Gallery: 10 most annoying hardware headaches

It's a simple job. Take a high AC voltage and turn it into low-voltage DC. We've known how to do this for a hundred years. What can go wrong? Well, how about the industry redesigning the connectors and changing the specifications more often than England lose wickets? Not only does every new gizmo come with its own unique adapter to add to the hundreds of apparently identical warm black bricks infesting your life, but you've got at least a seventy percent chance of blowing things up if you plug in the wrong one. That's if you manage to find the right mains lead. And good luck decoding the hieroglyphics that replace useful information on the case stickers. Is it hard to build a universal adapter? No. Do we need twenty types of socket? No. Why are we drowning in a million adapters, all doing the same job in different ways? Because manufacturers hate us and want us to hurt.