fairly new and it's not 100 compatible with like all the games steam offers so what you do when you look at a game on Steam you actually look for verified for steam deck and if it's got the little symbol

verified for steam deck you know you're good to play it on there and when I first got it um I had Portal 2 which I had not played yet and I fired it up on my steam deck and I mean I lost myself in Portal land for like a good few hours I mean it's an amazing platform man yeah I'm I'm jealous of people who have one of those I uh you know I use Steam for most of my games now um and uh it's probably the only portable device I would I would buy they're hard to find now because they're so popular but I mean there's a bit of a wait but I got mine on opening day because I put in the pre-order and you know pre-orders were opened up like you know six months or a year before it was released but once those came through I was able to get it and it's um yeah if you could find one it's a really awesome gift for your loved one yeah and I think from you know the tech nerd perspective as well there's it's a pretty powerful machine and I think there's been people working on you know customizing it using

it for things other than games oh yeah yeah as soon as a powerful machine handheld machine comes out you know that people are going to be trying to do everything with it at its base level it is just a Linux computer and you can run it as such foreign I've heard that so while we're on the topic of other Tech gifts Sam talk to us about um some of the tech gifts you've given to your loved ones you were mentioning I think monitors the other day yeah so honestly I think I've gotten more mileage out of giving just good monitors as gifts than any other tech gift because I've yet to meet a technique who doesn't want another monitor it doesn't matter how many they already have we all want more monitors oh yeah absolutely you know decent big monitor just pretty standard something that handles 1920 by 1080 resolution has decent color good brightness I've never met anyone who would turn that down I wouldn't what do you think about these new monitors that are really really wide screen in their curve

then they're sort of like give you like a big effective depth what do you think of those oh gosh I I have never used one of those I kind of want to it's one of those things where I'm interested but I don't fully understand it but I want to so you need to drop handset Mike I think I I've I've seen Pedros I've seen pictures of his monitor and it's it's huge it takes up this entire desk there's not room on my desk maybe monitor stands get a good you know monitor stand for your loved one right I mean the Simplicity of that is you only need one plug [Laughter] how about you Andy what other Tech gifts are you interested in in giving out oh probably like portable charging Banks anybody can use those even at home it's not even a travel thing who knows that moment when your phone's about to die and the wall plug is like all the way across the room what if I had it I was thinking of the charging bank right now or power that's an also that's a that's a more practical solution this is just like everyday

life like oh man my battery's about to die it's a good thing I have this portable charging Bank just ready to go well I find them handy for when the power actually does go out like you know we've thankfully Connecticut is a fairly stable power and whatnot but every little once in a while and who where we are in Windsor we do lose power for a few hours and um it can be really your phone's on low charge so having affordable bank all charged up ready to go is actually pretty cool for that yeah a lot of those things are good for like for a phone like a lot of them are good for like two and a half charges these days so pretty there's some pretty good ones out there you were talking about keyboards too oh yeah always great idea good mouse and keyboard I like wire I prefer like a wireless keyboard those are like pretty amazing this particular one that I have is like a Logitech and you can switch between like three different computers so um oh what no way what you can switch between yeah it's

got like a little thing right here it's got a one two three switch I don't know if that's backwards in this camera but um yeah it's um so I can switch both my mouse and keyboard so if you're loved one uses multiple computers it's like a really nice really nice thing and they make them that is really cool so you get one keyboard and mouse and actually control multiple machines but it's just one set and you just flip a button and it flips to the other machine yeah I I would not want to have three keyboards on my desk so something like this is a lifesaver to that is a lot of us techners really really picky about our keyboards because I I know I'm a picky person about my keyboards if it's too clicky if it's not clicky enough is it mechanical membrane and he likes Wireless but I like wired true yeah some people don't like wireless keyboards this one is really good responsive I've never had a problem with it that's a really good idea I wouldn't have thought of keyboards for it for that but you're

right I mean some of them are more advanced ones could be really handy that's awesome or if you don't know just write in the card I want to get you a really fancy keyboard please show me the way oh man well this has been fun guys and so I think that's all the time we have today so I wanted to thank my two uh colleagues Andy Webster and Sam Sheldon my senior developers on our team and thanks for all the great ideas and until next time see you around everybody [Music] foreign [Music]