Pinky Drive

I've been having another "Oh my freaking Jeebus, I'm living in the future" day. My venerable old USB thumbdrive which, when I bought it 5 years ago packed an astounding 128mb of memory, has finally fallen apart. And so it was that I braved Tottenham Court Road this lunchtime to get something with which to replace it.

After my slack-jawed amazement when I got a micro-SD card for my Nintendo DS homebrew kit I thought I'd seen it all. But no. Sony have now made "Tiny Vault" USB drives that are about the size of half a stick of gums. It's absolutely tiny and yet it is mountable as a drive on a computer and somehow manages to fit 4Gb storage within its tiny frame. Initially I just stared at the packages on the shelves for a while trying to figure out the catch, trying to work out if it was actually a drive in its own right or whether it was like a camera flash drive and would need an adapter. No adapter is needed. I must have looked like the first person to be shown television staring at this glowing box and wondering how they managed to fit all those tiny people inside it. Having convinced myself that it was what I wanted I purchased the wee fellow and have just copied 2.6 Gb of data onto it. Essentially I now have a gizmo which is capable of storing the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and yet is also easily swallowable. That's a scary thought. Now where the hell did I put it down?