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The Swiss Army Knife of USB Drives
Mudzy writes "The Tech Zone reviews what has to
be the coolest Swiss Army Knife ever made. The Swissmemory USB Victorinox is the
first knife to be equipped with a USB flash drive. " Besides 64 or 128mb of data, it includes such useful items as a ballpoint pen, red light, scissors, nail file, and not surprisingly, a knife.
Swiss army knives traditionally used out in the wild on camouts, hiking, fishing trips, etc.
The concept of this gadget is cool, but could someone enlighten me to the uses of a USB flash drive out in the wild?
Until what we all know, we could bring that kind of knife on a plane. A swiss knife is very useful in all sort of situations, especially when you are travelling and just taking a piece of bread and some paté instead of eating a burger ;-)
Stick to Tux, get your own TuxSticker !
Wierd that they didn't make a variant of the Cybertool with USB, since it is actually targetted at computer support people. A generic swiss army knife with USB doesn't make sense.
- Posted via Danger HipTop2 / T-Mobile Sidek!ck II -
The USB memory is only the first step. Now put a little GPS reciever in the knife, and let me load the USB memory with maps of the area I am camping/traveling in. It would need a little LCD screen to show basic roads or trails as well I suppose.
Basically I am looking for a leatherman, combined with a Garmin Etrex (or your favorite GPS). Now that would be useful...
All I ask for in a knife is:
- A blade
- A large flathead screwdriver/bottle opener
- Small flathead screwdriver/can opener
- Philips head screwdriver
- 256M+ USB stick
- Built in Photon III, preferably in White
- Scissors
That's all I want. Is it really too much to ask for?I read the internet for the articles.
I use my PNY 64MB all the time and I've never had space problems. If I needed to store a bunch of music on it or something, I'd go for an iPod or some such. But I keep the PNY stick in my pocket everywhere I go.
What's even more bizzare is that the article doesn't link to the ThinkGeek page for this. Instead, they link to a competitor, thetechzone.com.
Congratulations slashdot! you've just shot your sister-company in the foot!
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Seems kind of silly you can't take pocket knives on a plane anymore. I used to always carry my Leatherman on board in my computer bag. These days they'd probably confiscate it. What, am I going to hijack a plane with a 3" blade? What pussies we've become when a plane full of people are scared of a pocketknife wielding hijacker. The ironic thing is, if people had known what was in store for them they could've easily overcame their box-cutter wielding hijackers. 9/11 will never happen again people. It was perfect and played off the complacency of passengers in a hijacking situation. Everyone in that situation will now assume the worst and should fight back since you're dead anyway.
a) How much time to you actually spend on a plane that (b) is a major issue?
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
It looks like the USB Knife is on the same pattern of the executive line, so that's just about a two-inch blade, but most Swiss Army knives have bigger blades; around three or four inches. My old favorite was the Tinker because it had a phillips head screwdriver. (Honestly, did anybody ever use that stupid corkscrew?) But I've since replaced it with a Leatherman because of the pliers. Unfortunately, it looks like the only part of the Leatherman line that has blades of two inches or less are the Squirt, Micra and Mini-tool.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Seeing as how the site is now down maybe it was intentional? Perhaps it was a DDOS attack idea in the same vein as the one reported a couple weeks ago where the boss skipped out on the hearings and left his "packet monkeys" behind. How long do you think it will be before we read about (on some other site of course) /.s servers being seized by the FBI? Some see stupidity while I see malevolent genious. Post a link to a competitor to take down their site and wait for posters to remind everyone that its also available on ThinkGeek. Theirs a mastercard or 1,2,3 profit saying in here somewhere. :-)
In Republican America phones tap you.
I ended up taking it back to my car. They were happy with that.
Overall the gadget is great, has been very useful. Oddly I think the ballpoint pen has gotten a fair amount of the use, but it's great having some portable storage. I was on vacation last week and it was perfect for use at Internet cafes.
I tried to get Firefox installed on it however it's not fully working yet, but I'm sure that's my fault.
"Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
Geeks have plenty of uses for a knife. I've spliced together hundreds of electrical connectors and done many many other computer maintenance tasks with nothing other than a small knife, mostly because it was what I had with me. From troubleshooting your car's electrical system in a snowstorm to cutting off a frayed shoelace, not too many items are as useful as a swiss army knife.
Some other posters have hit the nail on the head regarding the portability of this item... They simply can't be taken with you when travelling by air because the airport security terrorists will steal it from you, fine you if you complain, and detain you if you press them for such details as the name or badge number of the goon who stole your stuff.
But for those who don't have to travel by air, this little gadget would be a very cool and useful thing to slip into your pocket. Add come-as-you-are antivirus and other system recovery services to your list of things you can do without any other hardware or tools. Neato.
- Scissors got dulled by cutting sheet metal (I resharpened them a bit, but they're still not the best)
- Lost the toothpick, and, many years later, the tweezers (used for retrieving screws from inside computers)
- Tip of main blade broken off (which, incidentally, makes it a great jeweler's screwdriver)
- Spring on scissors broken
- Outer hard plastic casing chipped and splintering off due to repeated use as a mini-hammer
Given how much abuse I've given this thing (knives are useful on canoe trips, but also get rather wet/muddy), I really can't imagine something with electronics surviving more than a month. And how many people will want a crappy knife (no real features) after the USB part dies?Related amusing anecdote: was in a talk by the Red Cross about storing food/water/supplies as part of disaster planning. The woman joked about all the idiots that only have electric can openers, and would starve if power went out. She asked how many of us still had a manual one. I yelled out "right here" and waved my knife around. She asked if I knew how to use it. Yes... it's the only can opener I own.
I'm lazy. And I carry too much crap as it is.
A 120gig HDD and USB 2.0 enclosure will generally need an external power supply. That's more bulk than an iPod.
I have a Mac. Lots of people do. Many Macs have slot-loading drives which will *die* when you try to use a business card CD.
I'll grant you that the iPod is not the best portable storage device, but it's a damned good music player that happens to pull double duty. Why bother carrying more crap than you need?
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
Digital memory proves to be quite resilient indeed.
^^vv<><>BA
I had to make an emergency flight down to Southern California for a client and the TSA on the return flight home confiscated my RJ45/RJ11 CABLE CRIMPER that I had at the bottom of my bag. Now, any geek who's ever operated one of these devices will know the blade on it is so small and unexposed...but he didn't know what it was, and wouldn't allow me to take it back.
I spent the whole flight back how it would be possible for a deranged hijacker to take over a plane by cutting lots of patch cables.