It's Black Friday, the traditional day to indulge in online shopping. Not every item that is included in my selection of gifts is subject to a promotional offer, but where they aren't you might be pointed to similar items that are!

I can't afford a full Spot, but this is almost as much fun given its easy-to-use coding environment. Bittle is small enough to run around on a table top size but it is is affordable, especially if you take advantage of the 20% off Black Friday deal across all four versions. The model pictured is the top-of-the-range pre-built version, but I can see that the kit might appeal if you have the patience. As well as this smart robot there's a voice controlled version with commands for more than 35 lifelike movements such as sitting, playing dead and backflipping which let's you program up to 10 custom voice commands using C++.

We first met Bittle back in 2020 when it was a Kickstarter project, you'll find more details and a video in our report A Little Robot Quadruped on Kickstarter.

 Click in image for more information

Disclosure: I Programmer gets a very small reward if you place an order with Amazon using the affiliate links in this article. However, this has in no way affected our choice of gift items.

Given how worried we are by AI taking over our jobs how could you not want to wear the one Tee that will remind the world of what happens when you rely on an AI ... It was also an excellent film.

I'm not a fan of minifigs but I am a fan of Lego and I know someone who would just love to get this particular minifig as a pressy:

The C prompt mug makes it and it even looks like the person I plan to give it to.

My second T choice is one that might well need explaining to even the most experienced programmer and hence is a talking point you can wear. It is a reference to rubber duck debugging which is just one of the many zen of programming type techniques. The idea is that you have to tell your problems to a rubber duck and in doing so your errors will be quickly revealed:

Personally I use a cat - a real one that is, but somehow it doesn't seem to work. The cat just looks at  me as if I was an idiot.

This one looks fun as long as you have a junior programmer to play, I mean work, with:

You can program it in Scratch or Python and my only warning to a prospective buyer is that is is small and addictive. As well as the things listed in the picture it has am accelerometer and gyroscope. It also has an expansion port and bigger programmers need to keep away from this to avoid the danger or taking the device into new territory.

And finally one last T, you can never have too many Ts as it avoids running round naked. I'm told that I have a very algorithmic sense of humour which is why this particular example makes me giggle uncontrollably:

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