USB Insanity

Posted on 2002/12/31 04:37:42 (December 2002) by john.

The amusing extremes to which a specification can be taken.

Whenever I'm in Japan, I like to take a short while at some point to wander around a denkiya or two. The electrical goods shops - Best Denki, Deo Deo, Yamada Denki and so on. This time round I've noticed an explosion of USB gadgets which I found very interesting.

Some are things we're already quite familiar with in the UK. There's a vast array of memory card readers, for example. I found one that supported six different formats all in the same unit. Then there's those tiny little keyring USB storage thingies - a USB plug and some built in flash memory, for easy transfer of files between different machines. I think this is a great idea, very steeley. Also I liked the idea of the USB Bluetooth adaptor. I could see no good reason to have one of these, but I wanted one anyway. They were fairly cheap - about 25 or 30 quid. I think I must be exactly the sort of person they had in mind when they designed this kind of gadget - just merge two currently "trendy" specifications together and people will buy it, regardless of whether or not it has a practical application... I am still very tempted to get one before I leave. Also, USB/PCMCIA/PCI card network adaptors now seem obscenely cheap, and I just wish I had more than one thing to network together at home!

Beyond these fairly mundane gadgets though, they started to take on somewhat more surreal proportions. First of all were the USB desklights... OK not too odd I suppose, a USB cable provides power, and for something like a laptop this is quite a good idea. Still though, it feels like a bit of a hack, and I doubt this sort of thing was originally envisaged when the standards were drawn up. Slightly further along the surreal tangent was the USB mail announcer. This is a little furry toy thing (if I recall the one I saw was an owl with a mailman's hat) that reads out your mail to you as it arrives. I'd considered getting one, but (A) it would annoy the hell out of my colleagues and (B) it only worked in Japanese.

The epitomy of misuse of the USB standard however, came in the surprising form of the USB air freshener. Yes, you read that correctly. An air freshener. Which is USB compliant. What madness is this? It was a kind of plastic egg thing, with a little trough into which you pour water and some kind of scent, and presumably the gadget uses the USB connection as a power supply to gently heat the water, and release the fragrance. I wondered if it could actually be controlled via the PC, with a kind of dial to increase or decrease the smelliness of your working environment...?

It does make one wonder doesn't it? What next? Anyone got any good ideas?

USB Girlfriend
Plug her in and use a number of software tool to work out what the bloody hell is going on, what she wants and what it will take to keep her happy in the future.

Upgrades will be possible with the addition of friming-ware, keeping her up to date with the present body requirements.

Of course, you'd need a girlfriend to begin with. :(

Posted by Rob Lang at 2002/12/31 19:07:15.

How about USB stuffed donkeys? From Spain?

Posted by rowanboy at 2003/01/02 10:28:06.

I've often talked at work about a potentially very handy peripheral, that could work via USB.

Anyone who has worked with software must know those irritating situations where one of your colleagues comes up with an annoying user input scenario that might potentially break your software. Like, what if a user presses button A, whilst holding the control key after having double clicked button B at exactly the stroke of midnight on an Arabic edition of Windows being used under water by an unemployed steel worker who can't spell words beginning with 'K' properly.

My response is usually along the lines of "you spray them with acid".

I would have thought the USB acid sprayer would be quite easy to make. What's more, it's probably even legal - so long as you include a clause in the license agreement along the lines of "misuse of this software may lead to acid burns", which of course they won't read anyway.

Posted by John at 2003/01/02 24:06:01.

On the reverse of negative re-enforcement, you could reward successful users with a USB compatible vending machine.

Posted by dsp at 2003/01/02 13:29:26.

Hey yeah.. click once for Coke..

Posted by rowanboy at 2003/01/02 16:11:34.

We could specify it in CSP.

Posted by John at 2003/01/03 04:23:15.

Ooooh, I want them all!

Posted by Rusty at 2003/01/05 16:15:13.

On a related but surprisingly irrelevant note, how do you find out if you've got USB2 or not? Is there something in the BIOS or somewhere that tells you?

I'm now scared that my machine currently has a total of 13 USB ports, of which only three are free, and now I may need to add USB2 ones.

Posted by Mark at 2003/01/06 14:50:23.

I find the whole USB 1/2 situation very confusing. I have no idea what ports I have...

Posted by John at 2003/01/07 13:47:43.

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