It’s time for our irregularly featured, um, feature — Stuff Geeks Need. Accessories for the proud and professed gearhead. Phashion for phreakers. And one more really clever sentence fragment, since these things work better in threes.
We’ve been scouring the Internet for the accessories you didn’t know you needed, searching high and low in obscure shops, bringing to bear all our resources to keep you in geek chic. Okay, actually, one of our readers e-mailed us links, but we would have tried harder if we’d had to.
First up: Observe the unique form factor of HACKED! The OH !*#% Flash Drive. It looks like a shredded USB cable that dangles from your laptop, but it’s actually a two-gig USB key. Get it? No? Me either. But it’s from the people at Fred & Friends, who brought you Screwed Up, the macho fridge magnet, so it must be funny. I laughed until I stopped.
Wish that laptop was at the ready all the time? You might want to invest in the Connect-A-Desk Laptop Holder, a sling-and-desktop arrangement that wraps around the shoulders to keep your laptop always accessible. You needn’t stop working just because you have to walk, drive, or take a bio-break. It’s only $29.99 from ThinkGeek.
ThinkGeek has lots of techie accessories, including the My Documents Laptop Sleeve. The yellow neoprene bag is shaped like a desktop folder icon, and emblazoned with the words MY DOCUMENT in pixellated type. “It’s a bag! It’s a metaphor!” shrieks the Web site, and it does make one’s head swim a little bit that you’re putting your laptop into a metaphorical folder just as you put your documents into a metaphorical folder in your laptop. Or something.
But none of these scream bare utility like TG’s Wi-Fi Detector Shirt, a fashionable black tee with an animated glowing signal strength meter on the front. Because you need to know where there’s Wi-Fi, and everybody else needs to know you’re a geek. See it in action in this YouTube video.
And just a reminder to all you techcessories vendors out there: We at IT World Canada are willing, at great personal risk to our writers, review just about anything you want to send our way. We’re at 55 Town Centre Court, Suite 302, Toronto, ON M1P 4X4. It’s just one of the services we offer.