camwyn | Gadget crave

I have the most amazing case of gadget crave ever since reading the November 2002 issue of Maximum PC. They've got a lineup of USB keys - devices that're loaded with Flash memory that plug into your USB port. These devices are about the size of my thumb; the article has photographs of them at life size, and all ten of the devices (I think there are ten) fit across a single two page spread. 64 MB, 128 MB, and even one or two 512MB keys in the article - I think there's one that's a gig.

Let's pause for just a moment and remember that Camwyn's been in the computer game since Mom and Dad put a Timex-Sinclar ZX81 under the Hogswatch tree, complete with 16K RAM expander pack. Yes, kiddies, the machine itself had 1K of RAM and the expansion pack - which you had to have in order to play flight simulator on a machine you plugged into a black and white television set - had 16K. Now we're talking about devices only marginally larger than a tube of Blistex that can hold up to an entire fscking gigabyte of information, although all I'd want would be 64MB most likely. I mean, dear Gods! My computer for all four years of college had a 20 MB hard drive and I regularly went through it looking for unnecessary Windows components to delete so I'd have space to maneuver! (Things like the Clock and the Games, I mean. I knew what was necessary and what wasn't.)

I regularly have to move files around that are close to the limit on a floppy in size. Often I have to move bigger ones. This has generally been handled by burning a CD, which is a waste of a perfectly good CD-R; the machines around my office don't have burners and so I'd have to install a UDF reader to make CD-RWs viable, and that tends to gack up the works on these things (they're old). Reading a USB key would require a driver installed; that's it. Install driver, plug key into USB port, fwoosh. True, some keys are slower in transferring, but I'm talking about 5 meg files or 20 meg files at the most, not the full 64 or 128 megs. That speeds it up a bit.

I don't wanna deal with floppies any more. I want one of these. Now I gotta figure out whether I really need one of these, or whether it's a combo of 'it's cool' and 'floppies have not always worked well for me'. I suspect I'll be going to Kanguru's web site either way. Maximum PC gave a 9 out of 10 rating and a Kick Ass! Award to CreativeLabs' MuVo Nomad devices; it's slow, but it's an MP3 player as well as a storage device. I don't need that. I just need the storage, so... we'll see.