declined

NRCan’s Magnetic declination calculator is pretty cool (if you need that sort of thing). It was doing something weird yesterday, though: if you searched for Listowel, ON (43° 43′ North, 80° 57′ West), you actually got the coordinates and declination for Sechelt, BC (49° 28.8′ North, 123° 45.6′ West). And if you in turn searched for Sechelt, you got Fernie, BC instead (49° 30′ North, 115° 3′ West). Hmm.

nostalgia for something that never existed

The Verbatim FlashDisc seems to be a solution without a problem to solve.

verbatim flashdisc

It’s a cheap ($4) but very tiny (16MB) USB memory key in the vague form of some kind of magnetic media. There are problems:

  • $0.25/MB may seem cheap, but it would mean that a 1GB key at this price was $256
  • It neatly blocks most of the USB ports on a machine
  • Just what kind of media is it supposed to be? It looks closest to an old spool of mag-tape, but folks buying this wouldn’t remember that.