iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Battery Boosters

An iPod with a dead battery is no fun at all. Here are a couple of items designed to keep the music playing, even when the battery is not.

• Belkin Backup Battery Pack can supply 15 to 20 hours of music even after the iPod battery has run down. You put four regular AA batteries into this pack, and then clamp it onto the back of the iPod with suction cups. The flat FireWire connector connects to the bottom of the music player to feed it energy. $60 at http://www.belkin.com.

  POWER USERS’ CLINIC Two for Tunes

  While lots of these good-looking goodies are purely for the iPod, a couple of hardware items from Griffin Technology can enhance the digital music experience on the desktop side of things. Both devices work with Windows and Mac, and are available at http://www.griffintechnology.com.

  The Power-Mate USB Controller & Input Device, pictured here at left, looks like a plain old volume knob from a stereo console. But when you plug it into the computer’s USB port, you can spin the dial to control the contents of just about any window on your screen. You can program the PowerMate to control the iTunes or MusicMatch Jukebox Plus volume level, scroll through insufferably long Web pages and documents, or advance quickly through camcorder footage in a video editing program. You can even program it to perform key commands

  

  The controller, which sells for $45, works with just about ...