Jonathan Takiff: The perfect gifts for your techy dad (or grad)

On your mark, get set ... : This product-tester procrastinated on gadget suggestions for Mother's Day. So I'm making amends with this month's early roundup of techy toys for the dads and new grads on your shopping list.

Take me out to the ballgame: Most radios made today have lousy AM band reception. So how's a guy who likes to listen to baseball games on AM supposed to tune in? With a battery or AC-powered CCRadio-EP from C.Crane. This portable boasts a spartan design with analog tuning dial and four-inch monaural speaker that makes AM and FM broadcasts sound good. EP's special tricks include a fine-tuning knob to eliminate adjacent AM channel interference, a back light for night use, music/talk switch that sharpens the play-by-play, separate bass and treble controls, headphone jack and an input for an external source like an MP3 player. $69.95 at www.ccrane.com.

How's Tryx?: A proud new papa's gonna enjoy getting his hands on a Casio Tryx ($249 at Best Buy). With its twistable metal frame, this unique digital camera easily captures images overhead, off to the side or close to the ground. Then with the touchscreen flipped over, you can hold the camera at arm's length, stand it up on a table or even hang the shooter on a hook to get into the shot yourself. (Yes, Dad was there, too!) The 12-megapixel camera is excellent at capturing 1080i high-definition video to SD memory cards. Outdoor stills likewise come out well, and there's very smooth panoramic "stitching" mode. But a bunch of my inside snapshots came out soft, despite fancy face focus/scene detection. Onboard software uploads images to websites. A mini-HDMI output jack lets you play back stuff on a big-screen TV. Stuffing a Tryx-recorded SD card into the card slot of a new TV proved a bad idea, though. The TV picture began to pulse erratically.

Wake-up calls: Elder dads and college-bound grads both have needs for the Amplicom TCL 200 Digital Alarm Clock ($120 at www.iltsource.com). The adjustable alarm cranks to 90 decibels, with top-mount LED lights a-flashing - making you feel as though a subway's running through the room. Plus, this rig comes with a wireless vibrating pad, likewise good for shaking/waking both the hard of hearing and the badly hungover with an 8 a.m. class to make. The alarm clock speaks the day and time with a tap of the snooze button or automatically every hour. And you can connect the thing to a phone jack to emit a piercing wail when a landline call comes in. Excuses end here!