Russell Beattie

I'm not particularly handy with electronics, so I doubt I will ever have another "Make:" style post like this, but I thought this was a handy hack worth blogging about. If you have a PSP, you know that the cord is conveniently long for playing when your battery is dead, but it's waaaaay too bulky to transport conveniently. The cord from the converter to the wall is the same thick cord as any other electronics - with the figure 8 looking plug at the end - and it just doesn't fold up well.

I was thinking to myself that I should go to Radio Shack or something and find a smaller or thinner replacement for that cord when I remembered that I had an extra Apple power-plug that came with my International Adapter for my Powerbook brick (Mike and I bought them for our trip to Finland). The Apple adapter uses the same standard figure 8 plug as the PSP! Perfect! I plugged the two together (you can see the pic above) and incredibly they fit completely snug and flush (so you can plug it into a wall easily and it won't fall out) and now I have a *much* more portable power plug for my PSP. It even fits into the front of the little case I bought for the PSP as well.

Oh, while I'm on the topic - I actually bought a second PSP as I stupidly upgraded my original PSP to v1.51 which doesn't run any of the homebrew games. I've now got Super Mario and more all running from my 1GB Memory Stick. Soooo sweet. I went on the hunt for Coded Arms this weekend (it was supposed to come out on June 28th), but no one near me (Fry's, Best Buy, CompUSA) had it in stock. They had full-on ads in last Sunday's paper, so I find this very strange. I think Sony has recalled the games and are now furiously re-publishing them so they require an upgrade to 1.52 before you can play. What do you think?

By the way, Lumines dual-player rocks! Mike and I spent waaaay too long playing it last weekend I actually bought two copies to make sure my two PSPs can play (and have the hacked version of it on my Memory Stick as well just in case I need it. :-) I was getting pretty bored of it playing in single player, but now that I have a reason to "internalize" the patterns, I've been playing the 60-second mode quite a bit. My record is 51 squares in 60 seconds - though I have to admit most of that is luck, I haven't been able to get past 40 blocks since (though I can do that regularly now).

-Russ