Gadgets: Sushi USB
Thu, January 05 2006
Epson has just invented a microchip that can understand lots of funny foreign languages and speak them out loud all by itself. That’s a lot better than we can do with our gore-based processors. The multilingual text-to-speech synthesis chip can decode text input in English, French, German, Catalan and Latin American Spanish and read it aloud, given a suitable output of course. Japanese, Chinese and Korean are coming soon, so we can reasonably expect to see toys, PDAs and other lifestyle aids before too long.
Really bad sushi will stay in your memory for a long time, but really good sushi has its own onboard memory. Take the USB Sushi Disk, from Japanese company Solid Alliance. Available in Otoro, Shuumai, Ebi, Futomaki and 10 other styles with onboard memory of 32 MB to 1 GB, these portable USB "thumb" drives save your data onto thick, meaty plastic slices of raw fish and rice. Solid Alliance also has USB rubber duckies (iDuck) in various patterns and memory sizes, which are great for holding music files, PowerPoint presentations, family photos, but not so great for the bathtub.
Everything is being computerized these days. Who could’ve thought that even slippers would be USB-friendly? Thanko Japan is offering a unique product — USB powered slippers. All you have to do is connect the slippers to your computer via USB cable to keep your feet warm.
