Computer Speakers Have Gone USB

Computer speakers used to be horribly annoying things to set up. You had two boxes – three if you had a subwoofer – that had to be connected to each other, to the back of the computer, and to an outlet in the wall. Modern-day USB speakers, however, are way cooler than that. They have a single plug on a single cord, and they get their power through the same wire that they get their electro-sonic impulses from.

There are several advantages that a USB speaker has over its traditional counterparts. They have their disadvantages, too, don’t get me wrong. It’s hard to power any decent amount of bass through a USB port. But for the cost and the convenience, unless you’re a true audiophile, you won’t really feel like you’re missing out.

The advantages that I mentioned are plentiful, too.
Price — USB speakers are cheap compared to traditional speakers. Even high-end USB speakers come in below $30, and they tend to produce some killer sound. Compare that to the sound you hear out of the plug-in speakers of the same price, and you’ll be startled at how comparable they are given that the USB speakers use less electricity (and actually save you money in the long run because of it.)

Portability — If you’ve ever had to disconnect a set of traditional computer speakers so that you could take them to a LAN party or out to DJ a church function, you know what I’m talking about. Traditional speakers are bulky, unwieldy, and basically have to be shoved in a bag and sorted out when you get there. USB speakers are almost universally self-contained boxes that you can pick up in one hand on your way out the door. That’s convenient.

Versatility — Traditional speakers play one thing: the sound that comes in through their headphone jack. While not all USB speakers are this cool, the higher-end ones (those $30 types I mentioned before) tend to be able to play not only off of their USB connection (which means USB flash drives as well as functional computers), but many can also play off of SD cards and other forms of portable device as well.

There are plenty of reasons why computer speakers have gone USB, particularly among the young and hip. So what’s on your desktop?

USB Flash Drives Don’t Have to Be Boring

USB flash drives have been around for decades under several different names. Pen drives, flash drives, USB drives, solid-state drives…it’s a small wonder we recognize so many different titles for the same simple object.

At their core, all flash drives are the same: they have a USB plug and a small chip that acts like a hard drive, only there’s nothing that spins, so they don’t go bad the way hard drives do. They started small, but in the past few years they’ve gone up geometrically in size; the latest flash drives are measured in three digits worth of gigabytes – nothing to sneeze at.

The first generation of flash drives could be used to take a document from one computer to another without having to rely on big, bulky ‘stiffy’ disks. Today’s flash drives can hold an entire system setup – you can literally buy flash drives that you can boot to, bringing your entire system with you onto any computer you happen to plug it into.

That’s not boring – that’s exciting. It’s what Google is trying to do with the Chrome OS (turn any computer into YOUR computer by putting everything in the cloud) except we’re doing it with flash drives.

But that’s not the only thing that has been cool-ified about flash drives in the past few years. Of course, it’s all the rage now to disguise your flash drives as all kinds of other novelty kitsch, from Betty Boop to a generic heart-shaped blob. The coolest, though, are the toys that look nothing like flash drives. You can get Transformers that really transform – and hold flash drives. You can get flash drives that look like Zippo lighters, Hello Kitty, and even mice – both kinds.

What’s more, you can even get Flash drives that come pre-loaded with all kinds of crazy software or other information on them. As just one example, one particularly cool product is a flash drive with a huge directory of Internet Radio and Internet TV stations on it – upwards of ten thousand media channels ready for viewing.

Whether you’re considering the size, the shape, or the contents, today’s custom USB flash drives are a far cry from the boring sticks of yesteryear. We’re excited to see what tomorrow will bring to this staple product of the information age.

The Ultimate ‘Pampered Hacker’ Accessory: A USB Warmer/Cooler For Your Drinks

If you’re a hacker – or a stay-at-home mom that makes her money blogging, or a college student trying to master the arcane arts of internet marketing, or pretty much anyone who spends several hours every day at his or her computer – we have the ultimate accessory for your computer setup. It’s called a USB warmer/cooler, and it’s the perfect little desktop gadget for people on the stay.

Simplicity Itself
All you need is a USB port – the computer provides the power, and the unit has a warm/cool switch (and, of course, an on-off switch). It’s that simple. No more going to the kitchen to reheat last night’s tea. No more getting caught up in TVTropes or Cracked only to realize your oatmeal has gone cold. No more warm soda because your raiding party really needed your healer’s complete attention for 56 minutes straight. (Next time, play a mage.)

One Of A Kind
Don’t be fooled by imitations. There are one-can mini-fridges and even tiny little hot plates for your USB connection, but why have two things cluttering up your desktop when one would do? With a single-unit warmer/cooler, it doesn’t matter what your beverage is, it’ll always be exactly the right temperature.

Set It And Forget It
The best part about a USB warmer/cooler is that it’s attached to your computer – so when you’re done with your computer and you turn it off (you do turn your computer off sometimes, right?), the warmer/cooler automatically turns off with it. That way, should you leave some clam chowder in a mug on your heater overnight, you don’t come back to a mug full of thick, brown crust over a nasty paste of shellfishy glorpiness.

Safe And Effective
Of course, it would hardly do to have a warmer/cooler that you could, say, freeze your tongue onto. (You know, some things that seem really cool at 5AM while you’re grinding Platinum League looking for that last Shard of Serendipity…aren’t.) Or worse yet, one that you could burn yourself on if you misplace your hand after a final victorious click on Dredmor the Lich. Fortunately, the best warmer/coolers on the market go from about 15 Celsius to about 50 Celsius, so there’s not a lot of danger of any of that.

Remember if you have a hacker in your life, you just need to remember this mantra: “Get warm. Get cool. USB.”

There Are Some Crazy Novelty USB Accessories Out There!

Flash drives. LED lights. Mini-fans. The USB lamp. With every passing month, the variety of novelty USB accessories increases. If you’re not paying attention, an entire USB fad can explode into existence, flicker wildly for a few weeks, and vanish without a trace. But some unusual ideas have made their way mainstream for anyone to acquire and adore.

The USB Air Purifier — just like your normal air purifier, only smaller, significantly cuter, and powered by your computer. The USB air purifier is no Ionic Breeze™, but it’s a noticeable improvement over stale office air – even if it’s a home office. By combining both ionic and ozone oriented purification, you can get a sphere of breathable goodness out of a surprisingly small package.

The USB 2-Fan Laptop Cooling Station — for laptops that overheat, this useful little device clicks onto the bottom of a laptop and provides it with a pair of fans to suck the heat away. Powered by the laptop itself, they can drain the battery if it’s not plugged in, but they’re perfect for taking the term “laptop” literally.

The USB Illuminating Webcam — Ever tried to use a webcam in the dark? If you’re trying to hide the fact that your room is messy from your Skyping grandmother or you’re just trying to put on a spooky show, the USB Illuminating Webcam is your answer. Four bright LEDs shine out from around the lens of the camera, brightly illuminating the subject while leaving the background to the imagination.

The USB Silicon Keyboard — For those people who are prone to slipping on last Monday’s pizza box as they carry their 3-liter bottle of Root Beer and this Monday’s pizza box over to the computer for a few hours of Elements: The Game. You can type, play, and generally be around your computer no matter how sticky your hands or spilly your glass, because when you’re done, you can dip your computer into the kitchen sink and wash it clean.

There are plenty of USB fads that have come and gone, but some things – even in the world of zany USB accessories – have proven to stand the test of time.

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.