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Birthdays are of course one of the many great excuses for acquiring new gadgets. This year I grabbed an Elgato DTT Stick accompanied by the EyeTV 2.0 Personal Video Recorder software.

I thought it would be quite good, but it's really very good. So comprehensively excellent that my (admittedly crap) cathode-ray-tube beast of a television now lies abandoned in the back room.

The main reason my viewing habits have been transformed is the PVR. Fancy a cup of tea on commercial free ABC TV? Just pause the programme, then start it up again once the beverage is steaming gently on the desk beside me. Missed that hilarious quip on the West Wing because the dog was barking? Rewind a few seconds and hear it all over again.

Another big plus is the electronic programme guide. To record a show I look at a list of the next week's programming and click on those I want to record. After they've been recorded they show up in a list labelled with the programme names.

Compare this to the old days when I would spend ten minutes hunting for the VCR remote and then labour through the programming menu (half the time forgetting to press the crucial "Timer" button and missing the show entirely). When I wanted to watch a show I had to remove the Transformers tape from the VCR, hunt through the heap of anonymous cassettes under the TV, and then discover that someone had recorded an episode of Bob The Builder over the last five minutes of the show.

The third bonus is that EyeTV runs on my Mac laptop, which sits next to my desktop PC when I'm at home. Now, when something interesting comes up on a TV show I can nip into Wikipedia to find out more about it without having to leave my chair. I'm being entertained and educated...

Did I mention that I've got a bit of a thing about cars? Nothing gets me going like the curve of a well crafted wheel arch.

And there were plenty of those on display at the Perth Car Show last weekend. Not one of the world's best known automotive concours d'excellence, but more than engaging enough to occupy the male members of my family for an astonishing six hours.

The main reason for going is so that I can bang on interminably about all and sundry. "Of course, the sweep of the C-pillar pays homage to the coupe of 1965". "Did you notice that they've made a subtle change to the design of the rear indicator lenses?". Every button on the dashboard needs to be pressed, the seat folding mechanisms in the 4x4s need a good workout, the flip 'n' spin cup holders need to be flipped 'n' spun.

This year's highlights included the gargantuan Mercedes CL coupe (always rewarding to leave finger marks on a car that's worth more than my house), the Mitsubishi Concept Sportback - no doubt the next Lancer will be just like it, but with all the interesting bits removed - and the fabulous rear-end of the Alfa Romeo Brera.

None of which are likely to be my next car. I spent the whole time gazing at something gorgeous and thinking "If only they would do it as a station wagon"...

Jumping the gun somewhat I went to the music shop and bought the sheet music for a couple of well known pop tunes.

I can't play them yet, despite their slow tempo and relative simplicity, but one thing struck me straight away - when you've got the music you've got the magic right there in front of you, and you can work the spell all on your own.

With other music your chance of replicating a sound is next to zero since you can't pull together the mixing and production, the same collection of instruments, or even get the same sound from a single instrument - I've got both an ebonite and a metal mouthpiece for my tenor sax and the sounds they produce could be from two different instruments.

But where a song is just a singer and a piano you can press the keys just like they do, and the sound comes out just the same. I spent a good few seconds lining up eight of my fingers to produce the last chord of a song and it was just as spine tingling as the sound coming out of iTunes. Fantastic.

I've discovered that even someone with talent as limited as mine can produce piano music that isn't entirely excruciating.

Armed with volume one of Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course I raced through the sections on how to find middle-C, through a two-finger version of Good King Wenceslas and a three-finger version of Jingle Bells, before slowing up at the pieces with a tune on the right hand and chords in the left.

My right hand can now produce melodies bursting with fluid expression. My left can be trusted to serve up chord progressions every time. Unfortunately they can't do both at the same time.

I routinely look at my fingers only to see them do the exact opposite of what I'm consciously thinking. Instead I'm finding that the best way to sort them out is to try not to think about it at all. Thinking about one hand or the other is usually better than thinking about both, and I suspect that true mastery comes when you don't think about either hand at all, and listen to the music instead.

More than thirty years ago I started to play a musical instrument. First an old recorder I inherited from an uncle. Then a jump to the other end of the woodwind scale where a bassoon kelp me busy for eight years burping and honking at the bass end of a selection of orchestras and bands before a tenor sax took me a few feet closer to the people who actually play the tunes. A number of dalliances with oboes, clarinets, a cortol (the instrument no-one has heard of) and a memorable year or two with a set of bagpipes gave me a good grounding in music, but it was all in the wind section, and all of them need other people to make music with.

Nipping out four or five nights a week for rehearsals isn't really an option these days so I needed to find a new instrument that I could play at home, and play on my own. So I bought a piano - actually a digital piano, which feels like a piano, sounds like a piano, and has a headphone socket so that the rest of the street doesn't have to hear me learning.

Hey - I can play more than one note at a time on this puppy!