Tech snippets
Sony starts making tiny USB Drives
Remember back in the old days we had to carry flimsy floppy disks for our data? Now tiny pen drives with much greater capacities have replaced them everywhere. And it's getting better. Following the motto "the tinier the better", Sony's making its wee Micro Vault Tiny USB 2.0 drives that are just 1.45cm x 3cm x 2.7mm. About half the size of conventional USB key drives. They come in today's standard capacities: 256MB, 512 MB, 1GB and 2GB. Unfortunately, like most exciting new technologies, they'll be out in Korea first. Credit-card sized PC
If you thought Apple's Mac Mini was a small computer, take a look at this. From Compulab of Israel, the CM-X270 is a computer the size of a credit card. It's a real PC, with four USB ports, a PCI bus, 128MB of RAM, a 512MB flash memory card, AC '97 audio, all running on an Intel XScale processor. Plus, it can sync with a wireless network with WiFi. These are built for embedding inside various products to come out fairly soon, so can't hope for getting one as a secondary computer. But they're pretty cheap: if you buy 10,000 of them, they'll cost Tk 3313 ($47) a piece. Ultraviolet shoe drier for your wet shoes
Is there a more uncomfortable feeling than walking around in wet shoes? If you didn't know, it's been raining here for months. Those of us who brave the streets of Dhaka wearing sleek leather shoes would have found this UV Shoe Dryer very useful indeed. This thing has long tubes that pump air at 104 degrees Fahrenheit around the inside of the shoes and the Ultraviolet LEDs kill bacteria that have grown inside the festering disease fiesta. Its noise won't compete with a generator either: the dryer was developed using the same quiet technology used in PC ventilation systems. It would cost about Tk 5000 for priceless dry feet. But of course, like most useful technologies, this isn't available here in the country yet.
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