freeform goodness

Those little USB keychain flash disk things finally got cheap enough so that even my penny-pinching ass would buy one. I got a 64MB model for $25, which seemed pretty reasonable. I love the thing. It's truly tiny, and holds over three times as much data as the first hard drive I ever owned (which probably retailed for $500 new.) It also, wonder of wonders, is truly plug and play. I plugged it into my Mac's USB port, and an icon showed up in my Finder window. I copied an album I'd encoded earlier that day onto it. Then I unmounted it from the Finder's menu and physically unplugged it from the USB port and placed the protective cap over the USB connector. I brought it to work this morning, and plugged it into my FreeBSD machine. I wasn't even sure if USB mass storage support was compiled into my kernel, but I figured I give it ago anyway. I created a mount point and executed the mount command, and (whee!) there were the files I copied from the Mac. I deleted the files with rm, then umounted the volume, then did a camcontrol eject and removed the device from the port. I walked the device over to my Windows 2000 machine, plugged it into the USB port, and it mounted the device instantly, without any driver installation. Cool, plug and play, on three different OS platforms. It's kinda nice when things actually work.

:: 08:46
:: /tech/gadgets | [+]
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