Father's Day Gifts

I'm doing 2 segments for Father's Day:
San Francisco's KGO, Sunday June 12th
Good Morning America, Saturday June 18th

Here are my picks for Dad:
Lacrosse Technology Wireless Weather Station $80
Women love shoes, Men love WEATHER.
What other force of nature has its own TV channel? So let dad play meteorologist with this wireless weather forecaster (Also comes with handsome wood trim)

myKeyO Keyboard Organizer $25
Ingenious! Working computer keyboard flips up to double as pencil case. Wired and wireless keyboard options, no more desk clutter.

Sentimental Scanning $0- $15 (printing costs)
Collect your favorite pictures of dad- Scan the images and then use a photo program (Photoshop, Paint, Paintshop Pro) to create a montage. You can put your montage in a book, on a poster or calendar. You can either print these at home, or use an online service like Ofoto or Snapfish, or head down to Kinkos or your local camera shop.

Satellite Radio $99 + $13 monthly subscription
The Sirius Sportster is a small and relatively inexpensive satellite radio that can be used in the car or with a Sirius boom box in the home. 120 channels of radio (including 65 music channels and 55 channels of sports, news and talk) make satellite radio a great commercial free option for serious sports fans or people in rural areas who don’t have myriad radio choices. Satellite radio is subscription based, so expect to pay about 13 dollars a month for the radio service. Sirius boasts NFL, NHL, NBA, English Soccer, and collegiate sports on their channels.
XM radio has exclusive rights to Major League Baseball, so think about the XM SKYFi-2 if baseball is Dad’s passion.

Golf Swing Gaming- $229
The Golf Launchpad swing simulator lets you play the hottest golf video games with a club in your hand instead of a mouse. This USB device plugs into your computer and allows you to swing at an actual ball that’s tethered to a piece of artificial turf. Sensors under the ball determine if your swing was on target, whether your club face was open, or if you John Daly’d the ball over the pin.
The Launch Pad comes with the Tiger Woods EA Sports PC-based golf game.

‘Extreme’ Tapeless Video Camera- $600
Dads love to record video, dads love cool gadgets, and dads generally think they are cooler than they really are. So why not give dad an EXTREME video camera. Samsung’s tapeless MPEG4 Sports Camcorder weighs less than a pound and is about the size of a deck of cards. It records on 512 megabytes of internal memory and on removable media cards (Memory Stick PRO) that you have to buy separately. The really cool feature of this camera (besides the tiny size) is the external “lipstick”camera that you can plug into the camera. Dad can attach this camera to his bike helmet, to the dog, to anything he’d like for extreme POV shots that put all those other camcorder-fathers to shame.

Robomow: Robotic Lawn Mower $1800
If you could only give dad time; time to relax, time to play golf, time to hang out. If dad has a big lawn that nags at him every weekend, the Robomow may be the equivalent of the gift of time. This robotic lawn mower does a pretty good job cutting the grass. The set up is fairly involved, but if it means you don’t have to push or ride a mower for a few hours a week it’s completely worth it.

Set-up
The Robomow works off a perimeter wire that you stake into the ground. At first the green wire is noticeable in the yard, but after a while you could see how the grass would grow over it and it would be nearly impossible to see. My test area was only about 15 feet wide by 60 feet long, so the staking process took about 20 minutes. I assembled the perimeter fuse-box (5 minutes), put the pieces of the Robomow docking station together (5 minutes), and put the Robomow into the dock. Total set-up time, including the time to read the manual, about an hour.

How it works
Robomow has a manual control that allows you to drive the device almost like a remote car. The controls and commands are very intuitive. I used the remote to drive Robomow into the docking station and left it attached to the charging connectors. Once Robomow had charged up, I set it to work on my yard. Using a criss-cross pattern, Robomow works back and forth across the lawn, staying inside the perimeter wire and systematically mowing the grass. Big tread tires give it good traction in bumpy spots and it’s slow but steady pace didn’t threaten me in any way (I had visions of a HAL like robot with blades attached). Immediately I was struck by how quiet the Robomow was. I couldn’t give you an exact decibel count, but it seemed at least half as loud as my electric mower. After about 30 minutes, Robomow had done a comprehensive job on the 900 square foot plot I had staked out. Never once did I have to retrieve it or rescue it from terrain or obstacles it couldn’t handle.

Not too short
I am somewhat obsessive about my lawn, and I keep it at a relatively short clip all summer long. I’d let it grow to an average blade size of about 3-4 inches to test Robomow, and hoped the device would cut the grass to about 2 and a half inches. Despite the fact that I lowered both Robomow’s back and the front height adjustors to their minimum height, the robotic mower didn’t get the blades quite as short as I’d like. If you are hoping for a device to trim your lawn to putting green status, this is not the mower for you. But if you have acres of lawn that get unruly fast, the Robomow is ideal. It’s programmable to mow on a fixed schedule or you can launch it manually. It will return to its docking station when it completes an area and you can shuttle Robomow between unconnected lawns when you have to create multiple perimeter areas.

Bottomline
I really liked the Robomow. As of our print deadline, the lowest cost for the RL1000 is around $1800, the slightly older RL 850 can be found online in the more affordable $1100 area.
Bottomline- if Dad dreads mowing the lawn every week, the Robomow is a great gift that keeps on giving.