Now that digital music releases aren’t shocking any longer expect to see a few more of these on the digital horizon. Rap trio, Get Busy Committee (GBC), is releasing their latest album “Uzi Does it” on a USB flash drive shaped like an Uzi machine gun. The Uzi will likely have just enough space to hold the album’s tracks in MP3 format and no more. The memory stick fits into the Uzi as its clip. It would be really cool if the follow up album became available as an extra-mag-only version. That would enhance the environmental benefits of departing from the CD and DVD distribution industry. Those “keep” cases and packaging are huge generators of landfill waste and any move away from wasteful is a good one.

Listening to the album the band is definitely trying to move in a slightly different direction from overly “serious” street rap. The Uzi icon makes that a little hard to believe without listening though. The picture of the Koala with an Uzi on the CD cover is almost adorable and only a little disturbing. We’re fairly certain they were trying for the latter. The Uzi should hit e-tailers in early November.

Have you ever thrown your hands up in frustration because you simply want to use the Monitor, Keyboard and Mouse of a laptop to access a server or other standalone device? I have, but never know what product could help…now I do.

The Portable Laptop KVM Adapter from StarTech is specifically designed to turn your notebook into a portable KVM station. Simply connect the adapter between your standalone [or GUIless device] and notebook and you’re off and running.

I would think the biggest market for such a product are large data centers where they need to access any number of servers without a full KVM installation.

“Aside from a rack mount LCD console, which can be expensive, server administrators and technicians would typically have to use a server room ‘crash cart’, which is a cart comprised of a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Although a typical ‘crash cart’ is somewhat mobile, it lacks the portability of our Laptop KVM Adapter, which provides identical but more convenient control”.

The NOTECONS01 USB 2.0 Laptop KVM Adapter offers immediate BIOS-level access to the connected computer from the laptop control point, as well as the ability to handle full configuration of the attached PC, server, or other headless machines such as ATMs, kiosks and VLTs.

But the portable USB KVM station doesn’t come cheap, the MSRP starts at $470.

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The 32GB Pico Drive — previously only available in 8GB and 16GB capacities — from ThinkGeek is touted as the world’s smallest, at just 3.4mm thick. It features a polished chrome / nickel finish and is shock and water resistant. At the following video a water durability test with the 8GB version.

Flash drives are getting so small, they are the size of the USB connector itself. How cool is that? Well, in size it’s cool, but in functionality…it won’t become your favorite flash drive. Take this new 4GB EagleTec USB nano drive…

This friggin tiny drive is too small. Too small to easily connected and, more importantly, disconnect from your computer. As I’ve said before, once you starting saving SOME files on that stick..you’ll soon be saving ALL your files on that stick. So why deal with something so small it’s a pain in the a$$ to get out.

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Let’s face it – computer geeks collect files. Many of them large, some of them illicit, and perhaps even one or two illegal. Hey, we’re not here to judge – we’re here to help! Those files often live on hard-drives that occasionally get upgraded. The old drive gets ripped out in favor of the new in the never-ending effort to increase storage capacity. That doesn’t mean, however, that those old drives have outlived their usefulness.
You can dock just about any of those old drives into this simple device. Sick a USB transfer cable into one end along with the power-cable, and in one of the other ends, you can connect a 3.5″ IDE hard drive, or a laptop 2.5″ IDE drive, or even a miniscule 1.8″ IDE hard drive! But, why stop there?
You can connect a SATA drive, too! How about an optical disk drive? We’ve got it covered. Blu-Ray, DVD, CD, writeable, rewriteable… it doesn’t matter! We’re drive agnostic with our USB to SATA/IDE Combo Kit. Now your old drives have a brand new life. Or, if you’re the handy type, you can keep this one device handy to recover data from a drive in a dead computer. You won’t have to haul several different devices – just this one!

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