Flick Studio is making these trucks with the hopes that companies will be interested in purchasing them for their own advertising purposes. The idea comes from trucks that are already out there, which feature rolling ads. This takes the concept to a whole new (and likely expensive) level.

Information about FlickTruck is scarce. The FlickTruck site only shows a couple videos (which offer no real details) and a GPS tracker tracking the journey of one of the trucks, "Flick-2". However, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas recently, WebProNews spoke with David McDonald of Flick Studio (FlickStudio.com or FlickTruck.com).

As you can see, it’s a truck with 3 big TVs built in. The displays are higher than 1080p. The are WUXGA and can be viewed easily in broad daylight.

Flick Studio began producing the trucks six months ago, and currently there are only two of them. Those are just to drive around executives who are interested in the technology. Who knows where they will go from there?

Related Articles:

> Checking Out Boxee’s Version of the Future of TV

> A Close Up with Sony’s New Personal Internet Viewer

> The World’s Smallest USB Drive and Portable Hard Drive

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So where to take things next? Some are working on smaller, more slim and easy designs to take with you while others are working on adding as much space to the drive as possible. Every design has their own particular advantage. Even though designers really do their best they never seem to really add that bit of extra to the drives that they put on the market. Maybe it’s because they always have to compromise their designs in order to meet the manufacturing costs and compare it to the actual price in store to make the concept liable for a clean go for marketing.

When I saw a design conceptualized by designer Sokolova Ekateryna I was captured in an awe state. The design is pure beauty and the small eccentric features is speaking to my senses like I was mesmerized. Just the red textual status screen at the curvature end of the drive is so cool. I’d like to add a few of these drives to my air shelf made of glass to really showcase its awesomeness and creative use of imagination.

But, what really spoke to me when I saw it was the silver, glossy finish the drive inhabits.The pure shapes and the female curvature of the drive is just beauty in a box. I hope this drive will be available before soon. When it is, I’ll make an initial order of four.

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Photo by Ingorrr.

Last week reader Brady C Knight asked what great apps people run while they’re sleeping, and it got us wondering, too. So before we throw it out to you, here’s a few suggestions from our end:

• Automate Your Self-Repairing Hard Drive
• Run CCleaner on a Schedule to Keep Your PC Crap-Free
• Back up your hard drive. For online backups, try one of these five best online backup tools (I particularly like Mozy); for local backups, see our previous guide to automatically backing up your hard drive.

You’ve also got your other common overnight stand-bys, like downloading large files over BitTorrent. Remember, as I said above, just because you’re running a few maintenance tasks or downloads overnight doesn’t mean you can’t also save some energy when your computer isn’t working; just check out a few of our favorite methods for automatically shutting down your computer at a certain time for help in that arena.

Now let’s hear your thoughts: Share the apps and maintenance tools your computer’s running while you sleep in the comments.

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Read the rest of MyDitto Cloud NAS Revealed [Cloud-Accessible NAS Lets You Access Your Data Anywhere, Via Thumb Drive]

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WebProNews got a look at some of the company’s upcoming offerings, which can be viewed in the following clip:

Among the Verbatim’s upcoming offerings are the "smalest USB drive in the world and the "smallest portable hard drive in the world). These are the "Tuff-’N'-Tiny" USB drive and the Titan SX portable hard drive. The former, which is waterproof, dust proof, and shock resistant comes with password protectection software, and in 2, 4, 8, and 16GB capacities. The price points are affordable too, with the 2GB drive priced at $12.95 and the soon to be released 16GB drive retailing for $86.99. The Titan SX portable hard drive will come in 320, 500, and 640 GB capacities at the end of February, and up to a TB by Q3.

Also on display was the upcoming InSight USB portable hard drive with always-on LCD display.  Check out the video to catch a glimpse of the products.

Keep an eye out on WebProNews and the WebProNews Video Blog for more interviews and product demos from CES.
 

Related Articles:

> A Print Shop for a New Decade

> A Close Up with Sony’s New Personal Internet Viewer

> HP Unveils New Touch Notebook and Some New Minis at CES

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The first product showcased is the Tuff-’N’-Tidy drive, which Verbatim is touting as the “smallest USB drive in the world”. The T-n-T line will be available in 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB – which will be available later in the year.

In keeping with the ’smallest in the world’ theme, Verbatim showed off their Titan XS portable hard drive lineup. These devices are made with portability in mind. They will be releasing with 320GB, 500GB, and 640GB options. A 1TB (terabyte) version will release sometime in Q3.

The final Verbatim Item from CES 2010 is their Insight USB portable hard drive. While not being the smallest in the world, they have a sleek design. A “cholesteric” LCD display allows users to show a custom title, and shows the amount of hard drive space left. The product will release in 320GB, and 500 GB capacities.

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LG has shown off a bright new Blu-Ray player that is the world’s first to come with its own hard drive built into the box. Unfortunately – it’s not for ‘backing up’ your Blu-Ray movies to a hard drive. Instead, it’s for storing music and other media files so you can make the Blu-Ray player the centerpiece in your media setup.

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SuperTalent have unveiled what they proudly bill as being the world’s first mobile USB 3.0 flash drive in the form of the SuperTalent USB 3.0 RAIDDrive which boasts data transfer speeds of around five time that offered by comparable USB 2.0 devices.
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Today on the company blog, Boxee revealed the specs for the Boxee Box and announced that the Boxee Beta is now officially open to the public.

Lots of us at Team Mashable are big fans of Boxee, the media center with a social twist. The company and its software have made some big announcements at CES this week, including the unveiling of the Boxee Box that it’s releasing in conjunction with D-Link later this spring.

I’ve been using the Boxee Beta for several weeks and it’s quite impressive. The UI overhaul is significantly better, and moving from one app or programing source to another is efficient and quick. You can download Boxee for Mac OS X, Windows or Ubuntu Linux.

Boxee Box Specs

Barb had a hands-on with the Boxee Box and its super-cool remote yesterday, but today Boxee has revealed the guts of the $200 device.

The highlights:

Powered by the Tegra 2 (T20) — a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU
NVIDIA Graphicsthat can play 1080p video from locally stored content and stream HD content
Utilizes Adobe Flash 10.1, meaning HD and web content should play back smoother and require fewer resources
RF remote (so you can hide the box behind a cabinet)
802.11n

Boxee also highlights what the Boxee Box won’t feature, namely a hard drive and an IR port. IR dongles will be supported (and I assume the Boxee iPhone app will work, since it connects via Wi-Fi), but the team was unable to get both IR and RF into the device. The QWERTY keyboard aspect of the Boxee Box’s remote does make a strong case for using the packaged remote, even if you’re a universal remote junkie (like me) with a Logitech Harmony One or similar controller.

As for the hard drive, it’s not being built into the box as a way of keeping costs low. The beauty of something like the Boxee Box is that it can take content from your entire network and display it in your living room. You can connect a hard drive directly to the Boxee Box via USB if you really do want to have more localized media storage and streaming.

As a Boxee fan, I can’t wait for this device to hit shelves. What about you? What do you think of the Boxee Box? Have you tried the Boxee Beta?

Tags: boxee, boxee beta, boxee box, CES 2010

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A lot of people use external hard drives for backing up important data, but what do you do with very important data, like priceless scanned photos from your grandparents, or the account numbers for your Swiss bank account? ioSafe has got you covered, with their new Solo SSD drive, a “military grade” external SSD.

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Taiwan’s BenQ has shown off a new ultraportable notebook computer that is absolutely filled with the latest and greatest in computer technology. Not only does the new notebook come in at less than an inch-thick, it also features Pine Trail and both a regular hard drive and a solid state drive.

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Read the rest of BenQ Joybook Lite U103 Ultraportable Notebook Revealed [New Ultraportable Combines SSD, HDD drives, 3D sounds, Pine Trail]

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WD has revealed its first-ever hard drive unit to feature a lightning fast USB 3.0 connection.  The WD MyBook 3.0 will be available in two models, a 1TB or 2TB version that will hit the street starting at just $180.

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The Team Group is showing off a new flash drive, the X092 that features both eSATA and a USB 2.0 connection, giving you a choice of a conventional USB port or the new, superfast, eSATA port. Yesterday, we covered a similar device from A-DATA. This could be a coming trend of eSATA-USB hybrid drives.

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If you’re running Windows 2000 and above—unfortunately excluding Windows Vista and Windows 7 home editions—you can easily restrict access to local drives by changing a flag in the Local Group Policy Editor, which is launched by typing gpedit.msc in the run box, and selecting which drives you would like to restrict. Over at How-To Geek they explain:

Now navigate to User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Windows Explorer. Then on the right side under Setting, double click on Prevent access to drives from My Computer.

From there you can access the drive restriction options seen in the screenshot above and select which drives you would like to restrict. For a screen-by-screen walkthrough and additional tips, check out the full guide at How-To Geek. Have another trick or tip for Windows security using built-in tools? Let’s hear about it in the comments below.

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A new flash drive, the N002, from A-DATA features both eSATA and USB 3.0 ports on, covering you in both new data transfer ports. This is just the first in a ton of USB 3.0 gear that is starting to come out, even though there aren’t any Intel USB 3.0 capable chipsets yet. A-DATA’s N002 combo flash drive can be used with USB 3.0, USB 2.0 or eSATA ports.

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National Geographic Magazine, the popular American magazine covering geography, history and archeology has released all of their issues from 1888 to 2008 on a portable 160GB hard drive. Each issue is presented in high-resolution .pdf format and NatGeo has promised updates as the years go on.

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More and more USB 3.0 gadgets are starting to come out and PQI has introduced one of the first USB 3.0 flash drives. The PQI U366 Cool Drive features a 3.0 USB connection for super fast data transfer rates, and the storage sizes of the flash drive are bigger than usual.

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National Geographic, the legendary yellow magazine that’s been an important part of many young nerd’s childhood, has been around since 1888. Even if you have a very large room dedicated to storing the magazine, that’s a lot of issues.

Thanks to modern technology, however, you can now have all those issues on one 160 GB hard drive, and it’ll still leave you a full 100 GB to spend on data of your choice.

Besides all the magazine issues, and the accompanying maps (which, some would say, are equally valuable as the mag itself), this collection will get you an app that helps you search through this vast amount of text and photos, a trivia game, and the ability to personalize your collection by saving your favorite articles. You’ll also get a DVD with a National Geographic behind-the-scenes documentary, and all of this will set you back for $199.95. If you’ve been late with your Christmas gift, this is a perfect chance to redeem yourself.

Tags: hard drive, national geographic

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Those interested in USB 3.0-powered external hard drives may be put off by the price, for example, the Buffalo HD-HU3 costs over $200. For those people, Brando has introduced a low-cost USB 3.0 to SATA adapter dongle that will let you turn any SATA hard drive into a cheap USB 3.0 powered external drive.

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Read the rest of Brando USB 3.0-SATA Adpater Revealed [New Brando Adapater Turns SATA HDDs Into External USB 3.0 HDDs]

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Millions of people risk losing their unprotected, critical data every day. As the amount of unprotected data stored on multiple devices increases, it becomes harder to synchronize and easier to lose. Keeping data secure, synchronized, backed up and available can be expensive and require in-house IT expertise. Whether you are online or offline, working at the office or on the road, Nomadesk allows business teams to secure, sync and share data with no limits or new interface to learn.

Each Nomadesk virtual fileserver acts just like a hard drive, storing important documents in one place with local and remote access from a PC, Mac or iPhone. You simply drag and drop your files into a virtual fileserver and files are automatically encrypted, backed up and available for file sharing. With Nomadesk, you can organize your files and folders just like any hard drive on your computer with no new interface to learn.

http://nomadesk.com/

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Lacie has revealed the Lacie Rikiki Portable Hard Drive, the world’s smallest 2.5″ hard drive on the market.  The Lacie Rikiki packs up to 640GB of storage into a tiny, USB 2.0 self-powered unit.

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Here’s what happened:

1. The server experienced routine hard drive failure.
2. Because of the hard drive failure, the virtual machine image hosting this blog was corrupted.
3. Because the blog was hosted in a virtual machine, the standard daily backup procedures at the host were unable to ever back it up.
4. Because I am an idiot, I didn’t have my own (recent) backups of Coding Horror. Man, I wish I had read some good blog entries on backup strategies!
5. Because there were no good backups, there was catastrophic data loss. Fin, draw curtain, exeunt stage left.

At first, I was upset with our provider, CrystalTech.

I am still confused how the most common, routine, predictable, and mundane of server hardware failures — losing a mechanical hard drive — could cause such extreme data loss carnage. What about, oh, I don’t know, a RAID array? Aren’t they designed to prevent this kind of single point of failure drive loss catastrophe? Isn’t a multi drive RAID array sort of standard on datacenter servers? I know we have multi-drive RAID arrays are on all of our Stack Overflow servers.

I also wish their routine backup procedures had greater awareness of virtual machine images. While I’ll grant you that backing up a live virtual machine is somewhat complex, and typically requires special operating system support and API hooks, it is not exactly an unknown science at this point in time. Heck, At the very least, just let us know when the backup has been regularly failing each day, every day, for years.

Then I belatedly realized that this was, after all, my data. And it is irresponsible of me to leave the fate of my data entirely in someone else’s hands, regardless of how reliable they may or may not be. Responsibility for my data begins with me. If I haven’t taken appropriate measures, who am I to cast aspersions on others for not doing the same? Glass houses and all that.

So, I absolve CrystalTech of all responsibility in this matter. They’ve given us a great deal on our dedicated server, and performance and reliability (with one recent, uh… exception) have been excellent to date. It is completely my fault that I neglected to have proper backups in place for Coding Horror. Well, technically, I did have a backup but it was on the virtual machine itself. Does that count? No? Halfsies?

Apparently, I was gambling that nothing bad would ever happen at the datacenter. Because that’s what you’re doing when you run without your own backups. Gambling.

I’ll add gambling to the long, long list of things I suck at.

Now that I’ve apologized, it’s time to let the healing begin. And by healing, I mean the excruciatingly painful process of reconstructing Coding Horror from internet caches and the few meager offsite backups I do have. My first order of business was to ask on SuperUser what strategies people recommend for recovering a lost website with no backup. Strategies other than berating me for my obvious mistake. Also, comments are currently disabled while the site is being reconstructed from static HTML. Oh, darn!

I’ll let my son Rock Hard Awesome stand in for the zinger of a comment that I know some of you were just dying to leave.

I’m not saying I don’t deserve it. Consider me totally zingatized.

I mentioned my woes on Twitter and I was humbled by the outpouring of community support. Thanks to everyone who reached out with support of any kind. It is greatly appreciated.

I was able to get a static HTML version of Coding Horror up almost immediately thanks to Rich Skrenta of blekko.com. He kindly provided a tarball of every spidered page on the site. Some people have goals, and some people have big hairy audacious goals. Rich’s is especially awe-inspiring: taking on Google on their home turf of search. That’s why he just happened to have a complete text archive of Coding Horror at hand. Rich, have I ever told you that you’re my hero? Anyway, you’re viewing the static HTML version of Coding Horror right now thanks to Rich. Surprisingly, there’s not a tremendous amount of difference between a static HTML version of this site and the live site. One of the benefits of being a minimalist, I suppose.

That pretty much solved all my text post recovery problems in one fell swoop. Through this process, I’ve learned that anything even remotely popular you put on the web will be archived as text, forever, by a dozen different web spiders. I don’t think you can actually lose text you post on the web. Not in any meaningful sense; I’m not sure it’s possible. As long as you’re willing to spend the time digging through web spider archives in some form (and yes, I did cheat mightily), you can always get textual content back, all of it.

The blog images, however, are another matter entirely. I have learned the hard way that there are almost no organizations spidering and storing images on the web. Yes, there is archive.org, and God bless ‘em for that. But they have an impossible job they’re trying to do with limited resources. Beyond that, there’s … well, frankly, a whole lot of nothing. A desperate, depressing void of nothing. In fact, if you can only back up one thing on your public website, it should be the images. Because that’s the thing you’ll have the most difficulty recovering when catastrophe happens. I’m planning to donate $100 to archive.org, as I have a whole new appreciation for how rare an internet-wide full archive service — one that includes images — really is.

That said, There are some limited, painful avenues to explore for recovering lost website images. I started with an ancient complete backup from mid 2006 with full images. And then Maciej Ceglowski of the nifty full-archive bookmarking service pinboard.in generously contributed about 200 blog posts that he had images for.

I also went through a period when I was going on a bandwidth diet and experimenting with hosting Coding Horror images elsewhere on the web. I’m slowly going through and recovering images locally from there. Beyond that, several avid Coding Horror readers contributed some archived images — so thanks to Yasushi Aoki, Marcin Gołębiowski, Peter Mortensen, and anybody else I’ve forgotten.

Also, I should point out that a few enterprising programmers have proposed clever schemes for automatic recovery of images, such as Niyaz with his blog post Get cached images from your visitors, and John Siracusa with his highly voted 304 idea. I haven’t had time to follow up on these yet but they seem plausible to me.

I’ve restored all the images I have so far, but it’s still woefully incomplete. The most important part of Coding Horror is definitely the text of the posts, but I do have some regrets that I’ve lost key images from many blog posts, including those about my son. It feels like irresponsible parenting, in the broadest possible sense of the words.

The process of image recovery is still ongoing. If you’d like to contribute lost Coding Horror images, please do. I’d be more than happy to mail stickers on my dime to anyone who contributes an image that is currently a 404 on the site.

What can we all learn from this sad turn of events?

1. I suck.
2. No, really, I suck.
3. Don’t rely on your host or anyone else to back up your important data. Do it yourself. If you aren’t personally responsible for your own backups, they are effectively not happening.
4. If something really bad happens to your data, how would you recover? What’s the process? What are the hard parts of recovery? I think in the back of my mind I had false confidence about Coding Horror recovery scenarios because I kept thinking of it as mostly text. Of course, the text turned out to be the easiest part. The images, which I had thought of as a “nice to have”, were more essential than I realized and far more difficult to recover. Some argue that we shouldn’t be talking about “backups”, but recovery.
5. It’s worth revisiting your recovery process periodically to make sure it’s still alive, kicking, and fully functional.
6. I’m awesome! No, just kidding. I suck.

So when, exactly, is International Backup Awareness Day? Today. Yesterday. This week. This month. This year. It’s a trick question. Every day is International Backup Awareness Day. And the sooner I figure that out, the better off I’ll be.

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Apparently it’s not only the dudes who find it hard to come up with a gift for their loved ones, we on TFTS can confirm that women have a tough time to make the perfect present for this holiday season, too. Well the Mitsubishi RVR is not yet on the market, we already own a “few” smartphones (although a Droid would be nice), already work on powerful computers, so how about something that would make us stand out from other in the geek world? Check out the limited edition Aero Bang Drive ACF watch coming from Swiss-based watchmaker Hublot.

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Read the rest of Limited Edition Hublot Aero Bang Drive ACF Timepiece Announced [Elegant Aero Bang Drive ACF Watch by Hublot for the Fashion-conscious Geek]

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Downloading child pornography is not a crime to be taken lightly. While we’ve all seen the To Catch a Predator episodes, it may come as shock to find out that the mere presence of child pornography on your computer’s hard drive is enough to send you to prison for 20 years.

Matthew White of Sacramento is learning this lesson the hard way. The 22 year-old man is facing hard time for downloading child porn, “accidentally.”

White claims that after using Limewire to download “College Girls Gone Wild,” he discovered that inappropriate images of children were also downloaded. Upon the discovery, White claims the photos were immediately deleted.

Now White faces up to 20 years in prison and plans to plead guilty, on the advice of his lawyer, in the hopes of getting a 3.5 year sentence instead (though he will have to register as a sex offender when released).

CBS in Sacramento covered the story, and White’s story is as follows:

“It didn’t appeal to me,” he said. “I was looking for women my age, so I just wanted to download ‘College Girls Gone Wild’ and accidentally downloaded underage pornography.”

About a year later, FBI agents showed up at his family’s home. The family agreed to let agents examine the computer, and at first, they couldn’t find anything.

Investigators later were able to recover the deleted images from deep within the hard drive.

“I asked them, ‘Where did you get that? I don’t remember that.’ I asked them, ‘Could I access that if I wanted to?’” Matt said. “They said no.”

It appears as if the law has no lenience for accidents when it comes to child porn. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, the only option you have to avoid White’s fate is to report the incident to the authorities immediately.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, helenecanada.

Tags: child pornography, matthew white

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A new solid-state drive has been announced today, the Micron RealSSD C300. The new model promises to be the fastest drive for notebooks and desktops. In fact the company says the C300 is going to be the first to deliver native SATA 6GB/s speeds which is definitely worth remembering next time you’re buying a SSD drive.
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The PSPgo, released just two months ago, is a new verison of Sony’s PSP handheld that instead of featuring the traditional UMD drive – features 16GB of flash memory to store games and video. A rumor today is reporting that accessory company Logitech is working on an add-on for the PSPgo that would add a UMD drive.

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Black Friday is upon us and retailers online and off have brought out the big guns for the busiest shopping day of the year. While most of the doorbusters are long gone, you can still catch some terrific bargains online.

We scoured ads, online deal sites, and our Twitter accounts (hey, if we have to work today, we’re going to try to shop at the same time) and found five can’t miss deals.

Amazon.com $150 off MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops — Lots of sites have Apple stuff on sale today — even the Apple Store — but only Amazon offers free shipping, no tax (unless you live in Washington), and an instant $150 off either the 13″ MacBook ($849 today only), the 13″ MacBook Pro ($1049 today only) and the 15″ MacBook Pro ($1549 today only). If you are looking at getting a portable Apple laptop, think about doing it today.

1 TB LaCie External hard drive — BH Photo Video has the fashionable and spacious Lacie external hard drive for $90. It’s one of the best prices you can find on a 1 TB external drive right now.

$30 Canon Multifunction Printer — Office Depot has the Canon PIXMA MP490 for just $30 after a $70 instant savings. The price is good through tomorrow. Print photos, make copies and scan documents.

Sony HDTV and Blu-ray Combo — BH Photo Video has a Sony 42″ LCD HDTV (120hz) and a Sony Blu-ray Live enabled Blu-ray player paired together for just $804. If you’re looking at upgrading your home theater this season, this is a great package.

$529 Toshiba 40″ HDTV” – Tiger Direct is selling a 40″ Toshiba 1080p HDTV for $529 plus shipping. It’s a great deal for this particular set and Tiger Direct is donating at least $100,000 to the Susan G. Korman Foundation this weekend.

What are the best deals you’ve managed to find? Share them in the comments!

Tags: black friday, online shopping

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Want To Try Out Google Chrome OS For Yourself? Here’s How…

Most people won’t be ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So, in this article, they have put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free. It should only take about 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself).

Want To Try Out Google Chrome OS For Yourself? Here’s How…

Download Google Chrome OS and Run it from a USB Drive

Within 24 hours of its availabilty, the web was littered with disk images for running the new Google OS on virtual machines such as VMWare and VirtualBox. As an alternative, this article shows you how to run Chrome directly from a USB drive.

Download Google Chrome OS and Run it from a USB Drive

Download Google Chrome OS for free – gdgt

This is one of the many places to download the Google Chrome OS. Signup here , takes about 2 minutes, and then you can download it.
You will need VMWare Player or VirtualBox to run the OS.

Download Google Chrome OS for free – gdgt

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

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Buffalo have confirmed that their first SuperSpeed USB 3.0 external storage solution, the DriveStation HD-HXU3, is now available making it the first USB 3.0 external hard drive to commence shipping.
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Read the rest of Buffalo DriveStation HD-HXU3 USB 3.0 External HDD Now Shipping [SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Drive is First USB 3.0 HDD, Boasts 625MB/s Transfer Speeds]

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We’ve seen out fair share of novel (aka wacky) USB flash drives here at TFTS and now we have another distinctive flash drive to all to our collection in the form of this USB Grenade Flash Drive, which has just become available from ThinkGeek.
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Read the rest of Grenade USB Flash Drive Offers 8GB of ‘Explosive Data’ Capacity [Plug and Play Hand Grenade USB 2.0 Hits ThinkGeek]

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Imation has announced a brand new external hard drive which also happens to be the first wireless USB external hard drive in the world so far. We’re surrounded by more and more wireless devices so a wireless hard drive was probably bound to arrive. And it’s Imation the first company that came up with such a device, the Pro WX Wireless USB hard drive.
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Read the rest of Imation Pro WX Wireless USB Hard Drive Becomes Official [World’s First Wireless USB External Hard Drive Available for $450] (273 words)

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Most of the tech related products have managed to lose weight in the last few years, confirming that size does matter. Keeping to the trends, the folks from Active Media Wink have decided to design what they claim to be the world’s smallest flash drive.

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See: Wink Debuts Worlds Smallest 16GB Flash Drive [Waterproof & Shockproof Active Media Wink Flash Drives Are only 0.1" Thick]

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Steampunk 2GB Copper and Brass Jump Drive with Vintage Gears. Handcrafted 2gb jump drive made with vintage clock cog gearing detail. The jump drive has been carefully wrapped in a custom piece of brass. Added to it was an intricate stack gears gently removed from a vintage clock and watch.

The designer  attempted to capture the details of the gear. Copper piping along the sides and brass bolts make this piece truly unique. He capped the end with antiquated silver clock gears.  The drive is a 2gb and has never been used.  From a simple usb to a very stylish one.  What a great way to stand out in the office.

A mouse is a mouse but not when its a Steampunk mouse. Imagine bringing out your laptop and then your newly re designed steampunk one.  Steampunk has gone beyond the traditional  various modern utilitarian objects have been modded by enthusiasts into a pseudo-Victorian mechanical “steampunk” style.^[25][26] Example objects include computer keyboards and electric guitars The goal of such redesigns is to employ appropriate materials (such as polished brass, iron, and wood) with design elements and craftsmanship consistent with the Victorian era.

So go beyond the ordinary, be bold.

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One of those key bottlenecks — and in my experience, the one typical users are most likely to underestimate — is the hard drive. I’ve been a long time advocate of having a small, fast 10,000 RPM boot drive for your OS and key applications, and a larger, slower secondary drive for storage. The two drive approach is a smart strategy, regardless of your budget.

Hard drives may not be particularly sexy bits of hardware, but we’re on the verge of a major transition point in storage hardware — from physical, magnetic platters to solid state memory. I was an early solid state (SSD) drive adopter with my last laptop purchase, and it was a profound disappointment. Those first and second generation SSD drives turned out to be slower than their magentic equivalents, despite the eager promises of vendors. On top of that, they were incredibly expensive, and of limited capacity. Running Windows Vista on an early 32 gigabyte SSD was an exercise in pain and frustration on so many levels. What’s not to love? A lot.

I eventually sold that SSD and replaced it with a traditional hard drive. I had grown deeply disillusioned with SSD drives. That is, until I read Linus Torvalds’ report on the Intel X-25 SSD:

I can’t recall the last time that a new tech toy I got made such a dramatic difference in performance and just plain usability of a machine of mine.

The whole thing just rocks. Everything performs well. You can put that disk in a machine, and suddenly you almost don’t even need to care whether things were in your page cache or not. Firefox starts up pretty much as snappily in the cold-cache case as it does hot-cache. You can do package installation and big untars, and you don’t even notice it, because your desktop doesn’t get laggy or anything.

So here’s the deal: right now, don’t buy any other SSD than the Intel ones, because as far as I can tell, all the other ones are pretty much inferior to the much cheaper traditional disks, unless you never do any writes at all (and turn off ‘atime’, for that matter).

At that moment, SSD drives came of age. And by that I mean, they began to justify their hefty price premium at last. But that was almost a year ago, and even the Intel drives — as great as they were — had some teething problems. Not to mention that price and capacity were still ongoing concerns.

But when Intel introduced the second generation, mainstream X25-M drives, that’s when I knew SSDs were poised to go mainstream. Now, those drives are still anything but cheap, at $289 for 80 GB and $609 for 160 GB. But they offer more performance than the original X25-E that Linus reviewed, at about half the price, with hardware fixes to address the fragmentation issue that plagued the original model.

Intel was the only game in town for about a year, but fortunately for us consumers, the competition finally caught up. The new Indilinx controller models, such as this Crucial 128 GB SSD, are just as fast as the X25-M. And, best of all, they’re cheaper, while also offering a not-insubstantial bump to 128 GB of storage!

I picked this model up for $325 plus tax and shipping. And, frankly, I was blown away by the performance difference compared to the 300 GB Velociraptor I had in my system before. That drive is not exactly chopped liver; it’s incredibly fast by magnetic platter drive standards. But it’s beyond slow next to the latest SSDs. See for yourself:

This is just an excerpt, browse the reviews for more detail, but I was astonished how often this drive (based on the Indilinx Barefoot controller) topped the charts. Suffice it to say, the performance increase is not subtle. All those little pauses while your system pulls some chunk of data off the hard drive? They simply cease to exist.

How much do I like this drive? I like it so very much I bought one for every member of the Stack Overflow team, as a small gesture of thanks for enduring new feature crunch mode. I couldn’t sell my old Velociraptor on eBay fast enough.

In my humble opinion, $200 – $300 for a SSD is easily the most cost effective performance increase you can buy for a computer of anything remotely resembling recent vintage. Whether you prefer the 80 GB X25-M SSD or the 128 GB Crucial SSD, it’s money well invested for people like us who are obsessive about how their computer performs.

Trust me, you will feel the performance difference of a modern SSD in day to day computing. That’s far more than I can say for most of today’s CPU and memory upgrades. The transition from magnetic storage to solid state storage is nothing less than a breakthrough. It’s already transformative; I can only imagine how fast, cheap, and large these drives are going to be in a few years. So, if you’ve ever wondered what performance would be like if everything was in RAM all the time — well, we just got one giant step closer to that.

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When you’re transferring your old vinyl onto your iPod you want to be able to do it as quickly as possible, hopefully without having to faff around with a PC. With the LP to iPod Turntable all you need to do is pop the iPod in the integrated dock and you’re good to go. And it looks fantastic. There’s something undeniably cool about black stereo equipment, (we touched upon this with the Profile USB Turntable) and you can’t deny that this turntable will look great next to a HiFi.

Getting your old skool classics onto your iPod has really never been easier – the turntable has everything you need to make the process as painless as possible and you can even charge your iPod while you upload your new tracks.

You can still hook the record player up to your PC or Mac and transfer your music the old fashioned way (we say old fashioned, but relatively speaking it’s still quite cutting edge) using ION’s EZ Vinyl/Tape Converter software. Once the MP3s have been loaded onto your hard drive you’re free to do whatever you please with your music: burn a CD, archive them on an external hard drive or go all out crazy and make a mix tape. If you’re feeling particularly retro then you can always hook it up to your stereo amp and actually play some records.

All the sounds of the past on your iPod.  SOURCE

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Santa Cruz Screaming Hand SkateDrive
Memory : 2 GB
Price: $11.99 USD
Buy it.
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Burton Custom X SnowDrive
Memory : 2 GB
Price: $11.99 USD
Buy it.
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Rip Curl Mick Fanning Eagle Spray SurfDrive and
Lost Speed Demon Skull SurfDrive
Memory : 2 GB
Price: $11.99 USD
Buy it (first model).
Buy it (second model).
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EagleTec USB Nano Flash Drive
Memory/Price :
4GB – US$23.00
8GB – US$35.00
Buy it.
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TrekStor USB-Stick with Bottle Opener
Memory : 4 GB
Price: $33.58 USD
Buy it.
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LaCie CurrenKey USB Flash Drive
Memory : 4 GB
Price: $42.40 USD
Buy it.
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Lego Brick USB Flash Drive
Memory/Price :
2 GB – $40 USD
4 GB – $59 USD
8 GB – $75 USD
Buy it.
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Gundam USB Flash Drive
Memory : 4 GB
Price: $ 57.75 USD
Buy it.
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Ravage Transformer USB Flash Drive
Memory : 2 GB
Price: $42.99 USD
Buy it.
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Memory Pill USB Drive
Memory : 64MB
Price: $17.86 USD
Buy it.
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Let me know in the comments which one is your favorite. I like all of them, the SkateDrive is one of my favorites.

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Two things make my life easier as a designer. Firstly, the smoother my Mac runs, the faster I can work. There’s nothing worse than trying to push work out as fast a possible and then upon the simplest of actions, opening Finder for instance, your little color wheel cursor appears…spinning and spinning… for no apparent reason other than to test your patience. It’s called a cursor for a reason – I have a special name for mine. The second thing that helps me is having the right combinations of tools that enable me to work as efficiently as possible. Below is a list of useful (and free) apps that I use consistently to help me as designer and web developer to work more efficiently and get my Mac running fast and smooth.

1. App Cleaner

AppCleaner is a small application that allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps. Installing an application distributes many files throughout your system using space of your hard drive. When you uninstall these apps, many of these bits and pieces are left on your hard drive, needlessly taking up space.  AppCleaner finds all these small files and safely deletes them. Simply drag and drop an application onto the AppCleaner window. It automatically finds all the related files specific to that app and adds them to the AppCleaner window for you to review. You then have the option of deleting all the files, or keeping the ones you think you may need at a later stage, should you reinstall the app. You then simply click the delete button. No more orphan files on your disk!

2. Monolingual

Monolingual is a program for removing unnecessary language files from Mac OS X, in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space. As designers, we usually have huge files which can very quickly eat away at your hard drive space so getting rid of any superfluous files is sometimes very necessary. Having a fair amount of freed-up space on your hard drive for Photoshop to use as a scratch disk will help you work on your files will less drag, especially if your RAM is limited. If you’re running out of hard drive space, this is the app for you.

3. Quicksliver

Quicksilver is an application that lets you reach any program, folder or file in a few keystrokes and is aimed at increasing user efficiency. It allows you to use the keyboard to promptly do things like launch applications, manipulate files and data, run scripts, or send email. You don’t have to go searching through your files to find something and you don’t have to worry about how your folders are arranged. You can customize its search options to include your address book, iTunes, and recent email addresses. Set this application to load at start up then customize a quick launch key so it can be at your fingers when you need it. This is the fastest way to find files and open applications.

Alternate: Namely

4.  Growl

Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X. It allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications so you know what’s happening on your computer at all times. Growl installs itself as a preference pane and is added to the Mac OS X System Preferences. Users are able to fully control notifications by going to this pane. Here the interface will allow you to enable and disable Growl’s notifications for certain applications in their entirety, or select specific notifications for each application. The display options of the notifications can also be fully customized from small non-intrusive floating icons in the corner of your screen, to larger ones with sound.

5.  Teleport

Teleport lets you use a single mouse and keyboard to control several Macs. It allows you to synchronize your pasteboard between computers (and limit the size of the pasteboard if you wish), so you can cut from one computer and paste in another. It also allows you to transfer files by simply dragging them from one Mac to another (although this tends to work better with smaller files).

Teleport will need to be installed on all Macs you wish to link up. After installing you can find the program in the System Preferences pane. You will need open up two ports on your firewall they will be saved as “trusted hosts” under the security settings.

6. OnyX

OnyX is a multifunction utility for Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel). It allows you to verify the Startup Disk and the structure of its system files; to run miscellaneous tasks of system maintenance; to configure the hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock and of some of Apple’s own applications; to delete caches; to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and much more…

Alternates: Deeper and TinkerTool

7. MagiCal

MagiCal is a menu-based clock and calendar. It features a huge range of configuration options for how the time and date are displayed, and can operate either in conjunction with, or as a replacement for the built in system menu clock. In addition to this, MagiCal features a handy drop-down calendar that can be torn off and placed anywhere on screen.

Alternate: MenuCalendarClock

8. FileZilla

FileZilla is an open-source, cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. It is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Features include a message log, site manager, local and remote file and folder view, and a transfer queue. FileZilla also allows you to perform multiple file transfers simultaneously.

Alternate: Cyberduck

9. Aptana Studio

Aptana Studio is a top IDE for web developers. It offers integrated language support for HTML, DOM, JavaScript and CSS. Customize your Studio with additional plugins for PHP, Jaxer, Ruby on Rails, Python, Adobe AIR, Apple iPhone and Nokia S60 development. For Java support, plug Aptana Studio into Eclipse. Also available for Windows and Linux.

Alternate: TextWrangler

10: Disk Inventory X

Disk Inventory X is a hard drive analyzer for Mac OS X 10.3 (and later). It shows the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way called “treemaps”. If you’ve ever wondered where all your disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X will tell you which folders and apps are eating away at your hard drive space. New features include a finder context menu plugin with an “Open in Disk Inventory X” command for folders (this needs to be installed manually in the preference window) and a new selection list which can show all files or limit them to a list of a specific file type.

Bonus App. Adium

Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X. It can be used to connect to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services, including, AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, AOL, GTalk, ICQ, Facebook, LiveJournal, Bonjour, MySpaceIM, Skype, Twitter and more. The latest version includes support for file transfers, and for the Growl notification system. Adium is highly customizable and allows users to alter the appearance of dock icons, contact list styles, message windows, and emoticons.

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And now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The winner of the 2TB hard drive is Ashley B! Congrats to Ashley, and thanks to everyone for participating. This was the most ppopular contest to date on BittBox with over 1000 entries. (note to self: people really, really like external hard drives) A specail thanks goes out to MediaMilitia for making the contest possible.

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