We love to travel and do so frequently.  By land, air or sea, we like seeing new places, meeting new people and making memories; one destination at a time.  But there are parts of traveling that are simply annoying. Cramped seats in the economy section of commercial aircraft: annoying.  Luggage lost by multiple airlines: annoying.  Standing in a long line anywhere: annoying.  Some of those annoying parts of travel we can do something about.  Pay to upgrade for more leg room on the plane, annoying that payment is necessary but it addresses the annoyance.  Travel with only carry-on luggage, checking nothing,  eliminated the potential of trip-disrupting (and annoying) lost luggage.  Avoid lines by configuring a way into the TSA PreCheck program and Global Entry for flying and go early to the port to avoid long embarkation lines.  But one totally annoying part of travel had eluded us: worry-free backup power for electronic devices, including the MacBook computers we bring along.   Finally, I found a Magic answer to powering smartphones, tablets and computers.

Not ‘Magic’ like I went to Disney World and had a magical experience, magic as in the HyperJuice Magic Box, a DIY solution for providing backup power where none is officially available.  I tested this powerful backup power source on a recent  trip to Europe with Abercrombie & Kent that required movement through multiple airports, hotels and a cruise ship.   Every step of the way, I never needed to find/fight for a place to plug in electronic devices for charging.  On a long flight across the Atlantic, I watched movies on my MacBook Pro and never plugged in once to the in-seat power source.  Charging two smart phones at once, I did that 3 times each; all without recharging the HyperJuice backup power source.    Still, there was a bit of a procedure in making it all work.

Officially, Apple does not have a backup battery source for MacBook’s.  Some models have easy to switch out batteries but mine were not some of them.  The answer came from HyperJuice and their Magic Box kit along with step by step instructions on how to modify a standard Apple MagSafe Power Adapter. That took five minutes.  Now, I have an additional 12 hours of operating time on my MacBook top of the internal battery time of about 3 hours. Power problem solved, end of story.  But there’s more!

An added bonus of the HyperJuice Magic Box solution lets me charge in the car, on the go too.  Also, with dual 12W USB ports, I can also charge two devices at the same time.  Retailing for $349 the annoyance factor of finding backup power needs to be fairly high.  It was.  Now it isn’t.

This video gives us more of an idea of just how easy it is to make the HyperJuice Magic Box