If it’s your child’s first Christmas, or even second for that matter, you’ll currently be wondering what to buy him/her for Santa’s big day. Family and friends will be showering your little prince/princess with toys, clothes, things that make a mess, things that make a noise, so how can you top that? If you’re a practical scrooge then you might be so brave as to not buy anything at all – after all, what does a 1 year old know about receiving Christmas presents anyway – but if you take this route you risk feeling guilty for the rest of your life. And if your child ever discovers that you never bought anything for his/her first Christmas, then I am sure you can imagine the repercussions. Luckily, I am here to help you avoid such pain and suffering.

My top tip is that you pay a visit to the Royal Mint website where you can buy your child a lovely gift that will be treasured for decades (or until your ungrateful brat needs to raise some money to buy a new pair of trainers). There are some cracking ideas to suit all budgets, and coins are shiny and metallic so they just happen to fit most Dadget criteria (apart from the lack of batteries).

£5 will buy you a presentation-cased £5 coin for the London 2012 Olympics, while £9.99 will buy a presentation set of UK coins from 1 p to £1 in perfect 2009 condition. £19.99 adds a few special £2 coins to the 2009 collection together with a special baby-themed folder. For larger budgets there is the £65 baby-themed gold bullion quarter sovereign, the £112.50 half sovereign and the £199 sovereign.

So there is clearly a gleaming coin for every pocket, and they also make great Christening and birthday gifts too – either for your own child or somebody else’s. On second thoughts, you need to buy other people’s kids those messy and noisy presents, so keep the cool coins to yourself.

I just wanted to share a great gift idea for your child’s grandparents, or perhaps even for yourself. Zumyn allows you to create a mosaic photo of your child using your entire collection of baby photos. The web site’s photo upload tool compresses your pictures before uploading (saving you plenty of time), and the clever Zumyn software will then arrange your photos to represent any particular picture you choose. It’s free to use, but you can pay for prints on photo paper or canvas if you like the results.

For Henry’s 1^st birthday we took a photo of him and then used Zumyn to turn it into a mosaic using every single one of the 2,400 photos we have taken of him since he was born. We treated ourselves to a canvas print and the result really is stunning. Sat in our lounge we can see the overall image of Henry with his cute little cheeks, but close up we can pore over all the great memories from his first year.

I resisted the Twitter craze for quite a while, but I recently caved in and setup my account and then began ‘following’ a mixture of famous people and friends. I’ve yet to post my very first Tweet, but stalking can be as much fun as actually writing yourself.

If you’re a Dad and into Twitter (afterall, Twitter is a pretty cool Dadget), then here are a few of my recommended links:

Twitter Dads is probably the most well-known network for Twittering Dads. Sadly their website is a bit of a dog’s breakfast and whenever I’ve viewed their Twitter feed it is crammed full of people promoting products. Surely this should be all about Dads Tweeting about fatherhood? Maybe I’ve missed something.

Odadeo are using Twitter to encourage us all to be better dads by, for example, making pledges such as “I will spend less time on Twitter and more time with my children”. Their Twitter feed has not been updated since January, which doesn’t set a good example, but their site enables you to Tweet yourself and automatically update the Odadeo site with your progress against your pledges. In truth this is a social network for dads that doesn’t fully exploit Twitter, but it’s making a good start.

My final recommendation is to follow individuals and organisations that give you their own thoughts and experiences on fatherhood. You should begin by following our good friends at DIYFather, and then branch out to follow some of the people linked here, here and here.  You can also Follow Me to see whether I ever start Tweeting myself.

The cake has been eaten and the odour from your pre-party poo has finally dissipated. So as your party is winding down, your little guests are now starting to wonder what’s going to be in their party bag. The party bag says a lot about you as a parent – are you cheap and cheesy, or generous and sophisticated? Well, how about using the party bag to prove your Dadget credentials by giving a hi-tech gift that the kids (and their parents) will be talking about for months to come?

My top party bag tip is to use the appropriately named GoDaddy.com to register a domain name for each of your guests. How cool would you be if every visitor to your party went home with theirname.com registered and paid-up for 12 months together with a free starter web page and e-mail account? You really are the coolest Dadget dad in the world!

If your wallet can’t stretch to the £6 per child for a .com, then you could plump for a .info at only 66 pence per child – what a bargain! Of course, you will always encounter a few snivelling little brats who really wanted a matchbox car and a packet of sweets, but life is full of disappointments.

Now that the games have gone down a treat it’s time for the ceremonial bringing in of the cake, complete with candles. But what if you used your last match to mask the stench of the horrendously smelly poo you had just before your guests arrived?

Step up the iPhone, which has a million and one candle applications to give you that hi-tech virtual glow. Birthday Blow Out (£1.19) provides you with a tasty-looking cake covered in candles. What’s more, you can blow into the iPhone’s microphone and see the candle flames flicker. If your kid blows hard enough then the candles will go out, and your iPhone will be drenched in spit.

For more kid-friendly iPhone fire gadgets you can also try Flametastic (59p). Here you can display flames from a candle, match, gas source or blow torch. It’s a very safe way to provide gentle light at your child’s bedside, and you can also use it while you make sweet love to your wife/mistress. Bonus.

So you’ve had success with your electronic invites and now your house is full of screaming children vomiting peanut butter sandwiches into your DVD player’s disc-tray. Time to settle them all down for a few board games.

But why punish them with complex mental arithmetic when adding up the scores? Sure, you could be generous and give them a calculator to use, but you’d still need pen and paper to write it all down.

So whip out your iPhone and solve the problem by using the EZ Score app. You can keep track of everyone’s score very easily, even having a photo next to each child’s name. For 59 pence (or free for the Lite version that is limited to 3 players) you have become the cool dad with the iPhone who didn’t make his kids practice mathematics when they were supposed to be having fun. Dadgetastic.

I’m not a fan of party-planning myself, possibly linked to a dream I once had involving Margaret Thatcher and a bowl of car keys, but I feel that a few good Dadgets will see me through anything. Having children means that you’ll end up arranging countless parties, so what are the Dadgets to look out for?

Let’s start with the invitations. Why waste money and rainforests on paper invites when you can plan the whole shindig online for free? There is a wide range of party planning web sites that will allow you to send e-invites to your event and then monitor the RSVPs as they come rolling in electronically.

Evite is possibly the most famous such web site, but their homepage is too busy for my liking and they have a bad reputation for saturating the whole experience with too many advertisements. I liked the look of PurpleTrail as an elegant and feature-packed solution, until I discovered that they don’t allow you to do anything from a Mac web browser – tut, tut, tut.

So my choice of online invite services has to be pingg due to its simple interface and support for all web browsers. Yes, it does have advertisements, but they are not very intrusive, and the way that you can integrate photos, web links and even YouTube videos is pretty cool. I’m currently helping my wife to plan Henry’s Christening and pingg is definitely my tool of choice.