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What's on Your USB Pen Drive?
gmhowell asks: "With the popularity of USB pen drives, I've thought it time to join the crowd and get one. But I'm curious as to what is so important that you should always have a copy. Clearly PuTTY or your favorite SSH client is important. Perhaps with some keys. But what else? A copy of your browser cookies? MP3s? Pictures? What other software is smart enough to run from a portable medium without need for an installation? (Yup, MAME and z26 seem like likely candidates)."
These things are porn stashs for married men.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
My entire UNIX account from school, including all my read mail and web pages, is backed up on my USB drive. I store anything I think I might need to work on just in case I don't have internet access.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
i used to have a cygwin install on my keychain, but it requires some registry crap in windows to work properly.
rather than clutter up the registry of every windows computer i'll ever use (joke here), i use unxutils, which has a great command line interface. along with cli gpg and my ssh keys, my usb keychain is of great use to me when i'm away from my powerbook.
I used to use Password Safe at work so that I could have randomized passwords and a system to retrieve them from, but it was very inconvenient because I wouldn't have the changes I made at home.
I now store my password safe database on my pen drive and just plug it into a USB slot when I need it--since I'm one of those geeks with a keychain equivalent to George's Wallet (Seinfeld)--it's always with me wherever I am.
I also store various utilities that I use from day-to-day, and made it bootable so that I can boot from it on ailing workstations when I need to.
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
> A copy of your browser cookies?
Cookies? Please. Try _bookmarks_. Definitely.
One's preferred text editor. Compression tools (zip, bzip2, etc.).
Perhaps some critical files for 'off-site' backups: your resume, a copy of your network settings, your address book, etc. The garbage file you snagged from that Gibson.
A network tool or tool(s), a virus scanner. Disk partitioning tools (PartitionMagic if you're a Windows user). A copy of your favourite games (BZFlag, GLTron).
Make this thing bootable, too, just in case, as some machines can boot off these things now. Yay!
I love it - I bought a 128MB and it is just about perfect. I carry it around like a pocket knife :)
I got my dad to buy one to backup his files while hes on the road. And I just had to have one after setting his up for him and such. If you DONT have one - go get one, really...
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
We've had a number of occassions where we've had to transfer a PowerPoint presentation from someone's laptop (because they decided to change all of their slides after e-mailing or burning a copy of their final version) to the one that is actually being used and hooked up to the projector
The stuff I work on (texts, source code, ...) checked out from my CVS repository. CVS lets me sync changes between the files on my USB memory and the various computers I use. Pretty nice side-effect of a version control tool.
I also reserve about 30MB for a FAT partition; file transfers between work and my connectionless old HP Vectra.
Here's what I store on mine.
1. Important documents. Mostly my poetry and fiction writing.
2. Funny little pictures I find on the net. I might want to show them to someone.
3. My irc software (mirc, in this case)
4. My Firebird and Thunderbird profiles. Finally, roaming profiles!
5. Copies of Firebird and Thunderbird. (so if I'm on a dialup computer, it doesn't take me very long to get up and running.
6. Backups of important files from both home and work. Just in case I lose the original, or need that file.
Very useful things, for the roaming profile alone.
Of course then the cover (the plastic part with the hole that you use to put it on a keyring, which probably costs about 40 cents wholesale) broke and now I can't even find the damn thing.
- adam
afaik, usb thumbdrives (or whatever they're called) act as usb drives, and in most modern bios you can select 'boot from usb drive'
If you've got a key you tend to use from only one place (i.e. work->home), consider prefixing the authorized_hosts line with a from="some.hostname.com" as well. This will prevent the key being used from a different IP by someone who "borrows" your keychain.
Puppy linux fits in 48MB w/ a X windows interface and office software
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/
Mesh-AP fits in 32MB and incorporates an ad-hoc WiFi mesh and an Opera browser
http://www.locustworld.com/
Trinux fits in a floppy with heavy duty security functions
http://www.trinux.org/
So, here's what my pendrive looks like after 10 months of use:
/docs - all my personal docs (bookmarks, resume, will, keyfiles, etc)
:(
/docs directory in case I'm on a foreign box.
/proj - source checkouts for personal projects under active development. Dedicated Eclipse workbench and tailored shortcut for launching eclipse. This lets me have one ide for java, python, documentation, websites, xml/xsl, etc.
/xfer - file transfer/holding area for moving stuff between locations/systems
/linux - aliases, scripts, must have utils
/win32 - gvim, dedicated profiles for thunderbird and firebird. Installs (but not installed) for putty, winzip, firebird (instant browser!)
Note, Putty is registry dependent, and the workaround for using it on a pen drive is too painful for everyday use. I love Putty, but it doesn't live on my pen drive. I wish it would
Having firebird and thunderbird profiles on the pen drive means that I can have firebird/tbird installs live on work/home/laptop machines but always keep my data off the boxes and in my hands. I keep my bookmarks in my
Trillian can run from portable media (even a CD if you're not interested in changing settings). Gotta modify some ini's to make the paths relative, but it works pretty well.
Somebody even set up a website with step-by-step instructions
Trillian Anywhere
I'm starting to think this isn't the best place to promote my Anti-Sig Campaign.