Years, like textbook chapters, traditionally get a couple of summary pages at the end designed to hammer home key points. Digital Slobs, however, like to use these summaries as cheat sheets 62 seconds before the bell rings to fool the teacher into thinking we actually read the whole thing.

With this spirit in mind, here then is Part 1 of the Digital Slob's Gist of 2008:

» Tired of your local cable company? Services from Apple TV to Netflix's Roku player offer set-top-box alternatives filled with a wide range of all-you-can-eat movies and pay-as-you-go TV. There are even rumblings that free, ad-supported online TV services such as hulu.com might soon be coming to gaming consoles like the Xbox 360. You thought TV on the Internet was cool? How about TV that goes to the Internet only to be ricocheted back to your TV? Dizzying yet somehow exciting.

» Locked out of my office when Mother Nature called because I'd de-pocketed all the RFID chips now required to gain re-entry, I discovered that, in a pinch, you can use a Google 411 service, (800) 411-GOOG, to make free phone calls from pay phones to local businesses.

» Got cool new electronic gifts for the holidays? Great. But what are you going to do with all those suddenly not-so-cool ones they're replacing? Why not get a little extra cash recycling them via myboneyard.com? Simply tell the site what gadgets you have to retire, and they'll quote you a price, send you a prepaid mailer and, later, a prepaid credit card filled with the agreed-upon reward amount. When altruism meets greed, it's always a beautiful thing.

» A site called drop.io allows you to upload and share on the Net anything up to 100 MB in size for free, and provides password protection for access to that data. Also, assuming what you want to store or share is faxable, it allows you to send and receive up to 20 pages at a time FOR FREE without a fax machine. Finally, a toll-free bridge from your computer's desktop to the nation's engine of commerce (which remains technologically stuck in 1989).

» After taking a safarilike trip on a bus with a random woman who kept unconsciously humming (badly) to tunes on her iPod—and when confronted excused herself by simply saying, “;I can't help it”;—I've become convinced that many people with iPods are jerks. Ear bud duds. MP3 creeps. iPunks. When Western civilization falls, half of us won't bother pulling Maroon 5's latest hit out of our ears to notice.

» USB flash drives, like the 32-gigabyte Corsair Flash Voyager, which costs only about $70 now, are getting bigger, cheaper and easier for those on the fickle hard-drive-backup fence. When my computer started flaking out, the sheer capacity of the Flash Voyager allowed me to quickly transfer almost everything of importance (along with much of no importance) onto it in one swoop, no culling required. I netted our precious home videos while also snagging 516 photos of my sister's Pomeranian, which even my sister would find to be one or two beyond necessary.

» Next week: More key points of 2008.