The Disney Store sounds like a store for kids, but don’t forget that Disney has its hands in a lot of different cookie jars, including many us nerds love to eat from. Take this Iron Man thumb drive for instance. It’s about as cool as thumb drives get, and though it’s a steep $40 it would look great protruding from your new laptop.

Who better to protect that valuable data than Tony Stark, right? The device only comes in a 4GB version. Product description is below:

Trust Iron Man to keep all your important data — movies, music, photos and files — safe and secure. Our Iron Man 2 USB Jump Drive is a flash memory data storage device that stores up to 4 GB with Marvel™ superhero style!

Those are legal movies, music, photos and files, people. Legal.

One of the most expected tech releases at CES this year was USB 3.0. It wasn’t really a release in the typical sense of the word, but it was the first time the public had a chance to see the transfer tech in action. And it’s fast. Really fast. Fast enough to make using an external hard drive to run anything from your operating system to your games completely viable.

Consider the numbers. As Engadget tested, USB 3.0 supported passthrough of 135 MB/second on a platter drive. That’s incredible. Hook up an SSD and things only getting better, reaching transfer speeds of 200 MB/second or greater. Basically you’re looking at a transfer tech that, for the time being, is limited only by the media on either end of the cable.

For now, USB 3.0 support is extremely limited. As you can see from the connectors, things get a little bulky on either end, so you won’t be using 3.0 cables on 2.0 devices. You can, however, plug that thumbdrive you’ve got into a 3.0 port, just don’t expect 3.0 speeds.

I saw this over at Gizmodo this morning and had to pass it along. A toddler from Longmont, Colorado got a little too curious around the family laptop this week. She managed to get a hold of the business end of a USB cable that was still plugged into the computer and, as toddlers are prone to do, put the thing in her mouth.

Here’s the text from the original article:

Trinity remains at Children’s Hospital with third-degree burns on her tongue, palate and lips. She is on sedatives and paralyzing drugs to prevent her from moving and disturbing her breathing tube, Jeffrey Anderson said. She needs the tube because her tongue is so swollen it blocks her airway.

Anderson said he feels helpless as he watches his granddaughter in her hospital bed.

“I want to make it better, and there’s nothing I can do,” he said.

Anderson said doctors plan to allow Trinity to regain consciousness in the next day or two to assess how much neurological damage occurred. The little girl wasn’t breathing for several minutes, and her heart nearly stopped beating.

Anderson said doctors expect Trinity to recover from her burns, though she may have lasting cosmetic damage. Right now, the family’s main concern is that the happy, laughing little girl does not suffer serious brain damage, and they hope she is young enough that she can recover any lost capabilities.

That’s some serious damage from a cable that typically carries around 5 volts. So please, unplug cables you aren’t using and keep them away from your toddlers.

Source: Colorado Daily

And thank god they have. I’m sure you remember your first wireless USB powered mouse. It likely had a gigantic dongle that hung from the back of your machine like some engorged tumor. You could forget about having multiple devices, too. That meant taking up two USB slots with another similarly engorged appendage.

Thanks to Logitech’s USB Unifying Receiver, we don’t have that problem anymore. The dongle comes as a joint announcement for some other new Logitech products, namely the Wireless Keyboard K350 / K340 and Marathon Mouse M705 / M505. Both devices sync up with the slim USB receiver, which is small enough to leave plugged in, even to a laptop, even while it’s in your laptop bag. Many of you are probably using Bluetooth supported peripherals for your laptops, but it’s certainly nice to have some options.

Each of the four peripherals ship with a Unifying Receiver, and will run you $60/$50 for the keyboards and $70/$50 for the mice. They should be available in early 2010.