USB Hub¶
684 words on eBay
Another excursion to eBay. All I wanted was a USB hub and they seem to be quite expensive in stores. So I looked around for one fulfilling the reasonable requirements of supporting USB-2, having at least four ports (I would have preferred 7 but those are much harder to find, more expensive and not really necessary for the number of USB devices I am using), being powered and being neither exceedingly ugly nor exceedingly large. All this at a good price of course. The number of devices matching this wasn’t too large and I settled for a hub by a company called Saitek which was selling for a fixed price of €5. I ended up getting two of them in fact as this wouldn’t increase the shipping rate and this way I’ll have a spare one or one to give away or something.
Everything went smoothly with eBay and I picket up a huge envelope from the post office today, wrapping the hubs in large original packaging. Strangely there was some additional tape on the packaging and I started wondering what that was about. But I didn’t need to wait long to figure that out. Unpacking them revealed that these were actually British hubs with British plugs, i.e. the huge and ugly ones. To avoid complaints, they had packaged an additional plug converter with the hubs.
I can’t really complain about this as it technically works. And it gives me a free plug adaptor as well, which may be handy when friends from the UK come to visit. But it still feels very dodgy.
And the hub seems to work. I could connect four devices and they were recognised by the computer. At least as long as the power is turned on. But even when the power is turned on, it seems that the graphics tablet isn’t powered up reliably, which is strange. Unplugging and replugging it will resolve the problem – but that’s exactly what I wanted to avoid by getting a hub. My idea was to hide as many cables as possible and only having a single plug to plug into the computer. Are these kinds of problems common for USB?
I’m really quite puzzled by this. Thinking back almost a decade, I remember the world of ADB. And for most day-to-day uses it was just as good as USB is. I could have a keyboard, a mouse and a graphics tablet connected on it as well – all through the handy ‘hub’ in the screen. We even had a colorimetre thing for calibrating the screen on ADB and some dongle. What we didn’t have, of course, were iPods, hard drives or scanners. But on the other hand we did have the Extended II keyboard which was just wonderful to type on (and was abominably huge).
In fact, I do have a CRT iMac keyboard hooked up to my Powerbook currently. And it started sucking sometime last year. Somehow the keys feel ‘sticky’ – which isn’t just a whim of mine but was also confirmed by my brother. So I’m looking for another keyboard. I really like the small size ones as they don’t clutter my desk as badly and I’ve had small ones at home ever since I got a Mac. But there seems to be no good way to get those. But what else to get? A Bluetooth keyboard would be neat but those are expensive (Apple) or dead ugly (everyone else)? A USB to ADB convertor with one of my old keyboards or even my dad’s old Extended II? Probably not cheap either, but nice.
Argh. Silly questions… getting a keyboard should be easy!
To finish with the USB hub. It’s got one really annoying thing about it – that’s probably part of what they consider to be a ‘stylish’ design: There’s a huge blue glowing blob in its middle which makes it look like a cheap UFO. I’ll have to see how disturbing that extra light is in the room. I hope I can bear it as I don’t want to turn the thing off and on all the time.
