I circled it… that little plug next to the Canon S9000.  I NEVER saw that before!  I’m sure it’s something that’s been in OS X for years, I just never had a situation where one of my printers was UNPLUGGED!  I guess now I  know if I see that little icon, someone kicked the plug .

Now I remember, it must have been when I was playing with Tethering my camera to my iMac.  I wanted to see if it worked and I must have inadvertently pulled the wrong USB plug out of the hub!  Phew, I feel better now.

The tethering DID work.  Aperture has this ability built in – Lightroom, on the other hand, wasn’t so easy.  After a bit of digging I did find a plug-in and I’ll talk about that a bit more in-depth in another post.

I found this on a trip to Radio Shack, it’s called the Lenmar PowerPort PPU2100B.  You can get one from Buy.com or here TheNerds.net.

Specs: • Universal Power Pack will charge or supplement iPods, Sony PSP, cell phones and PDA’s or any USB Powered or chargeable device – Black Color • Can recharge your device up to 4-5 times on a single charge. Includes PowerPort Battery, 3 ft. charging cable with tips for charging most USB Powered devices including: MP3 Players, Cell Phones, PDA’s, Digital Cameras and Camcorders, Gaming Devices and more. • 5V 7.8Wh • Lithium Ion

As you can see, the device is just about the size of the iPhone.  This was super handy over the summer when I’d spend 3 to 5 hours a day at the beach.  Without this device, there would be no way I could have made it through the day.

It will also charge any USB compatible device… I’ve used it to charge Eileen’s T-Mobile Wing, our Razr v3 and my daughter’s iPod.

* Powers & recharges personal electronics * Supplies portable AC & USB power to mobile electronics * No adapters needed, plug your charger in and power on the go * Provides up to 9 hours of extended runtime* * Compact & portable power supply anytime & anywhere (from the Manufacturer) Because staying connected is a basic human need, Black & Decker created Power To Go. These lightweight and compact powerful solutions come equipped with both AC & USB outlets allowing you to power and/or recharge a variety of mobile devices while on the go. No special adapters needed, one Power To Go does it all. Like a portable outlet, Power To Go is a cordless, rechargeable power supply that meets the busy pace of your life – anywhere and everywhere!

Staying connected is a basic human need, huh? I thought things like food and shelter were… but I digress.

As you can see from the picture, this unit is much heftier than the PowerPort – but it claims that you can run your laptop off this! I haven’t tried it in the real world yet, but I’m sure that you can only get a few minutes off this with a laptop. I’d be willing to bet that you can get HOURS and HOURS of charge time for a phone or small electronic device. One curious thing was, that even though this device has two USB ports and one power port, I was unable to get my iPhone to charge of the USB port. When I plugged in the wall charger unit for the iPhone, it charged just fine – go figure.

I was browsing a catalog (I get tons and tons of them) the other day and came across something that looked pretty interesting – a USB Universal Adapter.

As you read this, you might be saying, um, yeah right, interesting – but IT REALLY IS!

I was doing some cleanup down the cellar and came across 15 old hard drives. Ranging from 300MB to 40GB and the thought of ripping open my old Windows XP machine, shutting it down, putting in the drive, turning on the machine, checking the contents of the drive and then REPEATING THAT 15 times was a pretty daunting task.

Let’s take a looksee at this nifty little product, shall we?

I had mostly IDE/ATA drives – which, come to think of it, I have a laptop hard drive floating around here someplace – I can use that as well!

So, you plug the IDE cable into the back of the hard drive, then plug the cable into the USB adapter.  Next plug the power plug into the hard drive – the hard drive will spin up – and you’ll know pretty quickly if the hard drive is good or not immediately.  I had three drives that had the ‘ol click of death so I didn’t even need to plug in the USB cable!  Finally, plug the USB cable into the computer and voila! you have access to that hard drive!!

SO MUCH easier than either plugging the drive directly into a computer case and 1000% easier than cracking open an external hard drive enclosure and swapping out the hard drive, etc.

Now, I can confidentally throw away the three “bad” drives and I can dump the sub 1GB sized drives as I can get a thumb drive with more capacity!  That leaves me with just a couple of 40GB, 20GB and a 6GB drive which I’m going to keep for backups to my backups and hopefully, I’ll never need them.

Check out this picture that I found on one of the hard drives:

Finding that picture was worth every penny of the $29 I spent on the adapter!!!

Finally, I did one last test – I put a IDE DVD drive on the adapter and fired it up – IT WORKED!!!  So now I’ll be using the USB adapter as an external DVD drive for my old Powerbook G4 (the Super Drive went kaput about 8 months ago).

If you have a bunch of hard drives hanging around and  you need to access the data just once in a while, you’ll LOVE this little device!