You know how it is when you noodle over a decision to buy a device to solve a particular problem, you finally buy it and use it and it sort of works, but not entirely — then a few days later a friend shows you his device, and you wished you’d spent the money on that one instead? Yes, that’s what happened to me recently.

I was taking a multi-day road trip, driving a truck that wasn’t mine. The truck had an AM/FM tuner, but that was it — no CD player, no cassette player. Yikes! And me with about six amazing books on media to listen to for whiling away the hours alone in that truck cab. I suppose I could have used ear-bugs, but I didn’t want anything that would impair my driving ability. (That and my sweetheart would have killed me if I’d tried.)

So I hit a Radio Shack and picked up the amazingly tiny iSymphony T-Speaker for iPod for $19.99 plus tax. It was incredibly dinky, required a single AA battery for operation, had an on-off (mute) switch and included an 3.5mm jack. This last point was important. I had hauled my iPod Shuffle, my Walkman cassette player and my Sony portable CD player. That kind of jack would presumably let me plug my T-Speaker into any one of these devices, depending on what media I wanted to listen to. I was prepared!

Alas, although the T-Speaker worked fine for belting out music and podcasts from the Shuffle, albeit, with a bit of a tinny sound, it was truly inadequate for the cassette or CD player. I couldn’t hear a thing unless I put it directly against my ear — which was kind of against the point of buying it in the first place.

My trip was mostly media-free, which I suppose resulted in more mindful driving (plus, the billboards of Wyoming, South Dakota, Iowa and other states did receive more of my attention).

But in my next post, I’ll share what I’d wished I’d gotten instead. Same basic price. Much better product for my needs.

As my friend Mike writes, “I don’t need it but I want it.”

He’s referring to the Garner PD-8400 Physical Hard Drive Destroyer, a piece of hardware the size of a desktop tower that folds hard drives in half. This device would have come in handy numerous times through the years when I was getting rid of old computers but had to spend hours wiping the hard disk clean before feeling comfortable downcycling them.

Of course, in real life the Destroyer has a more valuable application: to eliminate the possibility of a nefarious individual being able to retrieve data from hard drives that have been disposed of (like the ones you can see piled up at your local transfer station electronics recycle bins). This it does in ways that meet compliance standards set forth in HIPAA and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

According to the Garner-Products site, the machine even comes with a “convenient carrying case.” No need to risk removing your SCSI or IDE hard drives from a secure location before they’ve been pulverized (a process that takes a mere 75 seconds).

Always looking for an upsell opportunity, the company recommends that you use its Destroyer in tandem with one of its degaussers for “the ultimate combination in data security.” But, hey, I’m not running the Pentagon here!