FOUR THINGS CAUGHT my eye in the pre-CES chaos that were not really worth a story on their own, but probably deserved a word or three anyway. Some are cool, others scary, I'll let you decide which is which.

First up is the AMD based Hello Kitty laptop by NEC. This one is so cute that I almost vomited. It is a real production model I am told, and it looks quite hideous, meaning that Japanese schoolgirls and broken boyfriends across Asia will be buying them by the truckload. A note to Intel product planners, next IDF, put this on stage next to a Vaio TZ.......

That brings us to Interactive Toy Concepts and their remote controlled beer cooler called the RC Cooler. They had many remote control things at the show, but this is the only one that would fetch beer and cool it for you. On football day, this could save lives, many lives, and only costs $49.99.

Next up is the far more mundane Powramid by Kreative Power. Not much to say here other than a fairly compact power strip that takes the ubiquitous wall warts with aplomb. They come in black and white with various colored lights on top. The lights have no particular meaning, it is a fashion choice.

Last up we have the Yoggie Pico and Pico Pro USB security devices. These little memory stick sized marvels pack a full Linux PC running on an Intel ARM CPU (now Marvell FWIW) and run all the security software on that.

It offloads the processing power to the stick so you can get realtime protection with little or no CPU overhead. This could be very interesting for laptop users, and more importantly it can clean out infected/spywared boxes because it doesn't depend on a clean host. Sadly it will nothing about the inbuilt Vista malware, but can anything? µ