I had an interesting conversation the other day with Trek 2000’s chief financial officer, Gurcharan Singh. Trek, a Singapore company, claim to be the originators of the USB drive, or thumb drive as they call it, and are currently sueing a company called M-Systems in a test case over who owns the patent for putting flash … Read more
Companies, governments, institutions: beware of the dude carrying an iPod. Bernhard Warner, Reuters’ excellent European Internet Correspondent, points out that the high-capacity iPod is getting banned from a lot of places as high-tech security risk. The UK’s Ministry of Defence “has become the latest organisation to add the iPod to its list of high-tech security … Read more
Further to my piece on WiFi for the masses, here’s another way to cut costs: Make your own WiFi dish out of a Chinese cooking vat scoop, poke a USB WiFi dongle through the mesh, and you can pick up signals more than 10 kilometres away. Total cost: about $40 for the USB dongle, NZ$8 … Read more
This week’s Loose Wire column is about Flash drives: I LEFT YOU last week in the capable hands of Ethel Girdle, the fictitious octogenarian who took her accusations of built-in obsolescence to the technology giants. One of her beefs was about so-called flash drives–small devices that store data, for example as memory cards for MP3 … Read more
From Akiba comes word of a new USB hard drive that’s a good 5 cm shorter than the usual laptop hard drive in a case, the Transcend 20GB and 40GB portable USB drive. If size is important for you, it looks like a good choice. No price given.