I’ve been thinking about blogging up some of my favourite things and gadgets that I’ve found useful. The first of these was a purchase for my bike video kit. I bought the cheapest best value for recording kit to help with the motorcycle observing I do and wanted to avoid connecting anything of that to my bike, so I looked around at battery technologies.

I got an email through from Maplin on their offers and one was a 2000 mah rechargeable mobile power pack that had been reduced by 50% to £9.99. It is charged by and charges from a mini-usb cable, and one of the connectors is a large usb connector – perfect for keeping my miniature digital video recorder going for as long as the sd card in it would record video.

So I bought 2! on a weekend when Maplin had free postage. The package came full with the battery pack itself, which is about the size of half of a pack of cards. The main part of the package came with 9 connectors and an adaptor cable. The connectors include a variety of mobile phone connectors, as well as a mini and full size usb. They also came with mains voltage adaptors, but I usually charge from a pc from a usb port.

So as well as powering my small mini dvr, I’ve also used the power pack to power my htc touch diamond with its woeful battery life, my old Orange SPV M600 which I use for TomTom, my bluetooth GPS bought on ebay and one or two other things I’m sure I’ve missed. The mini-usb connector is something I agree with as a common charging port, it is really handy.

I thoroughly recommend this which is excellent value at its power capacity, and really useful to have on hand – providing you have that essential cable of course!