Spread your net wide

Net Results:So we are into the final countdown to Christmas and you still have no idea what to give the geek or semi-geek in your life? Then this column is for you. Keeping in mind that D-Day is on Tuesday and you are reading this on Friday, almost all these items are designed to be ordered online and instantly available, writes Karlin Lillington.

Anyone from a teenager to a granny might appreciate an annual pro account at online photo management site Flickr.com. Whether they run a website or a weblog, or simply like to post pictures to discussion boards or share online image albums with friends and relatives, they would appreciate the extra features and storage space provided in a pro account (the free accounts can fill up surprisingly quickly).

At only $24.95 for a one year pro membership - about €17 - this is a modest but useful and fun gift. Click the "upgrade account" button on the Flickr homepage and you will see the option to buy gift accounts.

Irish web users might appreciate receiving their .ie personal name account as their domain name for a website or a blog. Recent changes at IEDR, the Irish domain registry, have enabled individuals to easily obtain their personal domain name.

Most domain resellers in Ireland offer .ie registration for as low as €45 and up to about €70 (be sure to shop around; the iedr.ie website offers links to registrars). As applicants need to submit identification documents to the registrar to obtain a personal domain, this is a gift that will need some collaboration with the recipient.

Then there is annual membership in Astronomy Ireland. For €48, members get a subscription to Astronomy and Space magazine, discounts on events and merchandise and, of course, can join with other members at regular Star-B-Q stargazing nights. See www. astronomy.ie for more information.

If you like more tangible gifts, an external hard drive would be a welcome gift for just about any computer owner. These are versatile both in size and use - you can buy small portable drives or larger desktop drives at a range of prices, either online or in any computer store.

An external drive makes backing up easy, as most come with software to automate a chore that most computer users neglect. For anyone with a large music or digital photo connection, it can make better sense to keep the collection on an external drive to free up space and improve performance on the computer.

If you are thinking of pricier electronics for someone special, the digital music player of choice has to be the Apple iTouch, the iPod made with the iPhone's amazing touch screen. €199 for 8GB or €299 for 16GB, this is an investment gift.

So is a Nokia N95 or Sony Ericsson P1i mobile - even more so, running about €550 for the 8GB N95, postpay, or €450, sim-free for the P1i - but these are gorgeous phones packed with capabilities, from SatNav to high quality cameras to doubling as a fully-fledged music player. Anyone receiving either of these beauties is going to be very happy with Santa.

Finally, to the bookshelves. If I were selecting a discerning collection of tomes that every geek should own, it would include any or all of these.

Top of the list comes the classic Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, the true story of Data General's race to build a new computer. This is some of the finest writing ever on computing and even manages to make machine language poetic.

Next up, Robert X Cringely's Accidental Empires (which became the television series Revenge of the Nerds), one of the most readable and hilarious descriptions of the era of the ubergeeks and their multibillion dollar companies in Silicon Valley - and, of course, Redmond, Washington.

In a similar category is the marvellous slim volume In the Beginning Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson. His metaphorical analysis of operating systems is perfect. While he offers this book for free download, I think it is much nicer to have it in paperback.

On the history of the development of the internet, go for Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. Yes, the name is terrible, and embarrassingly geeky, but it's an excellent read.

On the fiction side, two classics. Anyone who hasn't read William Gibson's Neuromancer, which envisioned cyberspace years before it existed, or Neal Stephenson's epic Cryptonomicon, which gradually entwines second World War era codebreaking, modern hacking, historical figures and fictional characters, has a treat ahead.

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