HyperMac updated their power blocks to include support for the iPad product line.  There are a couple models to chose from, but the high end, $500 unit, will give you 99 hours of iPad life.  More then enough for that weekend get-away.

For a bit less, the $200 battery pack will get you the 60 watt version capable of powering your beloved Apple product for 34 hours. For this price, at least they include USB ports to power those USB gadgets you have in every corner of your office.

The HyperMac power bricks are not yet available, but will be within a couple of weeks.  Just in time to be received with your long delayed iPad order.

Make a custom USB game pad with an accelerometer for endless fun.

The concept for this USB tutorial is taking a game pad and adding some USB.  Then putting in a small PCBA to enable keyboard shortcut programming so the device looks like a keyboard to your computer, but with specific buttons for game play.

The USB game pad can be used with nearly any software, such as a MAME emulator, game, simulation software, or for custom user interfaces.

We’ll start by turning the buttons of the game pad into keyboard buttons, so that pressing ‘up’ is converted into the ‘U’ key, for example. The firmware is easily adaptable, so you can adjust it for whatever software it will be used with.

Then we’ll beef things up by adding an interesting twist…an accelerometer. This will allow

So here is a new twist on the graffiti art, the facade printer. Technically, it’s not used for graffiti in the traditional sense, but rather a new marketing method for a different print medium. Buildings.

The facade printer is an inkdot printer which looks like a paint gun mounted on a portable deck. The paint gun is controlled via software and connects via USB cable. From here the facade printer uses stepper motors to control the firing position of the barrel and point the end towards it’s next mapped position.

Through this technology it is now easy to make a pointillism type image on buildings, bridges, or any large scale surface. I think this is a particularly interesting method for retails to promote products to the masses much like a freeway billboard. Visit the facadeprinter.org website to learn more or what the video below.

facadeprinter.org – three stones from Facadeprinter

Source: CNET News.

What do you get when you cross a Hot Wheels car and USB stick?  Flashrods.

We’ve seen plenty of mods for USBs and hot rods, but we found one guy making a part time job of it.

Sure you can do your own, but getting the masterpiece on the first try is hard, buy a Flashrod of $25 and have it done right.

There are 20+ styles to select and available in different GB capacities.

Source:  DigitalDrops.

Format USB Stick as NTFS File System

Flash drives are getting very large in size these days, the new SuperSpeed USB 3.0 sticks are getting over 256GB capacity.  With these larger sticks, the option to format the device as a NTFS file system is available, but what about the smaller USB sticks?

By default, any USB stick under 4GBs in capacity will not have the Format USB as NTFS file system option, but we can fix that.

Here is the How To: Format USB sticks as NTFS:

Click Start > My Computer > Right click on the drive letter for the USB stick and select Properties.

Now, click the Hardware tab of the Properties pop-up window and select the drive letter of which you’d like to change.  In this case, it’s drive letter F shown as “Simple Flash Disk 2.0 USB Device“  From here click the Properties button.

The next step is click the Policies tab and

Wouldn’t it be nice to get 1GB of data storage for $1 on flash drives?  We are not there yet but getting close.  We are about $2 per GB for this 32GB Kingston DataTraveler.

It doesn’t come with the lifetime warranty we typically see, only a 5 year one…but chances are you’ll lose it before then anyway.

The c10 drive comes in four colors [Red, Yellow, Blue, Green] and has a full cap design to protect the entire stick.  No word on performance, but the typical flash drive has a write speed of 5.5MB/s and a read speed of 15 MB/s, again not official just our experience speaking here.

Just 5 years ago I had a laptop with a 40GB hard drive, now we have flash drives just about as big and much less expensive.  This deal is for a limited time at buy.com and has a normal price of $90.

Once again, I am off topic of USB, but sometimes you get ultra cool products that you must mention.  Today I found a great gadget from our buddies at Gizmos For Geeks.  It’s the Gear Ring.

Very elegant in design and intrigues the engineering in all of us.  The Gear Ring is comprised of 6 mini gears which rotate in unison as you twist the top portion.

The product is high quality stainless steel and engineer to very tight specifications.  This makes for an easy and smooth feeling as you twist the ring.

Although I’m not a ring guy myself, other than my wedding ring, it is intriguing enough that I’m going to buy one.  It’s not THAT much, only $165.  Ring sizes include 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Source:  GizmosForGeeks.