Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote in 60 seconds:

Yes. I want one. Gimme.

I turned 34 last week, and decided to buy myself a little gift I bumped into in a local shop: The Bullshit Button.

Simple and fun: hit the button, it lights up and plays one of five sounds:

• “Bullshit level 5″
• “Oh come on now, don’t give me that bullshit, that’s bullshit”
• “Warning, warning, bullshit alert”
• “(Bip)That was bullshit”
• “Bullshit detected, take precautions”

I like it. A lot.
Colleagues who come to my desk? Not so much [insert maniacal laughter here].

As a muddling designer I always have one or two color ideas when working on a new design, but you need more than just two. I’ve tried various pieces of color matching software in the past, but now my need for matched color ideas is combined with my love for my iPod (I am the proud owner of the most excellent iPod Classic 160Gb) in Koloroo for iPod, a free (well, careware) little tool that turns my iPod into a very spiffy color picker.

I can wax poetic about it all day, but this is one you just have to get and use to see what a great little tool it really is.
And remember, it is Careware, so you do actually have to do a nice thing for someone else as ‘payment’. I myself helped a friend dig out the foundations of his house (which gave me muscles sore enough to hinder my mouse use at the moment).

We all have them by now (for God’s sake, even my dad has one), but they’re usually not very secure. Sure, my little Philips 2 Gig stick survived a run in the washing machine inside my jeans the other week, but lose it and your data is normally up for grabs.

IronKey has realeased what they are calling “the world’s most secure USB flash drive”. It comes in three sizes (1, 2 and 4 Gig) and looks like what you’d expect. But the fun is on the inside: it sports hardware-based military-grade AES encoding, so anything you put on there is immediately encoded by the on-board chip, and is filled with an epoxy compound to protect its innards. But get this: the crypto chip actually self-destructs if it senses that it’s being tampered with (and that’s a hardware self-destruct, not software). Mission Impossible, anyone?

The Personal version also comes with some onboard software, including a hardened version of Mozilla Firefox so you can use that to surf safely via IronKey’s Tor-based Secure Sessions proxy. How cool is that?

It also comes with a password manager and an on-line backup utility so that when you zap one IronKey all you have to do is buy a new one and the encrypted data can be downloaded back to your new drive (all encrypted, so even IronKey employees can’t see into your data).

I wonder if I can convince my boss I want gotta have need this to look cool for work…