USB Sticks

[MediocreMetastasis]

I thought this was a kinda silly issue to have until I started considering putting a demo of my game on usb's to give out in conventions if I ever set up a stall. My game demo would probably be at most 100mb so buying 100s of 16-32gb usb's in bulk would be a huge waste of money.

I have checked and there's a local company that ships as low as 32mb usb's in bulk. But it doesn't seem you can buy 32mb usb's as a consumer.

[Loebas]

Honestly, bring back the 1-4 GB USB drives, and make them USB3 as well. Because flashing a 1GB Linux ISO via DD to a 64GB USB drive seems very wasteful. (Ventoy does not always work. )

This is the reality at my dayjob.
We use a disk sanitization suite at work that provides a live linux environment that we use to wipe the devices from our clients. Normally you boot the devices using PXE.

But there are times this is not possible (e.g The device only support UEFI), then you have to use a USB drive with the image flasshed to it. The images they provide are ~1/2GB in size.

Their instructions say that you need to flash the ISO using balena etcher, or Rufus (using DD mode). Leaving you with 63/62GB of space you cannot use.
And this is the time where i would love to see USB3 drives that are just 2GB in size (the USB3 to decrease boot times), so i can flash the images on one of those.

Heck even <1GB USB2 drives would be awesome to store my documents, and other small files.

Also a petpeeve from me is that USB dives dont have a industry standard form factor, i would love to see this

[Dan Q]

I like a pendrive to have a size and weight that physically represents what's going onto it; does that count? Like, a really important file probably belongs on a weighty, metal pendrive; a small file belongs on one of those dinky little fingernail-sized drives, and so on.

I remember some art project once where somebody made a pendrive that "inflated" itself as it filled-up, to give a physical "feel" to the device to represent how full it was:

I sometimes wonder what it'd take to make one that appeared to "fill up" with liquid? Like: it'd use a "magician's glass" trick to pump a coloured fluid from a concealed container within the body into the walls of a plastic test tube?

[MediocreMetastasis]

I sometimes wonder what it'd take to make one that appeared to "fill up" with liquid? Like: it'd use a "magician's glass" trick to pump a coloured fluid from a concealed container within the body into the walls of a plastic test tube?

There's doll toys where a milk bottle prop magically fills up with liquid, but it turns out the inside is almost hollow and the cap stores all the liquid. I can see how you could possibly let water through a valve into a see through part of the usb by detecting how much storage is left. Getting it back in on the other hand...

[Dan Q]

There's doll toys where a milk bottle prop magically fills up with liquid, but it turns out the inside is almost hollow and the cap stores all the liquid. I can see how you could possibly let water through a valve into a see through part of the usb by detecting how much storage is left. Getting it back in on the other hand...

Yeah! That's the kind of thing I mean!

So I'm thinking: if you could build a plunger into the "storage" bit that would "push" or "pull" the fluid into and out of the walls. Powered by some kind of low-speed, high-torque motor (running off the ~5V or whatever you can reliably draw from a USB port). A bit like how a syringe works!

The biggest challenge might be powering the motor in such a way that the liquid can't leak into it. Possibly it could be a self-contained unit within the pendrive, powered by induction from a coil within the outer casing? Although that's probably going to get pretty hot...

...ooh, "getting hot" gives me another idea! A small heater inside a pendrive could power a tiny lava lamp and a light. The heater would run whenever the drive was powered, but the brightness of the light would indicate how full it was, or how hard it was working?

(My microelectronics skills are really bad: I can just about solder a USB connector together but I wouldn't know where to start with any of these wacky ideas. They're just fun to think about!)