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goth

Garish gadgets going goth

Here's one prediction for 2008 that we dearly hope does not come true: goth as the big tech fashion trend. We wish the recent spate of dark products were only Halloween novelties, but the fact that we're only in the first month of the year does not bode well.

In the last week alone, Akihabara News has highlighted a full desktop complement consisting of a macabre keyboard, mouse, and mousepad. That followed a cobra-wrapped Webcam and a pair of skull speakers that made their disturbing debut only a few days earlier.

In retrospect, the most telling sign of … Read more

Even vampires can use a little flash memory

Leave it to Neiman Marcus to find yet another way to overdo the mundane USB flash drive. It is, after all, the same place that offered a Razr "Luxury Package" that featured genuine gold tone for $900.

Part of the Jo Marz designer collection, these storage keys look like something out of a goth fashion catalog. They're a relative bargain compared with other Needless Markup offerings, priced at just $98 for a 1GB capacity, according to 7Gadgets. Not to mention the $6,000 that you could pay for a Swiss Army drive with the same capacity.

Most un-Goth item in Hot Topic, coming soon

It's a good thing teenagers are attracted to ironic fashion statements like a moth to light. MusicMarker, purveyor of the too-adorable Tamagotchi-like MusicMarker song-identifying keychain fob, will soon be selling their product at America's one-stop solution for disenchanted suburban youth--Hot Topic.

The MusicMarker helps people identify songs they hear by recording a short audio clip into its memory and then uploading that data to the MusicMarker Web site when it gets plugged into a computer USB port. The data then gets analyzed and (ideally) reveals the song information and where to buy it. A number of people … Read more