USB prosthetic finger gives new meaning to thumbdrives
After software developer Jerry Jalava lost part of his finger in a motorcycle accident, his surgeon suggested building a USB key into his prosthetic digit.
This is a story about Jerry Jalava, a Finnish software developer who lost part of his finger in a motorcycle accident last July. According to his friend, Henri Bergius, when the surgeon assigned to work on Jalava's prosthetic finger discovered his hacking history, he made a clever suggestion: incorporate a USB key into the new digit.
The prosthetic finger contains a 2GB USB key, and Jalava also loaded it with Billix distribution, CouchDBX, and Ajatus to run off the drive, throwing even more geek cred into the mix.
When Jalava needs the drive, he simply pulls it off his left hand, plugs it in, and comes back to pick it up after the transfers are finished. That dispels any parallels to that scene in "Robocop" when he uses the giant spike that comes out of his hand to transfer data from the OCP criminal database to the computer in his head.
Check out more pictures of Jalava's cybernetic finger in the slideshow below, and be sure to listen to Thursday's episode of The 404 Podcast to hear 30 jokes in a row about what would happen if this were to go on another part of the body.
