[Jack Simth]

There can be 16 and 2/3rd's "meh"'s. Hah.

The real trick is to lock one up and feed it very carefully - feed it basically any matter, and capture the radiation as energy - total conversion of matter to energy at E=mc^2 (and then you have a Hawking Generator). There are some downsides, though - your generator can go critical in one of two basic ways: underfeeding (energy output is proportional to an inverse of the black hole's mass, and it loses mass as it outputs energy - if you don't feed it enough, it explodes in a very big burst of some very hard radiation) but that's not so bad as the second, which is loss of containment (it gets loose, and starts feeding ... on anything and everything available - the atmosphere of your ship, your ship, the atmosphere of the planet your ship was parked over, the planet your ship was parked over, the star that planet used to orbit.... and everything on any of them, of course (though why you would have anything important on a star, I have no idea) - all that's left is a little black hole ... which eventually evaporates).

Overfeeding will tone it down (more mass -> lower energy output) but you can't rev it up again in a hurry if you need to, and raises the risk of a loss of containment.