A while back I was looking for a car charger for my wife’s and my own iPhone 3Gs. Turns out, people really hit you hard with that stuff; most prices were around $20 and overengineered for the job. Rather than spend the money, I started looking for other solutions.

The reason the current charger wouldn’t work (one of those $20 jobs) is that it charged using the old FireWire pins and current levels. Because of those, my iPods would charge, but not the phone. So I needed to get USB power to it.

Separately, I was pointed to Monoprice for another cable I’d been looking for and I stumbled across two very cool, very cheap items that wound up solving my problem.

• Car Charger (Cigarette Lighter) to USB Female Converter – White $1.62

• Retractable USB sync Cable for iPhone/iPod Mini nano Apple[USB to IPod] $1.10

For less than five dollars, I have not only a car charger for the phone, but a retractable car charger and a spare sync cable. So, you see, when something looks simple, it really is.

I looked around a little more now, and found some other, similar items that might be of interest at some point:

• Car Charger to USB/Firewire $5.04
• Plain USB sync cable for iPod/iPhone $1.62

• Car Charger Splitter $1.70

You can charge two iPods/iPhones at once for less than half what one commercial charger costs, or any other USB-charged device (some other cell phones).

Well, not so much HDTV as HD, DirecTv, and TiVo. I do not appear to be able to predict the future with either technology, and I need to buy a new TV.

Okay, clean out the thoughts (for those five people still reading). My TV’s remote sensor is dying. For a true couch potato, this means that life now sucks as I cannot toggle power or change volume at a distance. It’s otherwise fine, but it’s impossible to do the quick volume change when something loud comes up and the wife’s in bed. Sure, I could get a speaker system for $200 (and might) and use that volume instead, but my TV doesn’t let me turn off the internal speakers when externals are plugged in. That’s the 1998 Special for you.

The Studio Display that was on my old G4 tower has a history of being flaky. It was known for having a capacitor problem that made it 'pop' while you were using it. Well, it did that for a while when I had it, and I had it fixed once for it (outside of warranty, but Apple still paid). It stopped doing this after then.

So a couple of years ago I got a new iBook and gave the G4 to my mother who had a crappy little thing of a computer at the time (a Performa 6116CD; the other computer I gave her). She's been using it ever since. Until the monitor started popping again and popped its final pop three days ago.