My most loved holiday break tech present doesn’t have to have batteries or computer software updates. It’s not even a gadget, even though it was created with technologies.

Can you guess what it is?

A few several years in the past, my spouse experimented with her iPad and a digital stylus to make digital illustrations. Using Procreate, a drawing application, she loaded a image of our beloved corgi, Max, as a reference to trace around before embellishing the graphic with a polka-dot bow tie and a cartoonishly lengthy tongue. I appreciated it so substantially that I picked a background color that would complement our dwelling and uploaded the illustration to the app Keepsake, a printing provider that assembles your photographs in a wonderful body prior to offering it to your doorway.

A massive, framed portrait of Max now hangs as a centerpiece in our dwelling place in all its two-dimensional glory. It tends to make me smile and is normally a discussion starter when we have visitors around. Which is far more than I can say about other tech gifts that I’ve received in excess of the years, this sort of as video clip game titles and wise speakers, which only introduced shorter-lived joy.

This form of gifting work out — tech-adjacent provides that really do not include hardware or thoughtless Ideal Acquire gift playing cards — might be primarily welcome this yr. That is simply because we are living in a pandemic-induced era of scarcity driven by a world-wide chip lack and offer chain disruptions that have created typical gifts tricky to invest in. (Anybody striving to buy a recreation console for the very last yr understands this suffering.)

So here’s a record of strategies for tech items we can give without having essentially obtaining tech, from the offers you can create to encounters that will final a life time.

The gift of repairing

Previous 7 days, I informed a mate I experienced a special existing for her: I would repair her Iphone trouble.

She had complained to me about her 5-calendar year-outdated Iphone SE. The product could no for a longer time get images or set up application updates for the reason that practically all of the device’s info storage was used up.

So prior to she remaining for her Thanksgiving trip, I met her for lunch and walked her by way of the procedure of backing up photos to an external drive before purging all the illustrations or photos from the unit. Then I plugged her cell phone into a computer system to back again up all her details right before putting in the new functioning method.

She was thrilled to have this trouble preset prior to her trip. She can now choose a lot of images on holiday. Additionally, a new Apple software program update has a instrument to increase a digital vaccine card to the iPhone’s wallet app, which would make holiday break vacation a bit a lot less demanding in the pandemic.

For all those who are relatively tech savvy, this may perhaps serve as a template. Listen to your loved ones’ issues about their tech and supply the gift of resolving the challenge. If it’s a sluggish Wi-Fi relationship, see if you can diagnose the challenge to raise speeds. If it is a brief-lived phone battery, look at having them to a mend shop to get the battery changed for a compact sum.

In some ways, this beats supplying a manufacturer-new gadget mainly because it spares them the headache of discovering how to use a new piece of tech.

The reward of generation

Apart from the illustration of the electronic illustration of my pet dog, there are lots of other techniques we can use tech to build for close friends and loved ones.

For one, I’m a fan of image guides that can very easily be produced with web resources. A number of yrs in the past, a colleague’s Top secret Santa gift for me was a calendar she made making use of Google’s photograph publications service. She produced it by pulling photographs from my dog’s Instagram account and compiling them into a calendar — every single month was a various photograph of Max posing following to an entree cooked by my spouse and me. I was delighted.

In basic, photo-printing solutions give wonderful methods to convert electronic pictures into bodily keepsakes in the variety of previous-faculty, significant prints and even mugs and Christmas ornaments. (Wirecutter, our sister publication that assessments solutions, analyzed two dozen photo-printing products and services and highlighted its favorites.)

Prior to the pandemic upended our lives, my wife purchased a DSLR, the type of electronic camera employed by specialists, with the intention of understanding far more about digital photography. Then the lockdowns transpired, vacations turned into staycations and the camera ended up living in a drawer.

My strategy for a holiday existing for my spouse is a two-hour electronic pictures lesson with a image studio in San Francisco that normally takes students on a stroll throughout the Golden Gate Bridge when teaching the fundamentals of pictures. (Ideally she doesn’t read this column.)

What would your close friends and family like to learn? We have loads of choices for opportunity reward courses, given that the pandemic drove several instructors to offer you virtual instruction on the web, such as for cooking classes and workout routines. The present of awareness goes a extended way and sometimes gives again, like when the receiver of on the net cooking lessons utilizes that newfound know-how to make you supper.

The reward of no tech

The pandemic may possibly have exposed us to much more display screen time than we could ever think about enduring, so a fantastic reward this yr could also be anything that normally takes our notice absent from tech.

That could be leasing a cabin in an location with no mobile support, tickets to a participate in, a wintertime hike and a picnic — just about anything that offers us respite from our inescapable return to screens.