GearWERKZ TechBlog

With all of the high tech (and some times high-priced) gear that is in the 'WERKz, a lot of people assume that most of my efforts are supported primarily by the more expensive gear. The truth is, it is a lot of the little items that ensure that these higher priced items are able to provide any value to me at all during the course of the day. These particular three widgets are things that I carry with me just about every day:

I don't necessarily have ginormous hands, but they are not baby-size either. I tend to dislike small interface devices, like most styli that come with gadgets that have a touchscreen interface. I use a Windows Mobile phone and a UMPC with touchscreen interfaces primarily designed for interaction with a stylus. For those devices I keep a couple of regular pen sized styli around to make working on them easier, like the one in the top of the picture.

On the left is one of my other little life-savers: a USB extender. In this day and age of PCs of such small form factors, one of the things being sacrificed are USB ports (the MacBook Air has one!!). So on devices that only have two USB ports and when those ports are side-by-side, an extender becomes necessary if a fat USB thumb drive or other odd-shaped device is in one of them.

On the bottom right is a 1.8-to-1.8mm Audio jack. I take this with me whenever I go on travel. Not a lot of rental cars are equipped with iPod Docks these days. Even when they are, you have to see if they support your specific variant and generation of iPod. But more and more of them have AUX ports. Few things make a business trip more survivable then being able to mix my own tunes out of my 30GB music collection on the ride from the hotel to the work-site. Around the house, I also use this in the computer room sometimes to send an iPod audio output directly to a set of PC speakers.