Pay attention, 007: Wi-Fi cufflinks perfect for a spy Brookstone, the up-market US gifts-you-know-you-absolutely-can't-resist retailer, has come up with another winner: Wi-Fi routing silver cufflinks with an on-board USB stick. How on earth did we ever do without them... and they only cost $249.99. Brookstone WiFI cufflinks The coolest cufflinks ever The USB thumb drive bit …
I think the last time I wore cufflinks was at my own wedding. Being an old fart, I might have a couple of shirts with the additional buttonholes necessary for cufflinks but I suspect most of my colleagues would have difficulty finding a shirt suitable for use with a tie - cufflinks would be out of the question. I can think of a few people that might wear cufflinks but most of them can barely answer their own emails. But maybe my colleagues and I are a bunch of Proles.
Speak for yourself, almost all my shirts require cufflinks, and I have about a dozen pairs.
My favourites being the 'Monkey Magic' ones, and the motorbike ones.
I still can't see the point of these though, unless the PC you plug the usb bit into doesn't actually have a wi-fi card. But if you can afford these, you can afford a wi-fi enabled laptop and turn it into an ad-hoc access point. Stuff a bit of routing software on there and you are done.
Still, pretty cool though.
They're nice enough, I suppose, but 2GB "respectable enough"? For USD 250? Er. I'd expect at least 16 GB (already exist in roughly that size usb stick, though sans cuff link), 64GB would be respectable. As in, yes, that's a nice job building this, well done. And I would expect the things to last more than an evening or two. The whole "oh it's got wifi in it and you can play hostap with that too!" doesn't impress me much. But then I tend to avoid adapters that cannot do that, and I do check beforehand, yes. The storage might be useful though, if there was an usable amount of it, not barely enough to hold the hostap software. I mean, come on. What secret spy file transfer is under 2GB these days?
All the WiFi routers I've ever seen have in common the fact that they need to be connected to a wired network. So does this mean that Mr Cool with his WiFi cufflinks is tethered to the wall by a length of CAT5? Does he run it up his trouser leg for neatness?
I guess a wireless router doesn't actually have to be connected to a wired network. The function of a router as I understand it is to join two or more subnets, so this could just be a way of joining two wireless subnets. Is this a sufficiently common requirement to justify carrying the solution around on your person?
So you plug the wifi cufflink into your computer and it can be a "router" - but actually that's just a software function of your computer, so it's really just a USB wifi adaptor. But maybe you want it because it's so small, and portabilty is important to you. So presumably you'll be using it with a laptop or other portable computer, which will almost certainly have wifi anyway, making this gadget completely redundant.
Or am I missing something?
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