undervoltage

It sounds like a common cause of problems sticking peripherals onto a Raspberry Pi come from unsufficient power supply.

They have a USB port for feeding power in, and I think that encourages people (including myself) to use any old USB compatible supply (even though they explicitly tell you to not do that in the docs...). I tried mine first feeding from my laptop and then from my mifi power supply.

That mifi supply seems to work for regular usage but when I start plugging things into USB it gets all wanky. So I measured the voltage with my trusty old multimeter - it seems to be down around 4.6v, (varying by about 0.1v depending on what I have wired in). That's well below the 4.75v minimum that apparently I should be seeing.

Off the the RS online shop to buy a grown up power supply then...

yubikey input fail.

I've been using a yubikey to generate numeric OTP codes for logging into one of my servers when using friends PCs.

That's work well so far. But today I tried to use it on a french keyboard, where the "number" keys generate punctuation (the numbers are on the shifted version). Well, now, my yubikey then just enters a load of punctuation in place of the OTP code. Fail.

pink panther usb hub

I got this pink panther USB hub from mediamarkt - it was the same price as a USB extension cable (which is what I was looking for) - €7.99

Now I have three extra USB ports too, which is useful for attaching (for example) bamboo encrusted memory sticks, or my wide SD card reader.

One problem: when there are two of them chained with my ext hd on the end, the ext hd makes terrible clicking sound and doesn't start up properly. maybe thats a power problem?