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On my recent trip to South Africa, I wanted to be able to power my laptop from the plane's power jacks during my flights if possible. I'd heard that there was such a type of power supply, but I didn't know what it was, and I didn't end up trying to get the right supply until right before I left.
The most common power jack on aircraft is called an "Empower Plug". It's a special jack that supplies up to 75W of 15V DC electricity to your portable device. Here's a photo of one of mine:
A common accessory for laptops is to have a power supply that runs on a cigarette lighter plug, so that you car run it from a car power jack. However, the Asus Eee doesn't seem to have one, so the only way to power it from a DC vehicle source is to have an inverter that takes DC power and produces AC wall power, and then you power the Eee from the normal wall power supply. Although this adds a step, I guess this is the only way to power my laptop on an airplane. So I went shopping, at the stores that I had available to me.
Wal-mart did have an inverter:
I tested it out on my battery pack; it ceased to work immediately without ever successfully powering my laptop.
I also ran across one at the local auto-parts store:
This one worked fine, but it had a really noisy fan in it. I took out the fan (another blog post), and it still worked Ok from my battery pack. I took it along on my trip. It did NOT work on the flight from Philadelphia to Heathrow. I'm not sure why; maybe the connector was the wrong shape (it seemed like it never did fit right).
After leaving South Africa again, I bought another inverter in Heathrow:
which worked on the flight back to the US. Yay! Having bought it in Heathrow, of course, it puts out 240V AC and has a UK/EU power jack, rather than a US power jack:
(I think that this is the US power jack equivalent).
Fortunately, I also have a Yung-Li power adapter from the old South Africa plug standard to a US outlet
which then converts the inverter to one that effectively has a US outlet:
By the way, before heading to South Africa, I did manage to get the right plug adapters to power my laptop and such:
These are of the very excellent Taiwaneese "Yung Li" adapter series. The South Africa adapter is the YL-8015. It's tough to find a place that sells them; I finally bought mine at Signal and Power Delivery Systems. (It's tough to find in their catalog, but they have them, and they will sell in small quantities.)