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My entire adult life has left me in wonder year after year as developments have brought more and more magical gadgets into our lives. The items I describe below are just fascinating to me, and so inexpensive as to be unbelievable.

At Christmas 1977, I bought myself a Texas Instruments TI-59 calculator with memory stick. Two years later I bought an Apple II+ (which ended up being featured in a national advertisement for Apple). My struggle at that time was whether to buy a machine with a floating or fixed decimal point processor (I bought floating) and how much RAM to get--16, 32 or 48K (what would one ever do with 48K of RAM?, oh, what the heck--go for it). No agony over hard drives--they weren't available--but do I need one or two external 5 ¼ inch floppies? Software?--write your own in BASIC, which is what I did. Visicalc (the first spreadsheet program) was over a year away.

Ah, that was then; this is now. My recommendations for this year:

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An Apple iPad Mini. I also have a Motorola Xoom, two Kindles (one is a Fire HD) and two Windows 8 machines (one a tablet, one an HP tablet convertible) at my fingertips. They all have their strong points, but the Apple has a few features that the others don't and that would be of interest to the papermaker. One of these is a simple thermal camera setting that lets you compare the temperature of various surfaces. The camera also has a time lapse feature that can be used for simple tasks you want to see repeated in fast time.

As an attachment for your iPad Mini, you'll want a Structure Sensor. It lets you work in 3-D with your iPad. Around $ 500.

Another item you might need is a microscope. It won't work with your iPad, but a Carson zPix 200 (about $45 at Amazon) will work with other computers. Not a bad little microscope.

If you travel a lot you'll need a Trakdot Luggage Tracker to throw in your suitcase. It will tell you where your suitcase is no matter where it is and when no one else knows. I got mine at Touch of Modern but their sale is over so you will have to look around for this.

Duluth Trading (Duluth, MN) has Fire Hose® Work Pants. Yes, they are supposed to be made of the same material as a fire hose. I haven't bought any, but looks like the right clothes for tough work applications.

Of course, you must have a Gopro Hero Camera. These range in price from $130 to $500.

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And, then...

I may be getting too old to ride my motorcycle (according to someone in this house; it will probably go up for sale in the spring), but I am not too old for a Polaris Slingshot. This is a motorcycle-class three wheeler with side-by-side seating, a 2.4 liter DOHC engine and it only weighs 1,700 pounds. Heck, go for the SL model, it's only $24,000.

And I didn't even mention drones. There are so many models of RPAs (official name for drones--Remotely Piloted Aircraft), that I wouldn't know where to begin.

So, how do we tie in safety with this eclectic smattering of information? Well, some of them could help improve safety and others maybe not so much. As usual, safety is up to you--the gadgets in your hand or under your body are inanimate until you make decisions. Make good safety decisions.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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