Wired on Friday: The cutting edge of technology should certainly be novel - but there's one class of alleged computing hardware that veers more towards "novelty" in the Christmas cracker sense. The devices you can plug into the your computer's USB port have grown increasingly bizarre.
USB (or Universal Serial Bus, to reveal its never-expanded form), are the small, narrow sockets in your computer that were originally intended to attach your printer, keyboard and mouse. But the boom in other peripherals - from memory sticks, to card readers, to webcams - has now grown to the plain ridiculous.
Flicking through last month's releases, I see a USB drink cooler, a cactus-shaped USB incense burner and USB-heated gloves to keep your grandma's hands warm while typing. You can even, for £20 (€29.80), order a pair of ordinary looking rechargeable batteries. But flip up the part where there would normally be a copper top, and you'll find a USB connector for charging the cells from your PC or laptop.
That's the clue that shows where this explosion of oddities has come from.
Despite the complexity of the computers these devices are plugging into, and despite the sophistication of the USB interface, these gadgets don't care about the digital world. They're just plugging in for the power - the five volts of direct current that USB ports provide. To these peripherals, laptops and desktop PCs are just giant batteries to be leached from.
And why not? In the case of a laptop, that's pretty much all they are, in terms of weight and size. Unlike almost every other transforming and cheapening part of a modern computer, our power supply has stubbornly bumbled along, getting barely more efficient while everything else has miniaturised.
I'm sure that, in the future, our propensity to carry large slabs of chemicals will seem as peculiar as the brick-sized mobile phones of the past.
For other gadgets seeking to save themselves from the embarrassment of a pendulous battery addition, vampirically living off USB makes a lot of sense. This is especially true given the state of the rest of our power infrastructure. If battery technology has failed to keep pace with our new digital demands, it is not, at least, frozen in the past century the way our home power grids are.
The primary reason why so many gadgets hang off our PCs is because they need the same trickle of voltage that digital technology requires.
Meanwhile, electrical outlets still deliver the power that 20th century consumer hardware demanded. Dampening down industrial power to the drips needed for digital pulses isn't hard, it's just cumbersome. You need to have a chunky black box (or chunkier plug), and you need one for every device.
That makes sense when you have a few big digital systems. But now our desks and pockets are full of the tiniest discrete technologies, such as mobile phones, music players, PDAs, radios, LED torches, remotes and digital recorders. So it's better to have these devices use somebody else's clunky plugs and keep their slim form.
The next development was inevitable - now we're seeing charging units and power supplies that include USB sockets side-by-side with normal three-socket mains plugs. These are dumb USB ports - all they provide is power. But unlike the mains plugs they sit next to, it's the right kind of power for a modern device. The spread of USB as power plug holds another possibility. Technologists have spoken of "ubiquitous computing" or "ubicomp", the idea that everything will harbour some kind of networked computer intelligence.
The clichéd example is the "wired fridge" - smart enough to tell your PC you need more milk. The problem is that, while one can acknowledge how clever and futuristic a wired fridge might be, it's still hard to justify slamming a connection onto a standard white good - or anything else that never usually touches a computer connection.
But if you're already connecting your gadgets to the computer because that's where you're leaching your power from, then the instincts work the other way. Why not chat while you recharge?
Of such fortuitous "why nots" are new shifts in technology. Mobile phone manufacturers, finding their phones being used more like iPods, could let go of their obsession with proprietary connectors and add USB sockets as rechargers.
Cars that offered USB sockets instead of cigarette lighter chargers could find a range of peripherals that may take advantage of a more intimate digital connection with the modern car's hi-fi and data channels. The window for this connection may be narrowing. Ironically, just as strange devices are plugging into USB, the USB is struggling to become unplugged.
Various "wireless USB" standards are fighting to make our keyboards, printers and mice relatively free to roam without wires. I have my doubts about their success.
Wireless or not, everything needs to get its power from somewhere. Technology will come with strings attached for some time.
We might as well make good use of them.
Danny O'Brien is activist co-ordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
