gadget

noun6

1. •
   Any device or machine, especially one whose name cannot be recalled, often either clever or complicated.

   • He bought a neat new gadget for shredding potatoes.
   • That's quite a lot of gadgets you have collected. Do you use any of them?
2. •
   Any consumer electronics product.

   • From the Marvel Mixmaster to the Miracle Microwave, every time a new-fangled gadget has lobbed into the Aussie kitchen, Aussie mums have changed their cooking styles accordingly. — 1987
3. •
   A spring clip attached to the end of a punty in order to grasp the foot of a glass without leaving a bullion while finishing the bowl.
4. •
   A sequence of machine code instructions crafted as part of an exploit that attempts to divert execution to a memory location chosen by the attacker.

   • A Spectre gadget was found in the Linux kernel's implementation of system interrupts. — 2019
5. •
   A technique for converting a part of one problem to an equivalent part of another problem, used in constructing reductions.

   • We reduce an instance of 3-SAT to an instance of bird-flock-optimization, using a gadget that converts each conjunctive Boolean clause to a group of birds.
6. •
   (no longer used) A thing whose name cannot be remembered; thingamajig, doohickey.