These drives have a 4GB capacity for anger/data and the USB drive itself is hidden inside the body of the bird or pig that you choose. If you love flinging birds at pigs with a slingshot, then you will probably love these drives.

You can score one for €19.99 (~$26 USD) from EMTEC. That’s not a bad price for a bird or pig USB drive. I think that yellow guy looks like Bert from Sesame Street, but more pissed off, which I didn’t think was possible.

[via Journaldugeek]

Today the fact has surfaced that those memory cards won’t just be for DLC. Some of the normal games that you buy will not save game data unless you have a memory card installed. This is despite the fact that the PS Vita has (a small amount of) internal storage.

There are a number of games that will require the memory card. There’s a list of titles and their storage requirements over at via Kotaku Japan (JP). Given that so many games will require the additional memory, it seems that if you want to buy the PS Vita you might as well get a memory card at the same time.

[via jin115]

Researchers have made a new breakthrough in memory for electronics that is inside a soft gel with the consistency of Jell-O. The soft memory is biocompatible and the body should not reject it if implanted. The new memory is also suitable to working in a wet environment such as the brain. The soft memory can’t store much data right now, but the researchers are tweaking it.

The material works by creating an oxidized skin when a positive charge is applied to the material. The skin prevents it from conducting electricity and makes it the “0″ needed for binary code. When a negative charge is applied, the skin disappears and it conducts electricity making the “1″ needed for binary code. The new discovery has a long way to go before it is ready for medical procedures on humans.

Since you can pick the colors for each component, there are a ton of possible color combinations. The flash drive itself stores 8GB and is made up out of two identical 21mm Bakelite beads, that close up perfectly when the flash drive is not in use.

They are available in seven official snooker colors and will cost €86 (~$124 USD) and can be ordered of Tamawa’s website.

[via MoCo Loco]

Anyway, I’ve begun transferring some of these files via USB to my laptop, which has been a slow and arduous process thus far. What I do is right-click on the folder, check the size, and see if it will fit into the USB drive or not. Jan Barth and Roman Grasy’s DataBot concept mouse can’t really tell you the size of that file or folder, but what it does is let you feel how huge that folder is by making it harder for you to move the mouse, along with vibration feedback.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

In order to work, the DataBot mouse adds a rolling ball and a servo-motor to a modern optical mouse, which seems sort of like a step backwards.

[via Engadget via Dvice]

The SDCard HxC Floppy Emulator can replace just about any old 34-pin floppy drive, allowing older computers and electronic gear to read data from a modern SD card. Designed by Jean-François DEL NERO, the HxC Floppy Emulator has been tested to work with PC, Atari ST, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Thomson, MSX, ZX Spectrum series computers among others, and they continue to add support for more devices like synthesizers and samplers. It just plugs in where the device’s old floppy drive once sat, allowing you to read up to 2GB from and SD or 32GB from an SDHC card. The drive can even emulate two drives at once too.

It even emulates the head stepper motor sound of a 3.5″ floppy drive, as you can hear in the video below:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The HxC SD Floppy Emulator sells for $109.99 (USD) over on eBay.

Apparently, these Iron Man USB flash drives were released in Japan around the same time, and can now be found over on eBay.

They’re available in both gold/red and shiny silver versions, and they look pretty awesome. The even have cool LED eyes that light up when you plug them into your USB port.

Unfortunately, they don’t store all that much – just 4GB – but if you’re buying one of these, you’re getting it for the looks. If you need lots of storage, you’ll have to look elsewhere then Iron Man’s head.

Both the red and gold drive and silver drive are selling for just $19.99 (USD), which makes them way cheaper than the goofy American version too.

The USB Police Revolver Gun doesn’t fire bullets, though, and with capacities ranging from just 2GB to 8GB, it barely stores data either. Still, if you belong to the NRA, you’ll probably want one of these to carry your files around in.

You can grab a flash drive gun over at Brando for $17 to $32 (USD), depending on the storage amount. I actually think higher capacities should have been higher caliber weapons, but that would have been too clever, I suppose.

The Vertex 3 line includes the normal drive and the Vertex 3 Pro. Both of the drives are able to connect to SATA 6Gbps ports, and the both use the Sandforce SF-2200 processor to control the action. That processor gives the SSDs performance of 550MB/s write and 500MB/s read.

The Pro SSD has additional tweaks for enterprise use for better reliability and it uses MLC NAND memory inside. The standard Vertex 3 will ship in 120GB and 240GB capacities with the Pro version in 100GB, 200GB, and 400GB versions. Pricing has not been announced at this time.

Some researchers in China have found a cool way to use the E.coli bacteria to store data. The data can even be encrypted using site-specific genetic recombination. It turns out that bacteria can store lots of data too. A bacteria colony of only 18-cells was able to store the amount of data that the Declaration of Independence would need.

Scaled up, a 1g sample of the bacteria would be able to store 90GB of data. The downside to the tech is that the researchers fear the bacteria would mutate and possibly delete data and retrieving the data requires a sequencer and is expensive. I wonder if you would have to feed your computer if this ever goes mainstream.

These TRON USB drives come in either black (Sam Flynn) or white (Kevin Flynn) versions, and are supposed offer a “flashing light-up wheel base.” It’s hard to tell from the pictures which part is supposed to light up, and where the USB connector is. Presumably they’re supposed to look something like conceptual rendering from earlier this year…

Frankly, these things look more like a salt and pepper shakers to me than flash drives. Whoops, better not give the Disney merchandising guys another idea! You can grab the 4GB (black) model for about $17 (USD) and the 8GB (white) model for about$30 over on Amazon. Grab ‘em quick, before the MCP shuts off security access to your computer.

[via Chip Chick]

Just plug a single USB flash drive into the master port, and you can copy as many as 31 drives at a speed up to 2GBs per minute – which is actually faster than USB 3.0 specs. Nexcopy’s USB duplicator systems work without a PC, and can handle FAT, FAT32, NTFS, Ext2, Ext3, HFS, and UNIX formats, and can automatically verify the integrity of copies once complete.

As I mentioned earlier, these are industrial quality devices, with prices starting at $1799 (USD), they’re not the kind of thing you’d have sitting around your office unless you really do need tons of flash drives copied, but if you do, they’re definitely worth a look.

In order to pull off this hack, Charles had to stack components of two old 3.5″ floppies so there would be enough height to accommodate the storage of the USB connector.  Inside the drive are the guts of one of those business card style USB drives.

Charles managed to precisely align the drive’s activity light with the old floppy’s write-protect switch, so there’s a little blinking red LED in there now. It looks like the disk is an old IBM PS/2 reference disk, but I doubt that he bothered copying those files to his flash drive.

Best thing about hacks like this one is that it looks like it really wouldn’t be that hard to make one for yourself – now that Charles has paved the way with his creativity.

Check out more pics over at Charles’ USB Floppy flickr album.

As you might gather from the name, the card has metal in its construction with a metal plate in the front. The card is also made with epoxy in its construction making it waterproof. That means you could snap the pics of Skynet before you fall into the cooling pond under the reactor and at least when the camera breaks the resistance can still recover the images.

Most of the details on the Raw Steel card are thin, we do know it will land this month. How much it will cost is unknown. We can tell from the image that it’s 16GB capacity and has class 10 speed so burst shooting should be doable.

The MosKeyto flash drive is just 20mm long, and 14mm of that is the USB connector – leaving just a 6mm stub sticking out of your computer. This is great for laptop users, so you never forget about your flash drive, and you also don’t have to worry about breaking it off or where to store it when you travel.

The drives come in 4GB ($17.99 USD) and 8GB ($27.99) capacities. A 16GB model is also on the way. For more info on the MosKeyto, head on over to LaCie’s website. Giant mosquito not included.

It’s actually called the Golden Robot USB Flash Drive, and stores a whopping 4GB (which happens to be about the same amount of memory the real C-3PO has in his head from what I’ve heard). To use the drive, you pop off the head, and plug it into your computer. Everything about this is funny, even the way it looks while it’s plugged in.

The Golden Robot USB Flash Drive is available from Gadget4All for $25 (USD). Waste of money, or well worth it? You decide!

[via Geek Alerts]

If you like the Empire Strikes Back flick or just collect all the Star Wars Mimobots the Series 6 bots are now available to purchase. The new line is all from ESB and it includes Hoth Luke, Snowtrooper, Yoda, and the Wampa. You remember Wampa, the monster that Luke hacked the hand off of foreshadowing the loss of his own arm later.

The little bots come preloaded with content specific to them like screen savers and such. They are offered in 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB capacities. Pricing ranges from $29.95 to $89.95 (USD) depending on the capacity.

He really digs these cool Flash Rods that come from the infamous Dave of toilet cart fame. Dave takes a normal Hot Wheels car you can go buy at Wal-Mart and then turns it into something extra geeky. He opens the cars up and crams 4GB of flash storage inside.

The cars are sealed back up again and the only way you know that something is different is the USB connector sticking out the back of the car. You can pick just about any car you can think of and each one is handmade with a price of $25 (USD).

Instead of pushing buttons like the old games, LOOPZ uses a set of infrared beam sensors to detect when you place your hand through four semi-circular rings. The game comes with 7 gameplay modes, and lets you play with 1 to 4 players. Game modes include Music Studio, Freestyle DJ, Musicology, Reflex Master, Versus mode, Rhythm and Flow, and Repeat the Beat. The multi-player mode even lets players  create their own patterns to try and outsmart their rivals. While most of the modes are just variants on the old “Simon Says,” there’s a bit more variety with the rhythm-matching games which test not only your memory, but your timing too. Here’s a fun little video showing off how you can even use LOOPZ Music Studio mode to make your own tunes.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I got to play with a LOOPZ unit for a little while, and have to say it really is a fun diversion from today’s crowded market of casual video games. I can only imagine if I were a kid, I’d enjoy it even more. The only thing I’d like to see is the addition of tracks from popular artists. The built-in generic techno loops did nothing for me. Heck, if Mattel made add-on memory sticks with additional artists, they could extend the replay value of this thing quite a bit.

LOOPZ is available now over at Amazon for $29.99 (USD).

To aid you in your quest for the fastest computer, Patriot has launched a new RAM kit called the Viper II Series Sector 5 that runs at 2500MHz. The RAM is said to be the world’s fastest DDR3 memory and is for Intel P55 chipsets in machines running Core i7 processors.

The RAM operates with timings of 9-11-9-27 and comes in a kit with a pair of 2GB modules. Kits with similar memory operating at 2400MHz and 2133MHz are also available, but what’s the point if you can’t have the fastest?

Don’t you feel better now that you have upgraded to the speediest RAM in the neighborhood? You should, at least until next week, that is.