cooling function: high/low/off/auto sleep
i think the buttons are covered with leather, vegetarians beware. (not sure if it's real though, probably not)
there's a fan switch which shuts itself if the mouse has been idle for a min. (not sure if the fan is powered by batteries)
their mousepads look neat.
by the way, it's korean alright.

Matt, it's a USB/MS Windows compatible mouse. Odds are, any Mac mouse driver that recognises an MS-type mouse will work just fine with this mouse.

I just wish that there was some company (ThinkGeek?) that would offer this stuff domestically in North America.

Here's another whacky mouse, this one IS from Japan. <http://tinyurl.com/h9yk>;

The mouse is from a Korean company, and from their site it seems they don't offer online purchasing. Seems like a small, sketchy company to me.. but now that boingboing plugged them maybe they'll take off.

First saw something like this on The Screen Savers . Thier tech wiz Yoshi whipped up a few for the show using plain old MS mice and some vid-card cooling fans. One even had LEDs that blinked with the spinning of the fan. Always wondered when a commercial version would be produced.

Edited by author 07-17-2003 03:27 PM
The motors in axial fans aren't as affected by backpressure, so even if you blocked all the vents with tape the motor wouldn't really have much of a load on it with a stalled fan. You could seal up a box fan with plexiglass and it would run for much of its normal life.

Hand dryers use centrifugal blowers which actually compress the air and would load with a high static pressure, but the mouse fan is axial.

Did you ever cup your hands over the hand drier in the toilets and listen to the motor strain? Leave your hands there too long, and that sucker's going to have a hand drier hernia and pop it's cogs.

I reckon that my palm resting over the vent on this mouse is going to do the same thing eventually.

It isn't a Japanese mouse, it's Korean. And it only works with Windows (which is too bad as I know at least three Mac artists who would like this). Hard to find details on the web as there appears to be a Korean adult animated film produced by the same company. But you can get that for 10,000 units of Korean cash. (I don't understand any asian languages, I just like Babelfish).

I want, almost need, this. My palms and the soles of my feet get unbearably hot. I sleep with a fan pointed directly at my soles. Anyone read Japanese to tell me how much it costs and how to order it?