What to Get for Someone Who Has Everything

OK, well not necessarily absolutely everything - I think that's a different crowd than I move in, perhaps - but let's face it: some people are hard to buy for. Here's a cool and affordable idea, though - how about a built-in USB charger?

Besides being a convenient thing to have around the house, it also gives your significant other a weekend project! You can't beat that kind of two-for-one gift. (The creative person could also come up with a personalized t-shirt to go with, but I digress...)

These gizmos were introduced in the middle of 2011, and then featured at the Consumer Electronics Show last January. Meanwhile, I have yet to find them on the shelves at my local haunts - Home Depot,  Ace Hardware and Menards (which does list a couple varieties online, though) - but they are available on the Internet. (Just click on the links below.)

My favorite is from CurrentWerks, just because it's (a) really built-in, and (b) you don't have to sacrifice a regular outlet. The device is available in both a standard type outlet and a designer version, too (shown here). Directions are available online, courtesy of SmartHome.com, but it's really pretty standard stuff:

• Turn off the circuit breaker (or unscrew the fuse?)
• Remove the faceplate; remove and de-wire the old outlet.
• Wire up the new one and put it back into the outlet box.
• Attach the faceplate, and power up.

Suddenly, you don't have to unplug anything else to charge up your phone or iPad or whatever. And you only have to hunt for the cable, not the transformer. Just as an aside, whoever came up with the USB connector made all of our lives much simpler! Data and power in one simple, universal connector. Alleluia!

Another version of the built-in charger is available from Cooper, which is a well-known name in electrical circles. It's about the same to install, but you lose one 110 outlet in the process. Also, for me it just doesn't have the same aesthetic. Functionally, though, it's a good thing, and in my book it still counts as an upgrade to your castle.

Those two options are fine for homeowners, but what about you apartment dwellers? Well, Audiovox-RCA has you covered. Its version of the "built-in" charger is actually like a cube tap - you simply plug it into a standard outlet in place of (or over) the faceplate. It still offers one 110 outlet, but gives you two USB charging ports as well. It's the simplest of these three options to install, and it's portable; when the lease is up, take it with you and plug it in at your new place.

And if you want something really kind of different, Audiovox-RCA is on the verge of releasing a version of this USB charger that has a built-in nightlight as well. Now that's way cool. (The website says it's coming in May.)

The Curiosity Hazard

“How well do you know Microsoft Word?” That’s the question a colleague posed earlier this evening as we were waiting for the college president to give his annual “thanks for all you do” message to the assembled Advisory Committee members. It was the perfect opportunity for such small talk.

“Reasonably well,” I admitted. “What are you trying to make it do?”

It turned out that his problem was rooted in operator error, but of the worst kind. He didn’t know what he had done. “I think the mouse bumped into something,” he said, and suddenly all these weird characters appeared on the screen – dots and squares and arrows with tails and “that paragraph mark thing” – and he couldn’t make them go away.

“I think they’re called invisible characters," I said, "or something like that.”

I could picture what he was describing (and which button to click to clean it up) but couldn’t remember the proper terminology with which to label it. Clearly it wasn’t “invisible characters.” They weren’t invisible, and that was the whole problem. As an aside, though, I like having those things – whatever they’re called – visible on the screen so I can see when there’s a double space or why a line is breaking strangely, but I realize most people want just the letters and punctuation.

As we slowly made our way from the lobby into the auditorium, I turned to my smartphone for an answer. Searching Google for “invisible characters in word” turned up an answer (and an additional 34 million possibilities). It turns out that www.mvps.org gives a pretty thorough explanation, although they don’t explain how Bob suddenly made the things visible.

“Nonprinting characters is Word's term for anything that takes up space or has a formatting function but does not appear on the printed page: spaces, tabs, paragraph breaks, and the like,” the website explains. It goes on to describe three simple ways of controlling whether or not the nonprinting characters appear on the screen.

• Pressing Ctrl + Shift + 8 toggles all the nonprinting characters on and off.
• On the Tools menu, selecting Options and then the View tab allows you to select which of the nonprinting characters are displayed (in the Formatting section). The default is All.
• Clicking on the button with the paragraph mark, which is typically on the Formatting toolbar, also toggles the nonprinting characters on and off.

Although I’ve been using the toolbar button for years, the other two approaches were new to me, and they’re good things to know about. But the website offered one more interesting bit of information – the paragraph mark has a name. It’s a pilcrow.

Frankly, neither of us recalls much of what the president said this evening, but that doesn't mean we didn't learn anything. My colleague now knows how to get his clean-looking text back and I now know what a pilcrow is.