Administator for GetUSB.info
GetUSB.info started in 2004 with the concept of providing USB information for everything USB related. At the time, USB was gaining momentum and every day new products, articles and news became published. Today, the site is focused on bringing technical information, tricks and hacks to USB related products. The site does publish off topic information as well, to keep the variety up. Please visit the footer area of any page if you or your company is interested in article or product placement via purchased advertising.
How many times have you registered for a service or product on the web, only to be required to enter a user name and password? How many times has that website required some 6 or 8 character password which includes numbers, capital letter and lower case letters – basically some abstract combination of characters? Or you enter a user name only to find it’s already been used or you’re required to enter your email address as your user name. With most people having mulitple email address its difficult to remember which one, the password or combination there of. You need a system.
That system could very well be the SplashID from SplashData.
Consider some of the following – would they help you?
Never forget a username or password again – ever
Secure and backup your passwords, credit card numbers, registration codes, PINs, and more
Generate truly random passwords hackers cannot guess
Protect yourself from identity theft, keyloggers, and phishing
The SplashID uses a autorun function which automatically opens up the SplashID user interface upon connection to a PC or Mac computer. Pull the key out, and not a trace of SplashID stays on the system or any of your sensitive data you just gone done using. So clearly a big value add for passwords, data base of private content and password generator.
Currently you get the SplashID for $30 with free shipping…although the free shipping is for a limited time. Here is the link for more info.
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It’s standard for mobile phones to sync and connect with your computer with limited or no access to the memory for storage. As with our Zune hack for making a Mass Storage Device, here is a tip for the Windows Phone 7 as well…
The caviet to this tutorial, is that you can only perform the tweak to your computer which you sync the Windows Phone 7 device with.
To get started, do the follwoing:
Open the registry editor on your PC by typing regedit in your Start menu
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB; search for ZuneDriver
Now you will modify three entries (note, if you have multiple WP7 phones, you have to do it for each one)
Change ShowInShell from 0 to 1
Change PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell from 1 to 0
Change EnableLegacySupport from 0 to 1
Note: Perform registry entries at your own risk. It’s best if you back up the Reg before starting.
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If the benchmark claim rings true, LaCie has a new USB 3.0 flash drive which is living up to the USB 3.0 SuperSpeed promise. Things might be coming to fruition with the most recent product from LaCie, the FastKey.
The FastKey has print on the box claiming a whopping 260MB/s transfer speed. If it true, this puts a single flash drive at a faster transfer rate than your best hard drive. As EveryThingUSB points out:
“To put that in its proper perspective a typical 3.5″ hard drive has a peak read speed of about HALF of that and has an average speed about one THIRD of this little bad boy’s performance numbers”
So dumping your buddies MP3 collection of a 1,000s songs will be much easier with this USB 3.0 flash drive, then your portable USB hard drive. But don’t think this convenience, and some would say luxury, come without a price. The LaCie FastKey comes in a variety of sizes, starting at
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The iPhone has become an invaluable gadget for everyone I’ve meet with an iPhone. It gives the user instance access to email, the internet and a variety of applications and games. Clearly the heavy users who depend on the iPhone will run into issues with battery life. Since the product is portable, not everyone sits with the iPhone at their desk tethered to their USB port for charging and synchronization, must just leave it out for the quick grab-n-go while on the move.
Proporta has a product which will help those gassed phones, the iPhone TurboCharger Back Pack. The back pack is a iPhone case with a built in battery charger.
The TruboCharger has 1700mAh of power which will quickly and easily charge your iPhone and double it’s battery life. The TurboCharger can piggy back the iPhone during charging and use. The TurboCharger can be connected to the iPhone while connected to the PC…or you can connect the back pack seperatly for charging.
When together, the back pack will not effect performance or sync ability of the iPhone with iTunes. In addition, the TruboCharger will charge itself and the iPhone when connected to the computer.
To connect the TurboCharger, simply
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PQI introduced their first SuperSpeed USB 3.0 flash drive today, called the U339V. The PQI 3.0 stick is available in 8GB through 64GB sizes. As with any new technology, the performance is lagging behind the specification of performance.
For example the smaller 8GB PQI drive shows a read speed of 55MB/s and a write speed of 10MB/s. Verse the larger 16GB and larger sizes are more like 86MB/s read speed and 20MB/s write speed. If you know anything about flash drives, it just means the bigger sizes are dual channel and the 8GB is single channel.
Still far from the 5Gbps transfer rate USB 3.0 is suppose to offer, but once more advanced controllers come into the market, we’ll see the performance rise.
The PQI drive will be available through
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The new iPhone keyboard from Iomnio is a great example on the convergence of technology. The keyboard, named WOWKey, has a dock station for your iPhone where-by giving you full keyboard connectivity and functionality to your iPhone.
With the WOWKey you can respond to emails quickly and easily. You can draft letters, run excel spreadsheets and much more like a traditional laptop computer. The WOWKey gives you the functionality you need to more effectively use your iPhone. In my opinion, this is the direction which computers need to go. From some studies, the majority of computer use is for email response and web browsing.
Iomnio has two additional features which any iPhone lover will appreciate; first, they have 15 hotkeys designed for the iPhone for quick navigation and utility access. Second, WOWKeys offers is the use of the multi-touch function on a PC display and the Air Mouse Pro, an app that can be used as a laptop touchpad or number pad.
The WOWKey from Iomnio is priced at an equivalent $105 US dollars. The WOWKey is currently only available in Korea, but is clearly designed for the largest market, the United States, as you can see the English version settings in the screenshot from the original article at AVING.net.
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A New York artist names Aram Bartholl is trying a very daring, if not crazy, art exhibit by placing USB sticks throughout New York City. The idea is for others to share their digital life, secrets, information with others to bridge the life of digital information with that of the physical world. So what exactly do you do?
Aram has placed a small collection of USB ports in public places thinking that others will connect their laptop or computer to the USB port and upload or download data to share. I bit crazy if you ask me…you know how many viruses and key logging programs one could get? Even with virus checking software – there are sophisticated attacks you could expose yourself too. BUT, if you dare, connect!
Currently the installation is only a five-stick preview, but Bartholl is planning to expand the operation to more sticks and more cities. Check Bartholl’s blog for coming information including “full documentation, movie, map, and ‘How to make your own dead drop’ manual coming soon!â€
Aram – you should use USB Write Protected flash drives and share controlled data so that you’re exhibit doesn’t kill computers! Maybe provide an upload link where you can control the data, then put the data on flash drives and write protect the stick. Don’t know how – contact us, we’ll show you.
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Verbatim announced their 32GB flash drive today in the form of a USB dongle no larger than a nickel. There is no lanyard loop and it’s damn small, so will most likely get lost if you place it in your pocket – but that is all okay. It seems Verbatim is gunning for this product to be a permanent extension of memory for your Netbook or laptop anyway.
However, in the event you plan to swap the 32GB stick from PC to PC there is one dirty little secret you should be aware of…it needs a DC powered USB port.
In most situations and applications this isn’t a problem as the device will be connected directly to a motherboard USB port, but you’ll need to pay specific attention to dock stations or non-powered USB hubs. To understand a little better, the device controller needs
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With Apple’s recent news about the MacBook Air being ultra thing, ultra long lasting and ultra cool, what many overlooked was the reinstall software shipping on a USB drive.
With companies trying to save energy, reduce cost and reduce product sizes, it’s no surprise [at least to me] that Apple dumped the optical drive in favor of solid state memory…for both the computer and the restore media.
“Even the flash drive looks awesome from Apple,” says my colleague who does a ton of iPhone and iPad applications…with a new one coming out.
Beside the fact of flash being faster than optical, we also save space on the internal SSD drive by not having the reinstallation software loaded, but rather off-line and secure. Just be sure to wrap a key-chain around it, the Apple restore USB drive looks pretty small.
Wouldn’t that be nice – an app store for cars? Ford isn’t there yet, but they could be. I read earlier this week that Ford is pushing out a new SDK for software developers to create applications for For Motor cars.
A simple example of an app would be syncing your smartphone with the car [via USB] and run Pandora music or Stitcher internet radio.The new SDK from Ford includes access to the voice recognition utilities to help developers integrate voice command applications. An example here would be syncing the voice command functions of your phone through the speaker system of your car stereo. Developers could also design apps where you ask the car
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We have already seen USB sticks getting to the 64GB capacity, but it doesn’t go without some serious trouble or expense in making them. Currently all 64GB sticks are made up of four 16GB NAND chips. The drives are huge and far more expensive than a 1TB USB hard drive. But this will all change…
Samsung announced that it has begun mass production the industry’s first 3-bit-per-cell, 64 Gb (8 GB) MLC NAND flash chip using 20-nm-class processing. In addition to the larger capacity, Samsung’s new NAND flash will use Toggle DDR (Double Data Rate) 1.0 specifications, offering a 60-percent higher productivity level than the previous 30-nm-class, 32 Gb 3-bit NAND using SDR (Single Data Rate).
Samsung’s chips are expected to arrive in USB flash drives, Secur Digital cards, smartphones and SSDs while replacing the current 4 GB (32 Gb) devices on the market. Samsung did not comment on time-frame; however the new devices may begin to appear in the market and offer 8 GB minimum and 64 GB maximum.
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So cruising the news today for USB updates, I stumbled upon this article about an Australian company dreaming up a giant sky balloon to carry stuff.
When you need to get heavy gear into remote places a road can’t always get you there. Sometimes the gear is so large, air lifting it in wont get you there either. So what to do? How about a ginormous sky balloon?
To give you an idea of the type of problem this Australian company [Skylifter] is trying to solve; a helicopter is the only aircraft which can float in a product of great size or weight to a remote location – but it’s got limitations. A helicopter can only carry about 50 tons of gear. What if the stuff weighs more than 50 tons?
The balloon is 150-meters wide and could carry up to 150 tons. The balloon would have a flight range of 1240 miles and would act like a parachute on decent to make a gentle touchdown. A mini RC version of the balloon is now being tested and is 9 feet across. It can carry about 1 pound with a full-size prototype set to start building in the coming three years.
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We have already seen 