USB 3.0 Flash Drives have started to appear, and more importantly below the $20 mark.  This makes it a no-brainer purchase for enthusiasts.  The first SuperTalent drives performed well, but had price points up to $600.  The recent generation sells for under $20 for 8 Gbyte and 16 Gbyte capacities.

The Kingston USB 3.0 Flash Drive starts at 16 GB and goes up the 64 GB.

SuperTalent USB 3.0 Flash Drive

Lacie offers both a ruggedized hard drive and a standard USB 3.0 Flash Drive

Great I can buy Flash Drives, What can I connect the drives too?

You can connect it to your new Samsung Laptop, announced in September, the Samsung RF510 Multmedia notebook

You can rent movies

The first commercial company to make use of USB 3.0 is probably Flix on Stix.  You walk up to a Kiosk, insert your USB 3.0 Flash Drive (or 2.0 Hard Drive) and download the movie into you flash drive.  This would be much, much faster than downloading from the internet.  These Kiosks accept USB 3.0 Flash Drives and USB 2.0 Flash Drives.  Even at USB 2.0 effective speeds of 320Mbps, this is faster than most home internet connections of 1 to 21 Mbps.  You can use any flash drive, but with USB 3.0 it will be much, much faster.

Several questions are:

1) Why not just Pirate?
- It’s Illegal
- Viruses
- And it still takes too long to download a movie. You are still better off driving or walking to your kiosk and just getting the most recent, HD movie onto your flash drive.  you can do this faster than pirating a movie without getting your PC sick

2) Why not just rent a DVD disk?
- Sure. it’s a little 90’s, but that’s okay.
- You have to return the disk.   Personally, I think this is a big hassle.

3) Purchase a legal rental from Apple iTunes or others?
- I recommend this form so you don’t have to go to a physical location, but there are some people who don’t trust this or can’t do this for some reason.
- It still takes more time and preparation depending on your Internet speed.

Thanksgiving and the Kinect (A USB Peripheral)

During Thanksgiving, I usually introduce our family and friends to the latest in video gaming technology.  Mostly, because my friend that did this moved to Seattle and took all his game systems with him.

I bought an XBOX 360 Kinect bundle, 3 actually.  One XBOX overheated and stopped working, one stopped working during a firmware update. I returned both.  The 3rd one worked fine.

(I’d show you footage of me dancing to Dance Central, as it evokes hysterical laughter from my family and friends).  Instead, I’m directing you to this terrific, non-professional video of someone playing the hardest song in “hardcore” mode which is the hardest mode for the Kinect.  Enjoy.

Hardcore Dance Central on the Kinect

By the way, here’s an AMD Motherboard for $90 bucks at NewEgg.

If you want to see me do Dance Central, post a comment below.