Month: October 2007

USB travel adapter kits

3 USB adapters and travel pouch

Spotted a while ago on my favourite gadget blog Ãœbergizmo.com the Belkin USB Travel Adapter Kit is a neat little kit featuring three USB adapters.

These take a standard USB A (male)-B (male) cable and allow you to convert the B (male) end to:

  • A (female)
  • 5-pin Mini-b
  • 4-pin Mini b

7-in-1 travel pack

The only thing is … I can’t find anywhere in the UK that sells them! But not to worry, because Belkin UK produce the 7-in-1 Retractable Cable Travel Pack:

Retractable USB cables and travel pouch

This pack includes the following:

  • Retractable USB Cable A Male/A Female 0.8m USB adapter extension cable
  • Retractable CAT5e Cable RJ45/RJ45 1.1m Computer to DSL/cable modem, gateway router, patch panel
  • Retractable Modem Cable RJ11/RJ11 1.3m Computer to phone jack with crossover adapter (ea) or BT adapter (uk)
  • USB Adapter A Male/B Male, MiniB-4-pin and Mini-B 5-pin for Computer to printer, hub, scanner, CD/DVD drive, camcorder, camera etc

At £11.21 on Amazon UK, that’s pretty good value in my book.

Lean University

I had a great meeting with the University’s Lean team this afternoon.

Lean use elite ninja-like skills to focus on a process, to ensure that it is as waste-free as possible. Key Lean principles are:

  • identifying and eliminating waste
  • continuous improvement of processes
  • ensuring that each stage in a process adds value

Toyota pioneered Lean Manufacturing on these principles in the 1980s and revolutionised automotive production. Toyota is now the most successful automotive production company in the world.

So now you know.

Oh, and the team are fantastic, lovely people.

Another Potting Shed

Another Potting Shed

I have Another Potting Shed!

For the last few days I’ve been experimenting with another blog, hosted on WordPress.com, using it much like a “microblog”: short, informal, blether-like posts.

I’ve had that WordPress.com blog for a couple of years now, but not done anything with it. I originally signed-up for it out of curiosity, to see what the hosted accounts were like, so that I could assist friends who had their own blogs there.

This week I thought that it was a shame to waste such a fine space. So I’m now blethering on it. See you there!

Welcome to the new time zone

The clocks went back an hour at the weekend. I always find that during the following week I’m a little chronologically disoriented, like we’ve all taken a step sideways into another time zone.

We’ve moved out of Greenwich Generous Time and back into good old Greenwich Mean Time now.

I had a friend at school who always kept his watch at GMT. He’s an MSP (Members of the Scottish Parliament) now.

It’s very dark early now. But on the other hand, early it’s very light.