Charge of the light brigade…
Whoa,
in our post-sticky toffee pudding bonding era, my father and I exchange a kind of verbal RSS feed of gadget finds whenever we chat. Ha! Prof JB has come up trumps with his latest one, a solar powered universal charger. It costs about £25 (ebay UK has plenty for sale) or you can get it from Ethical Superstore if you can’t bear the garish colours of ebay shop pages.
Why would you want one? Cos it seems to work with everything going! I received a GPS today, which didnt annoyingly come with a charger, but had a mini USB socket - my Dad produced the adapter (from his tech den) and I got it charging immediately.
Mega part 2, whilst round at my folks, my phone always seems to run out, (the nerdy E61 from Nokia, you may have seen it recently as the phone given to contestants on the Apprentice. It’s ace although also crap in that it has no camera for opportunistic celeb snaps). 
It also has about 15 other adapters with it. Including iPod ones (NB you do not need their crappy addon kit at extra cost - so long as you have your USB cable that should have shipped with your iPod). Ingeniously you charge up the Solar charger by leaving it , er, outside… for a wee while, then that basically has a stored charge so you can re-charge your gizmos at leisure.
Pretty cool, and it looks lovely. As you can see it is a bit like a satellite when charging up, but a sleek (hate that word) brushed metal style when not. And it has a cool name - FreeLoader, punning nerdery, woo, woo.
Logging off…