It’s been a while since I had a new gadget but that all changed this Christmas.

No longer do I need to turn on my desktop or laptop to read my email. The one line display on my 1GB MP3 player is no longer a problem when I need to track down that missing podcast.

Thanks to K I am now the owner of an Apple Ipod Touch. With 16GB of disk space I don’t need to scrunch files down as small as possible to fit them on nor do I need to wonder just what to take with me anymore as I can carry around a lot more albums.

The best part for me is the management of podcasts which are all neatly filed away with the episode information available to view. No more struggling to find that copy of From Our Own Correspondent by flicking from one podcast to another watching the voltage drop from my AAA battery like Ken Mattingly in Apollo 13.

If you have one of these new for Christmas and are still struggling to setup access to your WEP protected WiFi network the trick seems to be to add a “$” before the WEP key. For some reason the Ipod expects that as an undocumented feature…