[Gllug] emulating a pendrive

[Nix]

On 14 Oct 2009, Peter Corlett told this:
> OTOH, I don't exactly use my USB ports for much. The iPod, external  
> disks, and my 3G dongle are about it. Considering that the iPod and  
> disks are just doing SCSI-over-USB and the dongle is doing RS232-over- 
> USB, it's still debatable whether we've really gained anything useful  
> over the last decade or so...

I too had basically useless (and really annoyingly positioned) USB ports
for a long time: effectively USB 1.0 too, as VIA motherboards have or
had an annoying bug which causes their USB ports to flip a few bits per
megabyte when run in USB2 mode --- but now, let's see, I have...

 - two external drives (not powered on all the time)
 - a mouse
 - a joystick
 - a flashcard writer (not used much, an emergency recovery tool for
   the soekris if its filesystem gets totally shagged)
 - a keyboard, intermittently
 - a cheapo mono laser
 - a camera, when downloading
 - an iPod, ditto, and charging

That's actually quite a lot: every peripheral but sound, network,
keyboard, and monitor, and all of those bar the keyboard exceed USB's
bandwidth requirements or are analogue. (The keyboard, of course, is my
trusty Maltron: they do USB models, but this one works.)

Note that you can have several keyboards plugged in at the same time,
and they all work. This is damn useful for me when doing things (chiefly
games with non-remappable keys) that *require* a normal QWERTY keyboard.
(There's a trackball on the Maltron, too: I use it when actively typing,
and the USB mouse the rest of the time.)

PC vendors have also got half a clue in the last five years or so: each
of my new machines has several USB ports and sound connections in
accessible locations on the front, and all the USB ports are powered.
The previous machines had either no ports on the front at all, or only
mostly-useless unpowered ones, with the powered ones being a nasty crawl
on the floor away behind the machine. (I never understood that. Do people
really keep their machines with the backs easily accessible? Why? Isn't
it terribly messy with the cables going everywhere? Mine are tucked out
of the way: it keeps the sound down too.)
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