With more time on our hands, it seems we're spending more time keeping fit, and fitness has become a real growth industry, and it seems prone to gadgetry as well.

There are all sorts of new things on the market these days. Take for example, the watches that monitor your pulse rate as you jog or do aerobics, or exercises bicycles with sensors in the handgrips to check your pulse rate and then display it on a screen.

And for those of you who remember that famous toy of the early 80s, Rubik's cube, the one with six sides, each composed of nine rotating faces, with 43 quintillion combinations, well, anyway, in a lab in the US, they're working on a Cubot, that's a self-contained robot using microprocessors and mechanics to solve it.

But I'm getting off the track again, so back to our home computers with a final warning.

The technical innovations of the last couple of decades have led to a host of new words in our vocabulary, and one of these is hacker, that's H-A-C-K-E-R, and it simply means an enthusiast who breaks into computers.

And not so long ago in the States, teenagers who were hackers used their home computers to beak into supposedly secure government and business computers, for example in banks, labs and research centers.

They just tried out different passwords until they found the right one. And as one 17-year-old said, It was like child's play. And all that's needed is a home computer and a modem, that's M-O-D-E-M, which is a device that allows computers to transmit data over the phone lines, and of course, a basic knowledge of how to operate a computer. And this has led to tangled legal and ethical problems, but we won't go into that here.

But as you can see, home computers are indeed a handy thing to have around, not only for entertainment, but also for education value. And no doubt in future......