For packaging lovers: a Tokyo shopping of everyday objects. Forget your Transformers, for this inflatable balloon: a light, disposable and 100% friendly must have. Better than Aibo!

Nice guys those brooms! Girly pink colour for the young housewifes, under 50 years old. Course, the concept is absolutely not sexist at all! Still for girls only (gomenasai ladies!): housework aerodynamic ”shoes”. I don’t know for you, but for me: no way!

More ”Easy” or “Irritated”? Irritated looks really cool! Sorry kids, I keep those small cuddly toys for me!

Wow! The second picture of tinting packaging reminds me a Corean melo soap. Have you noticed how serious and absolutely not sexy are the married couples tinting boxes? What’s the most frightening in this packaging concept: the depressive marketing’s view of 30’s years old couples, or having “already” white hair, or having the same tinting husband and wife, or both? What about a golden glitter domino to bring back a bit of imaginativeness?

Shisheido in “supa” (supermarket)! Next: expensive crazy sushi USB keys.

Cutie cutie childdish ustensils for maki and shaping rice: you don’t have to be a great cooker, just be creative! Sugoi né!

Related posts about shopping in different Tokyo districts and City guide Tokyo: Destinations

USB keys (or flash drives, pendrives, or whatever you want to call them) are extremely useful. You can carry around a huge quantity of data and programs that you may need at any one time.

However, there are risks attached – they are small, and can be easily misplaced. This means that you then suffer from 2 potentially terrible consequences.

1. You don’t have access to the data that was on your USB key.
2. Someone else may have access to that data.

If this happens, you risk the embarrassment that confidential information may become known to others, and even news of the risk of such data becoming know may do serious damage to your reputation, as recently shown by the British Government and their contractors.

Therefore, I’m suggesting a couple of measures that can be used to reduce the risks attendant to losing your USB key.

• Back up the contents of your USB key. You could do this by hand (on a windows system, navigate to the root of the drive letter of your USB key in Windows Explorer, press Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C to copy all the contents, then navigate to an empty folder on your PC’s hard disk and press Ctrl-V to paste all the contents), or by using any of a number of backup or synchronisation programs.
• Don’t keep important or confidential documents on your USB key. This rather removes one of the reasons for having the key with you – you wanted to have access to the important documents and files on the key! So in that case, if you have confidential data on the key…
• Encrypt the key. This might also be known as password protecting it.

There are many programs available to perform this kind of encryption – some USB keys will come with one ready installed on the key, and others are available to buy or to download for free. So how do you tell them apart? Which are good and which aren’t worth the money? And which ones are blatantly dangerous?

If you are looking at a free or cheap program, try to ensure that the program is well-reviewed (use Google to search for comments about it), and that the author is open about how it works – for instance it should use a recognised type of encryption (such as AES, Serpent or Twofish) that is known to be strong. Also, it’s an advantage if the program is open source – which means that people have been free to look at the code of the program to make sure that there aren’t any errors in the code, or any hidden ways to get in that the programmer may have left by accident or on purpose.

The thing to remember is that with this type of encryption is that if you forget your password, you can’t get back in. You did back up the files on the USB key, didn’t you?

If you are looking at commercial software, it ought to employ a recognised type of encryption as mentioned above, but should also offer some additional safeguards. There are one or two standards in cryptography that are worth looking out for – in particularly, the US FIPS 140-2 standard. Commercial programs may also offer a way to get back in to your key if you have lost the password. Some expensive USB keys come with this built in, such as the Ironkey and Sandisk Cruzer Enterprise FIPS models. PGP offer software to encrypt disks to the same standards and with the same facilities, but it is expensive, and would be hard for a home user or church to set up.

If you are looking for a free program to secure your USB key, I would strongly recommend Truecrypt. It’s a free open source program, and there are versions available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. The program’s site has comprehensive (and easy to use) documentation. A short summary of just how I would use Truecrypt to secure a USB key would be this:

• Download the latest version of Truecrypt from their site. The files are hosted by Sourceforge, but that is quite OK.
• Install Truecrypt on your laptop, and then install it in “traveller mode” on your USB key.
• If you haven’t done so yet, read the beginner’s tutorial.
• Create a large truecrypt container on the USB key, using up most of the remaining space. Now you can open the large container file using Truecrypt, and it will appear as a new disk drive on your computer. Use this new secure disk drive to save all the documents and files which you want to secure.
• Don’t forget to back up the files contained on the secure drive!

If you take these two precautions, you can use your USB key without the worry of appearing on the front page of the Daily Mail if it goes missing. If only the government realised that it isn’t so hard…

Andrew

I’ve always called them usb keys – and Lacie with the help of 5.5 Designers (a young design company based in Paris), has produced a range of usb keys which are – well – key shaped.

It’s great to see a different take on the ubiquitous usb key – so far the designs I’ve seen are either a variation on a theme for an oblong box or something more novelty.  With these keys you won’t be laughed at when you whip ‘em out to get at some data.

I was so impressed with the design I went out and bought one.  It feels sturdy to touch, sits well on a key ring, and generally feels well-built.  Being a very slim design, it only has the metal strips to make contact with the USB port, so a small clear plastic cap is provided to prevent pocket fluff from getting into the innards.

The only concern I have is how much wear-and-tear it will take when it’s dangling from a usb port with a bunch of keys weighing it down.

Iamakey is part of a range of key-shaped usb sticks – with varying capacities, dimensions and price tags…

The project follows on from an earlier collaboration between Lacie and 5.5 for a range of coin-shaped usb keys.

With 8GB flash drives available for under $20 and 32GB drives edging into the mainstream, nobody can blame you for shelving old USB sticks. But there are a surprising number of uses for those rickety, sub-gigabyte keychains.

read more | digg story

Ok.. so.. i think that title was used by PC mag for an article but oh well.

So, you have one of those flash drives laying around? Don’t know what to do with it really? Well if you go to school, let it be high school or college, or even work, this info could be really handy or even fun.

Basically the idea is to put small programs on your flash drive that let you do everyday, and not so everyday functions on a computer, but leaving NO TRACE in doing so.

so say that your at work, or your school and you need to get around a proxy or something. or maybe you want all your bookmarks and passwords saved? Or maybe you have a paper to do, and that computer doesn’t have your version of MS word. Well, this is what you do:

WHAT YOU NEED:

1. USB Flash Drive (I recommend 2gb or higher, and they are fairly cheap nowadays)
2. A Computer with a Internet Connection

THATS IT!

So you have two choices. You can choose to buy a U3 Compatible drive, or you can use Portable Apps

first I will talk about Portable apps, then U3 Drives. If you have a U3 Drive, skip the portable apps section

Portable Apps

Ok. first off go to PortableApps.com And Click “Download Now”.

If your not sure which one you want, I recommend Getting the Suite Lite Package. It gives you the Portable Apps Menu, along with some Basic programs that are almost completely necessary to have. The one I use the most, and you will to, is FireFox Portable.

If you are more advanced, get the Platform Only, and manually choose which you want later.

Once Downloaded, Install onto your USB Flash Drive. Now Click the New Icon it just put there for you and YOUR THERE! It should open Portable Apps. To open the menu, just click on the icon on your taskbar (the icons next to the time in the lower right corner of the screen)

To add more Programs, go to portable apps and click the downloads page. There instructions are pretty self explanatory. You just install each program into the “Portable Apps” Folder and the new program will show up in your menu.

BTW, This portable version of FireFox makes it so you can surf the net where ever, where ever, while being invisible (in a sense). it leaves nothing behind! No cookies, no History, no nothing! And it also can be used to get around some proxies and firewalls if you can figure out how

For U3 Drives:

You already should have a built in menu with some programs already available to you. If you want better programs, you can add as many as you want by going to their provided download center http://software.u3.com/softwarecentral.aspx?skip=1

Portable Apps On U3 Drives

Now say that you want to use the apps on www.portableapps.com
it wont let you right? WRONG you still can!
You CANNOT Add them to your menu though. Unless you get this utility some hacker made (i will post it later) But you can still run the programs on your drive.

All you do is just download the program you want from www.portableapps.com and run the installer, and tell it to install to your drive. And your done.

When you want to run the program, just open your drive up with “My computer” and double click the folder for that program, and there should be an Icon for that prog that you just installed. Just click it and it will run!

Well that sums up the Basics of it all. Sorry I couldn’t make it that detailed. I didn’t have enough time, but hey, you can always post a reply asking a question, or adding something. so yeah. I will probaly be editing this article a bit too. Well have fun with your new USB flash drive!

(also i have a lot of apps that aren’t in U3 Website or PortableApps.com and will be posting them in separate posts over time) So keep watch

~3RR0R

I’ll admit that I am unfamiliar with the music of Mars Volta. But I couldn’t help taking notice of the integrated campaign the prog rock band and their label, Universal, are marketing their new album, The Bedlam in Goliath.

The CD, which drops January 29th, is making every effort to gather some publicity momentum while offering enough extras to make fans think twice about downloading the album illegally.

One offering is an online companion Flash-based game called Goliath The Soothsayer, which incorporates themes from the album into a room escape adventure. I’ve learned (through the coverage for this CD/game) that room escaping games are extremely popular, especially as free online games that are shared virally.

As well, The Bedlam in Goliath is set to be released on USB flash drive to coincide with a vinyl release. The Barenaked Ladies, ardent supporters of fan rights, did a similar release last year. The USB release will also feature bonus material such as concert footage and B-sides. The band is also featuring four “webisodes” on their website depicting the band in humorous situations that have been linked to and shared all over the Internet. In addition, Mars Volta commissioned a scrambled puzzle of artwork on their website that gave fans access to a downloadable track when solved and the band is planning a pre-release mini tour to debut material.

It seems as Mars Volta and their marketers are waking up to the reality that pop music promotion cannot ignore the Internet. It’s where the fans are, even more than MTV or radio. They also realize that they are in competition with illegal downloads and must up the value proposition in order to sell CDs. For The Bedlam in Goliath, they are taking the best ideas from recent integrated campaigns (like the Canadian Tourism Commission’s USB drop from Tribal DDB) and are gathering mainstream media coverage for their innovative packaging of what many consider an obsolete idea – the album.

It’s not always about “thinking outside the box” (shudder). Sometimes, the best ideas come from taking smaller boxes and rearranging them until they look like something new.

Grâce à la “megitude” de Sabby, l’un de ses amis (Ivar pour le remercier) lui a envoyé les scans du dernier article sur les White Stripes paru dans Le Monde…

Autrement, voici les scans du magazine Goldmine (un canard sur les vinyles, et le blues en général) :

D’après la newsletter officielle, les clés USB sont maintenant disponibles pour l’europe (ce qui inclus la France bien sur !)