Hysterical USB Gadgets You’ll Never See Coming

There is a new wave of USB gadgets coming down the line, and some of them are incredibly off-beat. At first, your average USB hub basically sat around waiting for the second or third USB drive to get plugged in. Sometimes, it got to interface with a digital camera. Yay! Nowadays, however, the number of crazy things you can do with a USB drive are exploding exponentially.

Check out some of the USB gadgets you can buy this holiday season that you never saw coming:

The USB Speaker, Hub, Digital Picture Frame, and Pen Holder. Yep. Some ingenious fellow realized that all these different USB devices were clogging up his hub – so he added to his hub. And added. And added! Now, this extraordinary end product looks like a generic plastic cup being used as a pen holder – but it also plays music, has 4 outgoing USB ports on the bottom, and oh – you can display your favorite pictures on it.

The USB Portable Hand-Held Air Conditioner. There’s USB fans, and then there’s this. A genuine hand-held air conditioner that uses evaporative cooling technology to turn dry, hot ambient air into a cool, humid rush of chilledness pointed straight at your face. Sounds like the ultimate in high-tech until you find out that ‘evaporative cooling technology’ means ‘we run the hot air through a wet sponge and then blow it at your face’. Then it’s just plain funny.

The USB Flash Drive Transformer. It comes preloaded with Transformers virtu-swag. It transforms from a cat to a ninja-like robot. And it cracks in half to reveal the flash drive. It’s a freaking Decepticon that plugs into your computer. How can you go wrong?

The USB Vacuum Cleaner. Yep. It’s like those old red Dust Devils only much smaller and with a cute little nozzle specifically designed to get between the keys of your keyboard and get the Cheeto dust out. Perfect for any college freshman or other MMORPG addict. Or you could just get them…

The USB Waterproof Silicon Keyboard. This puppy can be rolled up, sprayed down, washed clean in the shower, slept on, and pretty much abused in every conceivable way without a hitch. If your mess is less Cheeto dust and more Mountain Dew, this is the gizzie for you.

4 Clever Uses for a USB Fan

A USB fan is a special mini-fan that hooks to, and gets its power from, the USB port of your computer. Like any fan, it moves air, but unlike any fan, it needs no electrical outlet, takes up very little desk space, and it’s available to be used any time your computer is on. The downside is that your computer must have a working USB port, and the fan pulls just enough power that it won’t work on a hub that has a few other high-drain USB items plugged into it. For most of us, though, it works just fine.

The aesthetic of a USB fan is widely variable; there are classic custom USB fans that look just like normal fans and there are zany fans that look like anything from a racing tire to a robot. Some even have LEDs in the blades and make hypnotic patterns in the air while they spin! Price-wise, however, they all tend to fall into the $5-$20 range.

Here are four things you might do with a USB fan that you might not think of:

• Cool Your Soup. While not all USB fans are on the end of long, flexible sticks, a surprising amount are – and they can be bent over a steaming bowl of udon or pot pie and used to speed their descent into thermometric edibility quite nicely.
• Heat Your Cubicle. Most people think of a fan as a cooling device: you point it at your head, and you cool down. But if you arrange your fan behind your computer tower, it will take all of the hot air that’s getting blown out back by your power supply’s fan and shoot it into your cubicle’s main airspace. You get to cool your processor and heat yourself at the same time!
• Make Beautiful Music. All you need is a tiny windchime, available from any hardware store – or just make your own. Set the fan to blow toward the windchime, and fill your workspace with Zen tinklings that will turn your mind to ‘ease’.
• Shred Your Documents. This requires a fan without one of those annoying wire cages, but it’s entirely self-explanatory. Enjoy!

Give a USB Gift This Xmas

It’s November, and you know what that means – Black Friday will be upon us before you know it! But before you start to consider what you ought to get for your co-workers, subordinates, or boss(es), consider this: gifts they can use at work are gifts they’re more likely to take advantage of. Unless you know what their home life is like, you have no idea what they might do with a fancy corkscrew or a ticket to the opera. A work-appropriate USB gift, on the other hand, you can see in action in the new year.

When you’re talking about giving gifts to the people at work, there are a few things you can count on. One of them is that they will have a computer, and that that computer will be on and functional for 90% of their average workday. That makes a custom USB gift something that everyone at work can use.

The old-school USB gifts are ones you saw being given out in 2006: small flash drives emblazoned with the corporate logo, maybe sometimes one pre-loaded with a Happy Holidays video from the top executives – very little else, though.

Then, there’s the kitchy USB gifts. These range in quality from poor to very poor, and in usefulness from not-at-all to actually negatively useful. USB Christmas trees, USB Valentine’s hearts, cheap USB robo-puppies…the list goes on and on. Suffice to say, avoid these at all costs.

But after that, if you put a little heart into it, you can come up with some surprisingly practical USB gifts. If your office is a little stagnant, getting everyone in the cubicle farm a USB fan for their desk can make you the hero of the hour. If your workplace is a little dust-prone, a series of USB air ionizers can make a startling difference – not just in the air, but in everyone’s mood as well.

For the truly classy, however, there are the coolest of the USB gifts. Imagine giving everyone in your office a USB hub that also acted as a speaker for the computer, a pen holder, a light source, and a digital photo frame. It’s the ultimate desk accessory; something everyone can and will use.

A Few Truly Cool USB Gizmos

USB – short for Universal Serial Bus – technology was first released on the market in 1995. It’s purpose was to provide a standardized way to connect a wide variety of devices to a computer. The benefit of USB over other forms of connection is that USB provides power to the device from the computer’s power supply, eliminating the need for batteries. The simplicity of design and low cost of USB technology have made it a powerhouse on the market, and today USB devices really are, as the name suggests, universal.

For the first decade or so, USB devices were almost entirely practical and functional, with very little that didn’t suit the core ‘computer geeks’ market. But over the past several years, USB devices have shed their practical image and given rise to a flood of truly cool USB gizmos. Check it out.

The USB Mug Warmer: Don’t think that mug warmers are only for not-a-morning-person type people. The average USB mug warmer is big enough to hold and keep toasty the kind of larger mug that people use for soup or oatmeal as well. Granted, high school computer teachers everywhere are in apoplexy over the idea of encouraging people to keep containers of liquid near their keyboards, but hey – we’re not in high school anymore, right?

The USB Can Fridge: The opposite of a mug warmer in many respects, the can fridge keeps a single can of soda (beer) cold enough that it will be perfectly drinkable no matter how long you forget about it — as long as you keep your computer on, of course. There’s nothing quite as gross as a warm soda (beer), so if you need that burst of liquid sugar (bread) to keep your focus (chill) late in the day, the USB Can Fridge and a source of soda (beer) is the solution you’re looking for.

The USB Massage Ball: After several levels gained in World of Warcraft, your clicking arm can get a little tired – and your lumbar back is probably a bit on the tense side from those PvP raids. The USB Massage Ball is the solution to your aches and pains – just turn it on, press the lovely little knobs against your back or your wrist, and in minutes, you’re good to go.

This is just a tiny sample of the kind of novelty USB items you can find online – check out thinkcutee.com for many, many more.