As sad as it may sound, we’re coming up on the end of summer. The kids are going back to the school and it won’t be long before the leaves begin to fill the sky with autumn colors. Even so, it can still be quite warm outside and there’s no harm in stocking up on supplies for next summer, right?

Wearing a regular baseball cap can be helpful on sunnier days, because it can provide your face with a bit of shade, but that’s not enough. Instead, you might want to consider this crazy Solar Fan Cap from Brando. The main construction is like a regular white cap, but you’ll notice that there are two solar panels integrated into the brim. These powered the single fan that shoots through the center of the brim, blowing cool air onto your face.

Because it is solar powered, you could say that this fan cap is quite the green solution for keeping you comfortable during the hottest days in the summer. On cloudy days when the solar panels aren’t fed with quite as much power, it’s likely that you won’t need the cooling fan anyway. That’s green and that makes perfect sense, right?

Check out the Solar Fan Cap for $16 through Brando. They ship worldwide.

There is a good chance that you use Skype for business calls, because this can provide for much more affordable long distance calls compared to conventional landline telephones and cell phones. That said, using Skype on your computer may not provide the most comfortable or ideal of configurations, especially if you want to have both hands free to type notes and shuffle papers. You could use a headset, but that can get uncomfortable over time too.

To make for a more seamless and comfortable experience, you may want to consider something like the Polycom Communicator C100S. This is a USB speakerphone designed for Skype, letting you continue with the conversations without having to hold a handset to your ear or to attach a headset to the side of your head.

For times when you are more concerned about privacy, you can take advantage of the built-in stereo headphone port to attach whatever headphones you’d like. The pair of high-quality microphones mean that this device is also good for conference calls and group conversations. Power comes by way of the USB cable, so you don’t need to have an additional power supply. You can even use he Polycom Communicator C100S for CD-quality music and presentation audio. The integrated buttons make for a seamless experience too.

The Polycom Communicator C100S USB Speakerphone for Skype is currently on sale for $141.99 on Amazon.ca. That represents a $30 savings over regular price.

So, you’ve yourself a new portable hard drive with the intention of backing up your valuable data and carrying digital documents between computers and locations. For the average consumer, this may seem like a relatively simple process with any number of portable hard drives available on the market. You may find some that come with free backup software or a fancier-looking case, but they all function in fundamentally the same way, right?

Well, there’s one frustration that is shared with most of these portable hard drives. Looking just at the drives themselves, you oftentimes can’t tell what has been saved on it and how much capacity is left remaining for additional documents and files. This simple frustration has been simply overcome by the team at Verbatim with the announcement of the Verbatim InSight Portable Hard Drive.

By and large, this is still your regular run-of-the-mill portable hard drive, but it comes with one very notable difference. You’ll notice that there is a small display on there. This shows you the name of the disk volume and the amount of disk space remaining. The kicker is that this display will stay on even when the drive is not connected to a computer, since it has a small internal battery that supplies enough power for this simple functionality. I’ve seen similar displays in some USB drives, so this was a natural inclusion for a hard drive too.

The Verbatim InSight uses a 2.5-inch drive spinning at 5400rpm. You get 8MB of cache memory, USB 2.0 connectivity (bus powered), and a data transfer rate of up to 480MB/sec. The 320GB version is listed at $120, whereas the 500GB goes for $150.

I don’t like cables. I understand that there are people out there who can’t stand the latency of wireless devices and, as such, prefer a wired connection for improved fidelity and accuracy, but I’m willing to make a few small sacrifices in that realm for the freedom offered by their wireless equivalents. Better still, you don’t really have to spend any more money to go wireless than you would with an equivalent wired device.

For example, you may be in the market for a new keyboard and mouse for your computer. Whether you’re going to use it with a laptop or a desktop, you may want to check out the Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 3000. You get a full-sized keyboard, complete with a numeric keypad and multimedia controls, as well as a wireless mouse in one comprehensive solution.

The keyboard comes with a “comfort curve” that is meant to make for a more comfortable typing experience and the wireless mouse makes use of high definition laser technology for improved precision and accuracy. Other features include four-way scrolling with the tilt wheel, enhanced function keys, five customizable mouse buttons, magnifier, and the convenience of standard AA batteries for power.

The Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop is currently on sale for $29.99 on Amazon.ca. That reprsents a 57% savings. Buy an extra ten bucks worth of stuff and take advantage of Amazon’s free Super Saver Shipping too.

If you’re going to be a mobile professional, you really can’t leave home (or the office) without your trusty notebook computer. This is your mobile workstation and it’s what you’re going to use to fire off those important emails, edit those important documents, and show off those important presentations. However, most laptops are lacking in two rather important departments: a mouse and a numeric keypad.

Some larger laptops, like those with 17″ and bigger widescreen displays, may have a numeric keypad as part of the keyboard, but just about every notebook smaller than that will not have this portion of an otherwise standard keyboard. Even with 17-inch laptops, they don’t come with a conventional mouse, forcing you to use that trackpad. Some people don’t mind this, but many others still prefer the relative precision and comfort of a regular mouse. What is a mobile professional to do?

Rather than rely on two separate solutions, it may be more prudent to consider the Kensington Wireless Notebook Keypad/Calculator and Mouse Set. This unified solution comes in three parts and really helps to solidify your mobile workstation.

First, there is a wireless optical mouse here. It’s not the fanciest mouse in the world, but it gets the job done and it’s wireless. Second, there is a separate wireless numeric keypad that can also pull double duty as a standalone calculator, thanks to the integrated single-line display. Third, there is a USB dongle that acts as a wireless receiver for both the keypad and the mouse, eliminating the need for two separate receivers. That’s pretty convenient! Kensington has also included a free travel bag to carry these three components conveniently.

The Kensington Wireless Mouse and Keypad Combo (model number K72273US) is available on Amazon.ca for $59.99.

You thought that massive hard drives were only available for desktop applications and that the notebook crowd had to lag behind? That’s not completely true! Western Digital is always pushing the envelope when it comes to mobile hard drives too and they’ve just announced one of the biggest ones to date.

The most notable thing about the new WD Scorpio Blue line of 2.5-inch mobile drives is that it is available with up to one terabyte of capacity. Yes, you read that correctly. It is very well possible for your laptop to be equipped with a full terabyte of storage capacity. To go along with the massive amount of storage, the WD Scorpio Blue hard drive features a 3Gb/s transfer rate and it comes equipped with a couple of Western Digital’s signature features.

WhisperDrive combines a series of state-of-the-art seeking algorithms to make for one of the quietest drives on the market. The ShockGuard uses both firmware and hardware technologies to offer high-end shock tolerance. Since this is going into a notebook, random drops and shakes are probably quite common, so the ShockGuard will certainly come in handy. You also get SecurePark, which parks the recording heads off the disk surface so the recording head never touches the disk surface. This extends long-term reliability.

The 1TB WD Scorpio Blue hard drive is listed at $250 on its own or $299.99 as a My Passport Essential SE portable drive. Those are in American dollars. If you want to save a little bit of money, the Scorpio Blue also ships as a 750GB model for $190. The My Passport Essential SE version is $199.99.