For my birthday on Saturday, Noah gave me a gift certificate to ThinkGeek, one of my favorite places to look at things that I’d really like to buy something but not have the money to buy anything because I’m a poor student.
Kid, candy store, etc., but I did ultimately manage to pick something out — the Iomega Micro Mini Drive. The name might seem redundant, but it’s not; it’s just that small. Technically speaking, it’s your standard USB memory stick, of the type that has gotten so popular in the past year. The idea is that you plug it into any computer (Windows, Mac, Linux…CP/M?), and it mounts on your desktop like you inserted a CD (or a floppy, for those of you stuck in the mid-90s.) You can copy files to and fro at USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 speeds, depending on what your computer supports. My Iomega Micro Mini Drive holds 64MB, which is not a whopping amount by modern data storage amounts, but when you consider that the thing weighs about an ounce and can basically be carried at all times, it seems pretty good.
I’ve been wanting a USB memory stick for a while, but this Iomega is way cooler than the ones for which I’d been hoping. I’m going to treat it like a digital Swiss Army knife, and just keep on it all of the programs and personal data that I find that I really need when I have to use or repair somebody else’s computer. Right now, I’m keeping PuTTY, Firefox, Thunderbird, tomsrtbt and AdAware on it, but I imagine that I’ll think of plenty of useful things to add before too long.
I look forward to the not-so-far-off day when these hold several GB, and it will automatically, wirelessly mirror the contents of my home desktop, such that I take a duplicate with me wherever I go, encrypted, of course. I further look forward to the only-slightly-farther-off day when the entire contents of my computer will be stored on one of these, as will everybody’s. We won’t carry laptops — we’ll just use ubiquitous dumb terminals, which will access all of the data on our portable micro-nano drives.
That’ll be hot.