I always have a hard time coming up with a Christmas list to give to friends and family. That’s partially because there isn’t too much I actually want at any given time and partially because I buy most things I want throughout the year.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been looking for some ideas of what to put on your wishlist. And aside from the obvious suggestion — Initial Charge merch — I have a handful of others that I’d like to share.

A Compact USB Charger

I have a bit of an obsession with USB chargers. There just seems to always be a new one that’s slightly smaller and with more power output than the ones I currently have.

I’m a massive fan of Anker’s USB chargers and I have a couple on my wishlist this year:

Anker 715 Charger (Nano II 65W) — it offers a single USB-C port that can provide up to 65W of power. It has foldable plugs and is significantly more compact than what you’ll get from just about any device maker. I have their slightly smaller 30W version, but with my recently acquired Framework laptop, I want something that offers more power output.

Anker 523 Charger (Nano 3, 47W) — a two-port USB-C charger that can output 45W when charging a single device or 47W when using both ports. I have the 40W version of this and absolutely love it, but the plugs on that one aren’t foldable and it obviously outputs less power.

A Great Game Controller

Video games are fun. And if you want to play video games, you should get yourself a proper controller. I own a bunch, but there are two that I recommend to everyone that asks.

Backbone One — one of those fancy retractable controllers that you slap on your phone to turn it into a handheld console. I have a few others like it, but always end up coming back to the Backbone. It’s comfortable to use, is available in a slick PlayStation variant, and they offer a carrying case. My only wish is for them to swap the d-pad and analog stick on the PlayStation Edition to match Sony’s controllers.

8BitDo Pro 2 — sometimes you just want to sit back on the couch and play a little Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 in RetroArch on your Apple TV. But if you want to make that happen, you’re going to need a Bluetooth controller. This one from 8BitDo is what you should get.

A Nostalgic Camera

I had a realization recently that I’m just not taking enough photos. How do I fix that? With a new hobby, of course. This year I’ve added the Kodak Ektar H35N to my Christmas list. It’s a super cool half frame film camera. It uses standard 35mm film, but each photo only takes up half the frame of a normal 35mm camera. This means you can get twice as many photos per roll.

I don’t expect the photos that I take with this camera to be as crisp as what I get with my iPhone, but that’s not the point. I’ll get to toy around with a nifty little gadget, explore the world of film stock, teach my kids about film photography, and capture memories along the way with a retro style.

An Excellent Wireless Charger

Who has time to connect cables to their devices to charge them? It’s so much easier to slowly slide your phone around while watching an LED, waiting for it to illuminate, indicating that you’ve found the sweet spot on your wireless charger.

You still have that experience with the Nomad Base Station, but it does feature magnets to help align iPhones with MagSafe. And you don’t have to mess about with USB cables that fall behind your nightstand because you bumped the alarm clock that was holding it in place.

The Nomad Base Station has three wireless charging coils on top and two USB ports on the rear — one A and one C — which you can use to top-off devices that don’t have wireless charging support.

And if you’re the kind of guy that has an Apple Watch. Nomad has an Apple Watch Edition of the Base Station that includes an integrated Apple Watch charger.

A Retro Gaming Handheld

Maybe you don’t want to use your phone as a handheld console. Perhaps because you’re tight on storage and just don’t have the room for all those rom files. Or maybe you feel too restricted by Apple’s asinine rules around JIT and emulators in the App Store.

If you have an iPhone and want to emulate systems beyond the PSP and PlayStation, you’ll probably start looking at dedicated gaming handhelds. I’ve been a fan of Retroid’s offerings for a couple of years and if I was buying one today, I’d end up with either the Retroid Pocket Mini or the Retroid Pocket 5.

These two devices offer nearly identical performance — although, the Retroid Pocket 5 has a bit more memory. The largest differences are the display and the physical size of the unit.

The Retroid Pocket Mini has a 3.7-inch display with a 4:3 aspect ratio and is, as the name implies, smaller than the Retroid Pocket 5. The larger of the two has a 5.5-inch display with a 16:9 aspect ratio.

I think I would lean toward the Retroid Pocket Mini. If only because the vast majority of games I want to play are from the GameCube and PlayStation 2 era where a 4:3 display would be more fitting. But I could see myself settling on the Retroid Pocket 5 since the price difference is negligible — only $20 — and the larger display could come in handy if I wanted to use it for watching video or on the off-chance I end up playing more modern games on it.

A Dedicated Music Player

The iPod Click Wheel Games Preservation Project has had the iPod on my mind a lot more lately. Phase is one of the best games of all time and that’s not a joke. As far as rhythm games go, there’s not another one that has brought me as much joy as Phase has. The ability to play with music from your own library is dope.

I have a few iPods, all purchased from Elite Obsolete Electronics. And unless you have a specific model that you’re nostalgic for, I’d recommend either the third generation iPod nano because of it’s minuscule size or the fifth generation iPod because of it’s impressive feature set and the ability to modify it for additional storage and battery capacity.

You get yourself one of these, install some Click Wheel games (Phase, seriously), setup a virtual machine to install an old version of iTunes, and sync over some music. You won’t regret it.

I was a huge fan of the iPod click wheel games. Especially Phase, which happens to be one of the best games of all time.

The ability to play a Guitar Hero-style rhythm game with your own music is absolutely incredible. And I’m so happy that I get to relive that now.

Update 10/4/25: The project has managed to collect the full list of available iPod Click Wheel games. You can grab the latest release to install them.

➝ Source: github.com

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for present-day Apple, there’s still a lot to be excited about in the world of technology. The following is an unordered list of things that I’ve been excited about recently. If you have any thoughts about the following items or have some tech that you’ve been excited about, I’d love to hear from you.

Old MacBooks

I recently purchased two 2015 11-inch MacBook Airs — one for myself and one for my wife. They can run up to macOS Monterey, which is still supported by Apple and by the vast majority of application developers. And if you’re willing to deal with potential pain points, you can use OpenCore Legacy Patcher to install macOS Sonoma on the machines as well.

I have Sonoma running on mine and it runs like a champ. Other than the non-retina display and lack of USB-C ports, these machines feel surprisingly modern.

Old MacBooks are also very easy to upgrade. In addition to the 2015 MacBooks that I recently purchased, I have a couple of older 2011 models that I’ve been toying with as well. The battery and storage has been a breeze to upgrade on these machines. I’ve put brand new batteries and 500GB SSDs in both and completed the tasks in less than ten minutes each.

Linux

An entire operating system, complete with its own selection of applications and features to explore. I’ve been doing so primarily through virtual machines on my work laptop, but I plan to dual boot Sonoma and Ubuntu 24.04 on my 11-inch MacBook Air now that this new long term support release is available.

The most interesting thing about Linux to me is the myriad of windowing managers. I can’t say its necessarily better than what we have on macOS, but it has plenty of innovative ideas that has me working a bit differently — using multiple virtual desktops never clicked with me on macOS like it has in Linux.

Self-hosting

There isn’t much that excites me more than being able to eliminate my reliance on a service controlled by someone else. I have three servers where I run various applications from my home office alongside a Linode and SiteGround account where I run services as well.

Plex and Mastodon likely get the most use from me, but I’m also a huge fan of Invidious, Miniflux, and Wallabag.

I’d like to self-host even more and should be doing so soon. I’m waiting on the arrival of an Umbrel Home. It should be here in the next few weeks. I have Umbrel running on an old Mac mini now, but it seems to bog down quite a bit when I have more than a few applications running on it. I expect the Umbrel Home should handle things a bit better.

Emulation Handhelds

I have a Retroid Pocket 2+ and a Retroid Pocket 3. Both of which are excellent devices for what they are, but I’d love to have something that features a bit more horsepower for PlayStation 2 and GameCube emulation.

I’ve been hemming and hawing over whether I want to get myself an Ayn Odin 2 or a Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. I believe both of them would be able to run the games I’m interested in, so it’s just a matter of which form factor is preferable to me.

I just love the idea of having a single device that can run all of the games from my childhood.

Emulation on the App Store

Apple updated their App Store guidelines earlier this month to allow for retro game emulators in the App Store. It’s still very early days and Delta appears to be the clear standout. It supports Nintendo systems up to Nintendo 64 and Nintendo DS.

I’m still using AltStore for now, though. Delta is a great emulator, but it just doesn’t compare to RetroArch in terms of the number of systems supported. I expect RetroArch will eventually make its way into the App Store, but that will take some time. I’m sure there are some changes that will need to be made to the app to fully come into compliance with Apple’s guidelines.

I’m okay using AltStore for now, but I’m excited about a future where I won’t have to resort to hacks in order to run this type of software on my own device.

PC Building

I built a gaming PC last fall, with the goal of having it run Steam as a headless home server. I’m using one of these inexpensive display emulators and interacting with the system entirely through Steam Link and VNC — using Screens. With this setup I can play any PC game I’d like and emulate more powerful systems from any device in the house — most often my iPhone and the living room Apple TV.

For anyone curious, here are the parts I used for the system:

• AMD Ryzen 5600 Processor
• AMD Radeon RX 7600 Graphics Card
• 32GB of Crucial DDR4 3200 Memory
• ASRock B550M-ITX/AC Motherboard
• 2TB Crucial NVMe Solid State Drive
• 4TB Samsung SATA Solid State Drive
• Fractal Terra Mini-ITX Case
• Noctua NH-L9x65 CPU Cooler
• Corsair SF750 Power Supply

It’s not the most powerful thing in the world, but it’s more than capable of playing everything I’ve thrown at it. And since I’m streaming everything over Steam Link, I’m not all that concerned about playing anything at high resolutions — 720p or 1080p are more than sufficient for my needs.

But with this project, I’ve started paying attention to the world of PC hardware again. Primarily through YouTube channels like Gamers Nexus, JayzTwoCents, optimum, ozTalksHW, and more. This is an area of tech that I haven’t really paid attention to since the early 2000s. And, boy, does it feel fresh and exciting in comparison to Apple hardware.

Steam Link

How amazing is it that you can just play games from your PC on all of your devices? I can have Skate 3 running in RPCS3 on a computer in my home office and use my iPhone as a display and a Backbone One as the controller. Or I can use the television in my living room paired with an Apple TV and an 8BitDo Pro 2 controller.

Steam Link is to video games as Plex is to movies and TV shows.

There are definitely times when the bandwidth just isn’t there, but most of the time everything works smoothly. And I’m sure it will get even better if I actually work on running ethernet to all of our Apple TVs — a project that never seems to receive the priority necessary to accomplish.

iPods

I recently purchased an iPod from Elite Obsolete Electronics. It was a 5.5-generation model that I paid to have modded with a 128GB microSD card and a brand new face plate, backplate, and click wheel.

I’ve since toyed around with just about every feature the device has to offer. I’ve added Click Wheel games, played around with the Notes feature, setup a preset in Handbrake to convert video to a compatible format, and it’s been a blast all along the way.

There’s something nice about using an offline device. Something that, by its very nature, only has the content that’s on it right now. If I want something new, I have to connect it to a computer and sync. It allows me to be a bit more intentional about the content I’m consuming.

Currently, the iPod is my primary method for podcast and audiobook listening. Huffduffer is a great tool that I’ve been getting a lot of use out of for adding random audio files to the iPod.

I’ve also been using the iPod for the majority of my YouTube viewing. I download the videos with my Invidious instance, convert them with the aforementioned Handbrake preset, and then add them to the Apple Music app for syncing — I’ve found it to be a bit easier to add them to the Apple Music app as music videos rather than adding them to the TV app.

They’ve finally discontinued the last iPod. It’s the end of an era.

Although I haven’t used an iPod regularly since I bought an iPhone in 2007, I still have an incredible affinity for it. I gifted an iPod touch to my father-in-law, which was his first introduction to personal computing. And the fifth-generation iPod is one of the best gadgets of all time.

I used an iPod to listen to my favorite bands in high school. I spent thousands of hours listening to podcasts on an iPod. And before the Apple TV was released, I used an iPod to power the living room TV in my first apartment — for TV shows, movies, and video podcasts.

It’s a shame there isn’t enough of a market for it anymore.

➝ Source: apple.com

Riccardo Mori recently acquired a third-generation iPod Shuffle and shared his thoughts on the minuscule music player. The device was a drastic change from previous iPods. Lacking controls on the unit itself, it relied on VoiceOver and the included headphones’ in-line controls.

This iteration of the iPod Shuffle was not well-received and Apple brought the on-device controls back in the following model. But reflecting on the third-generation iPod Shuffle today, I’m left wondering how long it will take for the AirPods to gain a little more independence. What if they featured a small amount of flash storage that could be automatically filled with music or the latest episode of your favorite podcast?

As you may have heard, Apple quietly discontinued the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle yesterday. The move wasn’t done alongside a press release or a statement, Instead, Apple simply removed the items from their online store. And people noticed. The news was later confirmed by Business Insider, who received confirmation from Apple that the Nano and Shuffle were, indeed, discontinued.

The Nano and Shuffle will still be available in some retail stores while supplies last, but this news leaves the iPod Touch as the only “iPod” branded product in Apple’s lineup. You’ll get more storage for your money with the iPod Touch today, though. Apple has increased storage capacities on the two models — 32GB for $199 and 128GB for $299.

The first-generation iPod Nano was the first Apple product I ever owned. I received it as a Christmas gift in 2005 and it marked a turning point in my computing life. Prior to owning the iPod, I was a dedicated PC enthusiast. I was enthralled by graphics cards, motherboards, processors, and all other forms of computer components. All I wanted to do was build computers and set them up. But the iPod changed that.

The iPod Nano acted as the halo product that everyone claimed it to be. From the moment I connected the iPod Nano to my PC and configured it in iTunes, I was hooked. I had never interacted with a device that was so easy to use and fun to manage. Nothing felt like a chore. Once I had my sync settings just right, I could connect the iPod once a day and all of my new music and podcasts would automatically transfer. It was like magic.

The iPod Nano allowed me to dip my toes in the water before jumping in the following year by purchasing a MacBook for college. If it wasn’t for the iPod Nano, I might never have fallen in love with Apple design aesthetics and acquired a dozen or so Apple devices over the past twelve years.

I can imagine my story is no different from millions of others who first realized how great computing devices could be when they purchased an iPod. But it’s time to put the Nano and Shuffle out to pasture. The smartphone, being The One Device that it is, has completely obliterated the dedicated music player market. The Nano and Shuffle served their roles well, but there’s no reason to sell a single-purpose device when the iPhone can do everything the iPod could, and more.

Pour one out for two of the best halo products Apple ever had.

My father-in-law, Bob, has absolutely no interest in traditional computers. There’s been one in his home for nearly fifteen years, but after several failed attempts at learning how to use it, he gave up entirely. His job never required him to use one and he was fine with that — he’d much rather pick up a phone and call someone or grab a book off the shelf than bother with a computer.

Things have changed over the past couple of years, though. He’s now retired and doesn’t get that daily dose of socialization that he become accustomed to over the thirty-five or so years that he worked. He spends most of days doing yard work or various home projects.

When the weather started getting cold this year — and the amount of time spent on yard work diminished — he began to express interest in new forms of communication. Everyone’s so busy these days that they don’t have as much time to pick up the phone and talk with him like they used to. Text-based messaging would be ideal, but again, he has absolutely no interest in using a traditional computer.

Bob hasn’t been quite so hesitant about touch-based interfaces, though. There’s been a handful of times that my wife would sit down with him and they’d tap their way through her iPhone — taking photographs, changing the station in Pandora, sending messages, and initiating FaceTime calls with family members that live out of town. He needed some coaching, but he was able to use the device without too much trouble. And most importantly, the use of direct input methods made the experience much less intimidating to him.

Another one of the hobbies that he’s spent time on since retirement is photography. He doesn’t have an expensive or complicated camera by any means, just an old, digital point-and-shoot. But he loves taking pictures of the wildlife in his backyard — the fox that routinely patrols the neighborhood, the deer that occasionally come off the hill, and the bears that he’s able to spy out the kitchen window. He loves taking pictures and sharing them with anyone who’ll look at them.

The problem with the sharing aspect of his hobby is that, without the use of a computer, he doesn’t have a good way of sending these photos to anyone. If he wants to show someone the fox or how many deer were in the yard yesterday, he has to physically show them the photo on his camera’s display or print them out at the local pharmacy. It’s less than ideal.

Hopefully this will all change next week. My wife, her sister, and I have pooled our money and will be giving him an iPod touch for Christmas this year. The iPod touch seems like the perfect device for introducing computing to his life. It’s pocketable, inexpensive, doesn’t require a monthly service fee like an iPhone, and replaces an existing device for him — his camera.

But we aren’t simply giving him an iPod touch and expecting him to figure it all out on his own. The device is going to be configured for him. Nearly every app on the iPod touch will be hidden inside of a folder on the second Home Screen. The first page of that folder will have nothing but the Settings app in it — making it difficult to find apps he hasn’t learned about yet by stashing them in subsequent pages. The first Home Screen will be completely blank with just two apps in the Dock — Photos and Camera.

Because the iPod touch is going to be pitched to him as a replacement for his camera, Photos and Camera are the first two applications that we will teach him to use. With these he’ll be able to take photos, record video, and share them over iCloud. iOS’s native iCloud Photo Sharing is already my family’s preferred method of sharing photos so he’ll also have access to years worth of photographs by my wife, her sister, and myself that he can like and comment on.

Once he’s mastered the features within these two applications we will slowly start introducing more apps into his Dock and Home Screen. We’ll start with Messages and move on to Weather, Calculator, Google’s PhotoScan, and anything else that he might be interested in.

Even if he never ends up moving past the Camera and Photos apps, it will still be a huge improvement over his previous setup. His photographs will look better and he’ll actually be able to share them and communicate with friends and family through shared photos’ comments. That’s something that isn’t possible for him without the iPod touch. But with any luck, these features alone will spark interest in other applications and he’ll quickly want to learn everything he can about this new, digital world.

Tony Fadell, in an interview with VentureBeat:

I had a team making it compatible with the PC and Steve’s like, “OVER MY DEAD BODY! Never! We need to sell Macs! This is going to be why people buy Macs!” I said, “Steve, the iPod is $399. But really it’s not. Because you have to buy a Mac!” We had to give people a taste. […]

He finally said, “Okay. But under one condition. We’re going to build these and run it by Mossberg. And if Mossberg says it’s good enough to ship, then we’ll ship it.” He wanted to divorce himself from having to make the decision. But Walt said, “Not bad. I’d ship it.” That’s how we actually shipped on the PC.

Now we know why nobody told Walt to get off the table at that Apple event.