The Inquisitr » USB

Piss Off Your Co-Workers With The USB Prankster Dongle

James Allen Johnson — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:58:27 +0000

As if fighting over TPS reports isn’t enough for most workers, now you can piss off your fellow cubicle friends by hijacking their PC’s with the USB Prankster device, a plug and play option that provides instant headaches for your co-worker victims.

Just plug in the device and then enable the Caps Lock, Keyboard or Mouse functions. Once enabled Caps Lock will be enabled or disabled at random intervals, the users keyboard will go crazy sporadically and their mouse will develop a mind of its own.

Thankfully the dongle won’t delete quarterly reports or email that pissed off email you wrote about your boss to the management team, but it does provide a few brief moments of office prankster fun.

The USB Prankster is available for £19.99 ($33 USD), although their currently sold out at the ThumbsUpUk online store. [Switched]

Sony finalizes specs for a 2TB flash memory stick

Steven Hodson — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 02:15:00 +0000

Back at CES 2009 Sony was bragging that they were working on a 2TB size flash drive but at that point they still hadn’t got all their ducks in row – hence they have nothing concrete to show off. That could all change soon as the company said today that they have finalized all the specifications surround the 2TB flash drive.

A new page on Sony’s boss-formats.org website has listed all of the details for the Memory Stick XC, which is really exciting especially considering that the form factor for these new flash cards are (on paper) the same as pre-existing memory sticks, which means that these high capacity juggernauts are most likely backwards compatible. The entire cast and crew are back, including Duo, Micro, and the HG variants. Additionally, the XC series also uses the much more efficient exFAT file system, while the PRO series uses FAT12/16/32. The 2TB Memory Stick Duo picture used in this story is a photoshop by yours truly, but this won’t be much different than the real thing. License agreements for the Memory Stick XC are now available to interested hardware manufacturers.

Source: Sony Insider :: Sony Finalizes Backwards Compatible Memory Stick XC With 2TB Maximum Capacity

hat tip to FreshBump

10 excellent ways to use that lowly USB drive

Steven Hodson — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:10:00 +0000

USB drives can be found just about everywhere these days in all shapes and sizes. While most of us just use them to transport data around there are some other really great uses that they can make them even handier. Much thanks to Greg Shultz at TechRepublic for pointing these great ideas out.

Run Portable Apps

This idea while useful in a general sense for the average computer user is a boon to computer techs and security folks. The idea is that you load it up with application and give it a handy menu interface and you have a utility toolbox to go. You can either create your own or if you aren’t feeling that adventurous you can always drop by PortableApps.com and get a ready made package you can download and install to that USB.

If you are of a mind to build your own I’m going to shamelessly promote the forum community around one of my other personal blogs and suggest you check out the forum post that gives you a tutorial for creating your own portable apps USB.

If you would like a good in-depth review of the offering available at PortableApps.com you can read one over at my WinExtra blog as well.

Boot an Operating System

While you can’t boot OS X from a USB drive yet you can with Windows XP and just about any version of Linux. Unfortunately without help this isn’t something for the faint of heart but luckily there are tutorials out there to help you. Check here for how to setup XP to boot from a USB and if Linux is your poison of OS choice there is this helping hand here.

Create a password reset disk

This helpful little hint is geared more towards Windows users who have forgotten their password. With Vista you can use a USB drive rather than a floppy to create a reset disk. TechRepublic has a post telling you how to do achieve this.

Manage those USB drives

On the off chance that all you are using those USB drives for it to transport files and other data you should maybe drop by the Microsoft TechNet Magazine site and grab a copy of the Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager. Once installed you can easily copy files to and from your drive, back up and restore the entire USB drive to and from your hard disk.

Connect to a wireless network

Wireless networks are great and to help keep them great you can use the Wireless Network Setup Wizard in ZP or the Windows Connect Now feature in Vista to save your wireless network configuration to the USB drive. Once down you can use that drive to help setup quickly and easily other computers to your wireless network.

Password protect it

As USB drives become more and more popular the chances of them being used to transport sensitive data that you don’t want prying eye to get at becomes more likely. To help you protect that data you can check out Rohos Mini Drive which will let you create a secret partition on that USB drive and then password-protect/encrypt the partition.

Boost performance

One of the more interesting features of Vista was the ability to use a USB drive in conjunction with the ReadyBoost technology to speed up your system. ReadyBoost uses the storage space on the drive as an additional memory cache. Because flash memory is more responsive than a hard drive the ReadyBoost provided cache can really improve your system’s responsiveness. To use it is as simple as inserting the USB drive and follow the onscreen prompts.

Lock up your PC

Using your USB drive and a program called Predator you basically create a key that will lock or unlock your computer. As long as the USB drive is connected to your computer it will operate as normal but when you remove it the keyboard and mouse are disabled and your monitor goes dark. To unlock it and return operations to normal just plug the USB back in.

Use it as an MP3 player

Has the office blues got you down because you can’t for whatever reason listen to music while you work. Well the simple answer is that pretty well every standard install of Windows will include Windows Media Player – unless of course your IT department is overly anal – so all you have to do is load up your USB drive with your MP3 you want to listen to and then when at work start up Windows Media Player and point it to the USB drive. At that point just tell it to create a library of the music and you are good to go.

Run a website

For web developers this could be a real boon as all you need is a USB drive and an install of Server2Go. Once setup what you have is a full fledged server that supports Apache, PHP, MySQL and Perl right from the USB drive. You can use Server2Go right out of the box and on all versions of Windows.

You to can now have a monitor wall – or pretty damn close

Steven Hodson — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:45:37 +0000

I still remember when I first hooked up a second monitor and found myself in dual monitor heaven. I wouldn’t ever want to go back to a single monitor unless absolutely forced to. Two monitors as nice as that might be is slowly becoming ‘old school’ as we are slowly getting the tools needed to attach even more monitors to our desktop computers.

Much like the team over at SlipperyBrick did when they heard about HP’s new USB graphics adapter that will let you connect .. get ready for it …. seven monitors and via USB.

Damn.

Their report on this wondrous event can be read on their site but the sort of it is that with the exception of video under certain conditions being problematic the whole experience was rather cool:

What did work well however is any graphics or video that we viewed through a browser or setup as a background display. (We had a little help from UltraMon for the background displays.) We used the Internet Explorer browser and were able to easily view a different web page on each monitor with a different browser instance, and were able to span a single browser across all monitors without noticing even a stutter. We could even open large images in a browser window and span that across all seven displays with little noticeable increase in the processor work.

Damn.

Quirky Split Sticks Seperate Personal Life From Business

James Allen Johnson — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:25:16 +0000

The developers over at Quirky have developed a new USB stick that promises to keep your personal life personal and your business life where it belongs, at work. The drives comes in a variety of colors and offer a new and unique way to separate work and pleasure.

The drives work by offering a toggle switch which can be flipped to one side for business and one side for pleasure. As the picture shown above indicates there’s also other ways you can use these drives, for example “his and hers” files for couples looking to share their drives. They even get a little naughty suggesting X Rated and G Rated splits.

According to the official pre-release page:

The quirky Split Stick is two, two-gigabyte retractable USB drives that are built into one slim (four gigabyte) stick. Formed of an anodized aluminum body and encased in a protective rubber membrane. We’re anodizing the device in a range of colors: orange, blue, pink, red, black, violet, grey, or green. This plastic button allows you to easily navigate between the two different sides of the drive.

The drives are $19.99, however they will only be available once the pre-order threshold is reached. At the time of this article 42 out of 200 drives have been ordered. Don’t worry they don’t charge your card until the threshold is reached. [via Quirky]

Your personal chainsaw madness from Resident Evil 5

Steven Hodson — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:48:10 +0000

USB flash drives come in all kinds of strange configurations whether it be a rubber chicken to cup warmers. If you are a gamer and looking to pick up a new Resident Evil 5 for Xbox 360 bundle you could find yourself as one of the lucky owners of a USB chainsaw. The idea being I guess that you can carry around your zombie killing fetish with you and illicit all kinds of strange stares.

Of course not everyone will want to fork over the money for the Xbox bundle just to be able to wave this miniature chainsaw around in the air. For those people some scouring of eBay might be in order as some of these have been spotted with a price tag of $22.

Happy slashing.

[hat tip to SlipperyBrick / picture courtesy of Everything USB]

A 2GB Chicken Drumstick

Steven Hodson — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:03:33 +0000

I realize that USB flash drives can be rather boring especially from a marketing point of view and as such we are always seeing different ways to get people to buy them. There has been everything from the quirky to the cool but there is another class of just downright stupid and this offering doesn’t even pass the cutesy level on its way down to idiotic.

The idea of wandering around with a chicken drumstick or a slab of pork that is doubling as a USB flash drive is just something that I can’t see myself doing. What’s even worse is that you can’t just leave it lying around if you have a cat or dog in the house because the next thing you know your cutesy flash drive could end up costing you a major vet bill.

Of course if chicken or port isn’t up your alley you can always check out the supplier of this fine electronic trinket and get a strwaberry, layer cake or even a hamburger one. Either way I just think the whole idea of fruit or meat flash drives is dumb.

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