Not that a Mr Burns USB webcam should make anyone’s short list for Valentine’s Day, I did find this on Amazon while shopping for my better half. For a whopping $44 you can enjoy this mediocre 640 x 480 plastic webcam which coincidentally shows off your love for prime-time cartoon shows. Not to pass judgment on those types.
For those of you who caught interest because of the geeky phrase “USB webcam” you might want to try this for a more rewarding purchase.
Vista Readyboost® has seen plenty of press over the last 18 months and although some feel it’s not all that beneficial for those who are drinking the cool aid, you can now get Readyboost for your Windows XP machine.
eBoostr works just like Vista Readyboost® where you can use additional memory, such as flash memory, to increase a computers performance. With the newly developed eBoostr™, the booting of your OS and applications is much faster thanks to the smart caching mechanism.
For those who use a laptop as their primary computer, the eBoostr software could really increase performance since laptop hard drives are much slower than mini-tower PCs (to increase battery life) and thus take longer to launch applications and boot up the system.
With eBoostr you have all the benefits of Vista Readyboost with the ability to use both USB and non-USB flash memory. The eBoostr software allows you to assign up to 4 individual devices to enhance performance and each device can cache up to 4GBs worth of application data – or 16GBs total.
You can try eBoostr for free with no expiration, but the software only works for 4 hours after boot-up. To purchase the full version would be $29.
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It’s always been a gas to report on those strange USB drives floating around and I thought we had seen it all with the Spongebob drive, Biscuit drive and Star Wars Pez drives, but today I bring you yet another.
Minimoo brings us four new USB animal drives to place into our “useless novelty” category [although not useless, sure is goofy]. As the flagship product we have the USB turtle, Göran.
Next up we have Fredrick the USB gorilla, Jan the USB sheep and Maud the USB pig.
The common USB sizes are available which are 1, 2 & 4GB with prices between $43-$75.
I’ve got a brother-in-law scared to death of turtles, so I’d love to get him Göran. The look on his face when a USB turtle is sticking out his USB port would be legendary. Although probably not to funny to you.
Anyway – getting your veterinarian a “thank you” tech gift or starting your own USB animal collection would never be easier, thanks to Minimoo of course.
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Click – Hard drive locked and encrypted.
Click – Hard drive unlocked and ready for use.
Yup, that’s it for security when using the RFID USB hard drive enclosure. The enclosure is designed to hold any number of 2.5 inch hard drives and with the embedded RFID technology a simple RFID ringkey is all that holds your data safe and secure.
Upon connection to your system, the RFID key identifies the USB hard drive for setup and connection, from that point forward the USB enclosure needs the same RFID signal to lock and unlock the drive.Several LED light configurations provide status: Red for lock, Green for unlock and Blue for write process.
With all this high tech RFID security, you can still be a knucklehead
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Our good friends at GizmosForGeeks cruised through CES’08 this year and one of their highly recommend products was the Pinnacle Video Transfer unit from Pinnacle Systems. The point of this device is making the record, copy and transfer of your favorite video (TV, DVD etc) to your iPod [or other hand held device] quick and easy.
As seen here, USB is the answer for plug-n-play connection and the Video Transfer box gives three settings for video quality. Your setting choice will dictate the file size and resolution quality. The video input options include S-video or Composite video.
The Gizmo guys had a moment to demo the unit and reported the unit was easy to use, compact and simple in operation.
The Pinnacle Video Transfer box will be available later this month for just $129.
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Markus Bischof is a Germany craftsman who’s recently applied his skills to the creation of hand crafted USB drives.
Made from extremely old wood and veneers it’s hard to believe a single tree hasn’t been (recently) cut down for it’s creation. Rather, the materials used, come from old wood collections where the wood is as hard as stone and incredibly smooth to the touch. For example some USB drives where made from an old pipe organ built in 1839 and dismantled years ago.
It’s clear these materials aren’t collected from local trees but rather hand crafted and hold a historical past from the materials used.
The image above is a sample shot which the German Bundesumweltminister (Federal Environment Minister) ordered as a representative giveaway to the ministers of other countries.
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Not to anyone’s surprise…the USB 3.0 jacks and sockets look exactly the same. Go figure, as part of the specification is to be backward compatible. But taking a closer look, you do see some differences.
The folks from Register Hardware had a peak at the USB 3.0 connectors while at CES 2008 this year. As you can see from the image below, the USB 3.0 sockets have an additional row of connectors. The connectors located in front are to keep the backward compatibility to USB 1.1 and USB 2.0. The connectors placed behind this first row are for USB 3.0.
The new USB 3.0 specification is promising transfer speeds 10 times greater than current 2.0 standards – to that of 4.7Gb/s. There is also a fiber optics connector which hasn’t been made available yet.
As the USB 3.0 specification is expected to be finalized sometime in June of 2008 – we can expect to see product following by the end of this year. Although I am looking forward to the new, faster USB 3.0 spec, not everyone shares the same love. Here is what some are saying:
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SentrySafe is the first [I think] Safe manufacturer to include USB connectivity for external access. We’ll get to the USB portion soon enough, but lets take a look at the physical characteristics of the SentrySafe Fire-Safe.
In the picture above, I am talking about the larger two Safes in the back. The sizes are available in 1.2 or 2.0 cu feet sizes. Are fire resistant for up to 2 hours and can sit in water up to 8 inches. A perfect Safe for the home or office.
Now on to the USB Safe portion: Sizing allows for 120CDs or DVDs with door pockets to hold hard drives. In the door pocket sits USB connectivity to an external USB port. From here, outside of safe, you have digital access to the hard drives inside. This is a nice twist for those who need high security for their hard drives.
However, and I can see it now, you need to encrypt your hard drive. Saving your digital data physically is only half the battle. Here is some free open source USB encryption software that’ll work great with any hard drive.
As a closing note, if you have a window office spot, and the safe happens to fall out during an blaze, she’s good for a drop up to 30 feet. Cost is $420 for the 1.2 cu ft and $520 for the 2.0 cu ft version.
SentrySafe USB Fire Safe
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Well, it’s probably a good idea to vaccine your dog too, but today we can apply that term to something new, USB drives.
LG Electronics launched a Vaccine USB drive equipped with anti virus and malware protection software. Appartently the first of it’s kind.
The Vaccine USB protects the UFD in real-time during operation. There is a built-in autorun feature which constantly monitors data being transferred on the UFD device. The Vaccine USB monitors both
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No, I’m not a “player” but the iPlayer is a nice piece of technology for cocktail conversations. The iPlayer is a standalone video player which can run content from a number of different flash media cards or USB drives. In addition, the iPlayer may be connected to either your TV or monitor.
The iPlayer has the ability to quickly and easily share photos, music and movies on your TV or monitor.
Sure, for the home user this might not be the ideal USB gadget for viewing your favorite content, BUT if you are running a business and doing trade shows the iPlayer is clearly worth a second look. The iPlayer makes it easy to set up a video displays without needing a PC or TV. With the combination of the iPlayer and monitor (flat screen I’d assume) you could have a slick looking trade show presentation in little time.
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Transcend has built a great name for themselves with the Jetflash UFD product line. It’s been tested as one of the fastest drives on the market, simple designs which are small and compact.
The new Transcend Jetflash V33 is no exception. At just 60 x 16 x 8 mm in size and 7g of weight the 1 through 8GB size would hardly let you know they are there.
As with all Jetflash UFDs you have the option of downloading the Jetflash Elite software package for personal UFD management. The software suite includes:
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Luigi of I4U had some time yesterday to review the PNY IronKey USB 4GB UFD. In short it’s a great security device but you give up performance for such security.
The PNY IronKey uses AES encryption which is always on and keys generated by the on-board cryptochip uses FIPS 140-2 true compliant random number generation. Since the IronKey uses the cryptochip the keys used to generate access never leave the UFD (and onto computer).
The PNY IronKey has an on board stealth browser via Firefox and is entirely incased with a water tight sealant which sits underneath the rugged, outside enclosure.
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