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Driving along the Belgian coast, we ended up tootling down a brick promenade. It took a little while to parse the statues we saw along the shore - until we suddenly recognised that cowboy icon of BD, Lucky Luke.

The giant bronze Smurfette being worshipped by little smurfs was perhaps best ignored...

...and certainly not photographed...

St Brelade's in Winter

St Brelade's in Winter
Originally uploaded by sbisson.

Jersey beaches in the winter - empty, bleak and uninviting.

On the horizon a shaft of sun silvers the swell.

So just what is a gadget?

Mobile PC magazine has released a list of the top 100 gadgets to date, along with a definition of gadget that works well for me...

• It has to have electronic and/or moving parts of some kind. Scissors count, but the knife does not.


• It has to be a self-contained apparatus that can be used on its own, not a subset of another device. The flashlight counts; the light bulb does not. The notebook counts, but the hard drive doesn't.


• It has to be smaller than the proverbial bread box. This is the most flexible of the categories, since gadgets have gotten inexorably smaller over time. But in general we included only items that were potentially mobile: The Dustbuster counts; the vacuum cleaner doesn't.

Some nifty widgets on their list, too...

I seem to have only owned 17 of them, too...