I’m really starting to think that the folks out at Wholesale Keychain are either brilliant or insane because they’ve put things on their keychains that I’ve never really even imagined before.

We all know about USB thumb drives, right?  Those great little pocket hard drives that can store a surprisingly large quantity of material and are, in some cases, actually bigger than the hard drive sizes of computers we used to work with?  Seriously, I remember when everyone was practically having heart attacks over a two hundred and fifty meg hard drive.  Now it’s a thousand times bigger!

But geriatric rambling aside, Wholesale Keychains offers a smart little one gig USB drive, and offers it with what I consider a really great feature.  You know how a lot of them have caps to cover the USB plug?  So you futz around with them and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll lose one outright?  Well, this one has a flip-open cover that will never get lost, and I personally find that terribly awesome.

These cost right around ten bucks a pop, more if you want engraving, but you can get them for ten percent off if you use the promotional code carbuyer.

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Answer: Yes.

And it’s actually easier than you might think!

First, you’re going to need a laptop.  Chances are you’ve either got one or are planning to get one, otherwise there’d be zero point in you reading this in the first place.  You’ll also probably want a car power adapter with it so you can plug it in and run it off your car’s generated battery power as you drive.

Second, you’ll need a GPS receiver and mapping software.  They come in two flavors, USB and Bluetooth.  If you have a Bluetooth capable laptop, your receiver will generally be wireless. A USB, meanwhile, will have a cable.

Now, you’ll put the laptop in the car, and the receiver in the window, and now you have a GPS built right into your computer.  Even better, you can do it for under a hundred bucks.  You’ll never have a reason to get lost again.

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You know those black boxes that they have on airplanes? You know, the ones that you recover in the event of a crash to describe what was going on at the time the plane went down?  They’re also called flight data recorders.

Well, now there’s one for your car.  It’s called the Driving Reporter Gadget, and thanks to a combination of GPS and USB connectivity, your car will now keep a running record of where you’ve been, how fast you were going, and plenty more.  You can even watch your trip play out on the surface of the planet thanks to Google Earth.

This is probably one of those things that’d be great for parents, but could be misused so easily it’s not even funny.  I mean, seriously–what if people started putting these things under other people’s cars? Then they could watch everything you do in a typical day, or at least know where you go.

That’s one to think about.

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