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Ultaportable Apps: Take Your Thumbware Anywhere
museumpeace writes "On his blog, Jeremy Wagstaff makes available a list of the apps now packaged for USB thumbdrives. He also wrote these up in WSJ but that will cost you. My personal favorite is the FireFox in a box...every where I went, I had a different crop of bookmarks, now my browsing is the same wherever
I go."
Apparently "spell checker" is not on the list...
Please help metamoderate.
It's called Spellbound
It's a great Firefox extension. You can spell check any field.
i just get portable firefox on my usb drive and take it wherever, its quite handy when your school only has IE *shudder*
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. - HHGTTG
I would not eat them even with a Firefox in a box!
I've recently been using http://del.icio.us combined with a live bookmark in my bookmarks toolbar. Now, on the 3 or 4 machines I used regularly I have centralized access to bookmarks. In my case, this turns out to be less hassle than carrying around a thumb drive.
Not sure I see the point here. Isn't putting your local profil on your usb key enough to have a portable version of the browser? Because if the only issue is to have as many bookmarks as you have computers, this certainly takes care of that.
Je n'ai pas d'avenir Je n'ai qu'un destin Celui de n'être qu'un souvenir C'est pour demain
Let me know when this electronic thumb can signal spaceships for a lift. ;)
The coolest voice ever.
is it already /.ed?
Now there's one thing that is the same everywhere I go...
You could load some MP3 playing software on one of these and have one of the most pointless music players ever.
He forgot the Metropipe Virtual Machine, for the tinfoil hat crowd.
Actually, it's a nifty little program, and it'll be niftier when it boots under Windows, Linux and the as-yet-unreleased OSX. It'll be nice to have a little slice of Deus on my thumbdrive if I need ^H^H^H^H^H want to use a familiar interface.
How about Putty.
Then I don't have to carry around all those apps. I just ssh to my machine that does.
i just have a wiki where my bookmarks live. anywhere i go, i open to that page and voila, my bookmarks. since it's a wiki, i can add pages to it from anywhere. no fuss no muss and no cost. philo
Like many Slashdoters, I often get asked to look at a friend or family memeber's computer to fix a small problem, remove a virus, or install a new piece of hardware. Want I want more than consistent applications is a way to take my OS and application configuration/preferences with me between machines. Nothing is worse than sitting down at a computer with the default Windows XP configuration still being used.
The "rumors" of Google's ultracool desktop will be the all in one. Log in with a dumb terminal, and you have all your bookmarks, files, addressbook, pRon... etc
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
Is there a media player that can be ported with all of its codecs?
When I move from machine to machine, I usually install the codec packs and then run mplayer off of the USB drive for the media off of it. If there was a media player where I could avoid the hassle of installing the codecs for the media that would be great!
I also found that winamp runs as a good media player to port around on machines as well. Some small ftp programs like ftp explorer work without needing installation, and i always keep a cd cracked version of some of my older games (such as quake 3 and pre-steam half life1) on my USB drive as well.
(pocket sized 40 gig USB).
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Why not use this: http://cgi29.plala.or.jp/mozzarel/ which I found on the Firefox extensions page? It will store your bookmarks on the Web so they can follow you everywhere.
... or did the connotation of portable software change without notice ??
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
http://gmail.com
Don't even say you can't get an invite.
from the portable firefox page
File / Directories Created - A directory (%userprofile%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox) is created on the
local machine (if Firefox is not installed locally) and a pluginreg.dat file is created within it. A Talkback directory
is also created. (this is a limitation of Firefox, see Bug 272983)
well that sort of negates the whole point really, apps should be self contained, not touch the registry or create anything on the hard drive
lets hope the FF dev team will fix that bug because while it exists it ruins the whole idea of USB apps
win developers please dont use the registry, just use an
just keep it in a single folder like Mac's try to do (although macs often suffer the same thing but in the preferences directory
yep, the shuffle gitz you a music player and a chunk of portable NVRAM. BTW, has anyone replaced a failed shuffle battery yet? this was my motorvation for swapping sawbux for that leetle beet O buttoned plastic. i can listen to lord flea and his calypsonians on the way to work and circumvent the firewall to look at porn and co,,ect music all day by booting knoppix off the shuffle.
back to the shuffle battery. this is serius folkz. thoze Li(pick ur ion) batz have a limited # o charge cycles and who's gonna want to trash their snuffle for want of batz?
Thanks, Slashdot, that's a nice bookmark. I'm installing that on my USB drive so I don't have to use IE (piece o' crap)
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
http://www.usbapps.com is a great site for apps you can run on a USB Drive
Some of these apps fit on a small USB (e.g. 64MB.) But if you want to start doing more than one or two of them, or want bigger apps like some of the Linux flavors, it's really helpful to know how big they are. For some things, like Email, the big problem isn't really the code, it's the data (e.g. you might have a 4MB program install but 100MB of email.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
People dont trust me when I request them to plug my USB key into their computer, to browse the web. For e.g., I was in a Realtor's office the other day, and wanted to print out my bank statement (e-statement). I didnt want to browse using their browser, so, I requested them to accomodate my USB key, so that I can use my secure FireFox to do it. She wouldnt let me use it for 'security' reasons!
I already run PortableFirefox on my iPod Shuffle. Talk about getting some wierd looks. "Yes, let me show you that page on my web browser on my iPod".
Now, what I really want is a "repair keychain". Thing of something like Portable Firefox but that lets me run AVG's system scan, some spyware clean up apps and crap like that.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
The main problem as I see it is that the places you would want your personal stuff most (work, kiosks, Kinkos) you cannot access a thumb drive. :-(
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
Hooray I can be on topic for a change....
:( - it does remember passwords but some sites remember a heck of a lot of stuff with the cookies - if I could just make it remmeber cookies for say my top 30 sites I hit, it would be so much handier.
As a portable firefox user, I've got to say I'm generally quite happy with the package.
It seems a little quirky I must admit like this problem.
Although this seems illogical, I've found installing some extensions don't work the first or second time, even though the instructions outline doing it "twice" should do it - it seems to not like the "delay" of working with a USB disk.
Now the solution I've found is to copy portable firefox to the local disk, which is obviously quicker and then set it up exactly how you like it (be sure to edit the portable firefox.ini file to set the path) - once you've set it up how you like it, copy it back to the usb drive.
Also the bookmark code within ffox does a lot of read / writes when doing ANYTHING with them - so it's tremendously slow, again I'd recommend doing it all on a local disk then copying back when it's finally setup how you like it.
It also doesn't remember cookies (obviously)
However for the love of god I'd like to be able to say setup cookies just for a couple of sites
I wouldn't let you plug it in on my network either. I sure wouldn't let some hacker run some random software on my network. Sure, it may look like firefox. God only knows what trojan is on it.
My personal favorite is the FireFox in a box...every where I went, I had a different crop of bookmarks, now my browsing is the same wherever I go.
I prefer Bookmarks Synchronizer. Upload your bookmarks to an ftp server when closing FireFox if bookmarks changed. Download them when starting it back up and the cpies differ. All automatically.
Where I work, they started to disable the USB ports on the computer's, We can still bypass them, but it points out on of the key problems of firefox, It's hard to make it follow a local security policy, my place of employ, uses a local proxy on the machines, to avoid exess traffic which would just be blocked anyway's, because it's used to lock down internet use, (Uses a whitelist of allowable sites), problem is, (Well, to the admins it's a problem that caused them to ban firefox, which makes it a problem for us), Firefox just ignores the local internet connection settings, which say, "Use this proxy", and as far as I know, even if it was installed on the computer's, there's no way to set that, and make it secure.
The size of the install for Alias Sketchbook 1.1.1 is 11.1 Meg. And you could easily trim 2.1 Meg off that by deleting the Japanese help and Japanese resource dll. And it has some pretty lightweight minimum hardware requirements -- 400 Mhz P2 with 256 Meg of Ram and a 1024x768 24 bit color display, but you'll want a wacom tablet of some form plugged in. So it should be pretty portable...
Ian Ameline
no registry or local disk writing, plays Xvid/DivX etc, the only thing is a lack of a decent and small filesize gui, but iam sure that will come in time, works great with autorun.inf and (CD|DVD)Rw?
http://csant.info/mplayer
and
http://armory.nicewarrior.org/projects/cygmp/
Cool, Emacs users can now take all their settings with them.
I wrote a site to hold bookmarks, my My.yahoo mail, Hotmail, notes, and webcam shots of the cities I lived in.
After a few years of coding, 2 servers, a t1 line, and a few thousand dollars I switched to a flat html page on a buddies server.
long story short, don't carry thumbcards etc...; K.I.S.S., Keep it simple stupid.
"She wouldnt let me use it for 'security' reasons!"
She did the right thing, good for her.
She'd be a real moron if she let anybody come in, attach a rewritable drive to her business computer, run executables from it, then let you have your drive back.
You should be happy she made that choice.
"Derp de derp."
For bookmarks, just create .rss feeds. Put them on a webserver. Use firefox's livebookmarks to track them. For passwords and such, I can't help you there :) But it's a quick, easy solution to make life easy.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Agreed. That's been around for a while and has some great FAQs for people getting started with thumbdrives
With USB thumb drives costing about or less than $50 for 512MB, I'd have to say that space isn't much of an issue at all. I've seen 1GB flash drives for under $70 (though $90-100 is somewhat more common).
What is more of an issue to me is that the application not go bonkers with write cycles being somewhat precious with flash memory. It would be nice if the various linux filesystem drivers could have a mount option that spread out writes (since fragmentation isn't much of an issue on a media with essentially no seek time).
Please help metamoderate.
The hard part isn't bookmarks or email - there are mechanisms to mirror/sync/port these.
It's stuff like extensions (firefox) or blobs & newsgroups (tbird).
So I guess by "ultra-portable" they mean software that installs files in one place, doesn't touch the registry, and is easily 100% removable without bits o' crap left over behind?
Isn't this how all software should be released?
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
The best solution I have heard of is using CVS to back up your preferences to an offsite local, but this requires that:
- you are not using the operating system of the damed
- know how to script stuff with cvs
- Have an offsite cvs server you can get too.
That is to say I have to really tried it yet.Grey (Chris Lusena)
I normally use whatever flavor of loopback encryption is supported in the kernel that I am running. This can be a problem, if that style or mechanism changes between kernels (from what I have read and heard, it has).
Bestcrypt works, but fails to compile on newer FC3 kernels, and I've heard of some stability issues from friends/co-workers.
So my question is, what can be used for a cross platform encryption container? Is there anything that can be use on Linux/Mac OS/*BSD and Windows? Is there some miracle project that I am missing?
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
does it touch the registry ? because if it does it kinda ruins the idea of keeping everything on the USB drive, nice product though
great for form fields ...
http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/
The list seems short. Of the top of my head, I can think of Feather Linux, Puppy Linux (mentioned), and Damn Small Linux. Those can boot off of the USB thumb drive, now I carry my whole OS with me, not just a browser.
hack a day
Does anyone know of a utility to encrypt the entire USB key drive, except for a loader of some sort, so that it requires a password to get access to the data on the drive? Or is this a pretty standard capability for these things?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
That's the way it used to work with many personal computers before people started creating "installers" that would mess with your system.
With modern PCs, you have to think seriously about whether this is a good idea, though. Unless you actually boot from the thumb drive, you risk exposing your data to viruses and spyware.
I've been looking for a list like this for a while. Google searches got me no where. (Except to websites of companies that sell both thumb drives and software)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Check. I have been able to pickup some helpful info/apps from this site as well.
I don't think the article mentions it, but there's also a portable version of python for windows out there. Sorry don't have the url handy. Google for "movable python".
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
AdvanceCD arcade (with bootable USB) http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/cd-readme.html Movix for bootable media http://movix.sourceforge.net/ and Puppy Linux http://www.goosee.com/puppy/flash-puppy.htm
How could he miss Foobar2000 for playing audio? It's simply the best media player out there, bar none.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
If you need to know whether a new technology is here to stay, go no further than your local cinema. For all its glitz and glamour, Hollywood is a pretty conservative place, so if you see some gadget onscreen it's likely that it already has taken root elsewhere. Take, for example, that well-explored plot device, the Diskette With All the Bad Guy's Secrets on It. In many thrillers, the villain keeps one in a drawer, or chases the good guy to get hold of one, or was unwittingly using one as a coaster. (No one seemed to have thought of making a copy, and everyone seems to have access to a computer that can instantaneously read the disk, irrespective of format or whether it had been dunked in water, blood and acid.)
But in the past few years I've noticed a shift. Hollywood's plot-device data has moved from diskette to small sticks called, variously, key drives, thumb drives or USB drives. These devices, like diskettes, store data, but they do it on a small rewritable memory chip, called flash. In the 2003 thriller, "The Recruit," starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell, for example, one character smuggles data out of the CIA on a USB drive. More recently in "Collateral," Tom Cruise jabs one into the taxi cab's guidance display to find out who else he has to rub out after his tablet personal computer containing his hit list is crushed under a truck. It's official: Key drives have arrived.
That's a good thing because they've actually been around a while. At least one company, Singapore's Trek 2000 International Ltd., has been making them for five years. Indeed, they're easier to find nowadays than the floppy disks they have pretty much replaced (I tried to buy a floppy in several computer stores recently and was laughed out of each shop). They come in all shapes and sizes, from small-capacity freebies given away at expos to sticks no bigger than your little finger that can hold up to four gigabytes of data (that's about 3,000 floppies' worth). Some double as MP3 players, others as Wi-Fi hubs. Some can also take photographs; some are shaped like rubber duckies. And, crucially, prices have fallen as capacities have risen. Five years ago you would have paid nearly $2 per megabyte of storage. Nowadays it's about 10 cents. Expect it to drop further this year.
Pocket Rockets
These drives are versatile too: Plug them into a Mac, a computer running Microsoft Windows XP or even a Linux machine and they're ready to go. Use them to keep backup copies of valuable files, move stuff between one computer and another, or store favorite music files or photos.
But why stop there? Key drives are fast (well, faster than a floppy drive). They're reliable. And most important, the key drive is the first bit of cheap(ish) hardware we can actually put in our pocket while leaving room for other stuff, like handkerchiefs, real keys and coins. People are beginning to figure out that instead of just storing files on them, why not whole programs? As long as there is a computer within reach, you use your own e-mail program, your own browser, even your own word-processing program, along with all your customized settings and files. Think of it as PC Piggybacking for the Peripatetic.
That isn't all. Programs that run from the key drive needn't leave any footprints on the host computer, so when you leave the building, your data goes with you. This is especially useful for public computers at Internet cafes, in libraries, at work or at your Mom's house.
In fact, all this isn't that new an idea. Some programs designed specifically to run off a key drive have been around for a while: E-mail program PocoMail PE, from Poco Systems Inc. (www.pocosystems.com), is now into version number three and works like a dream. Adventurous people have developed versions of the popular open source browser Firefox, its sister e-mail program Thunderbird, as well as whole operating systems, to run off key drives (for an attempt at a full list, see my blog loosewireblog.com).
Iomega Inc. has been peddling its own Active Disk
Certainly not portable to the slow-ass dial-up connections I frequently get from hotel rooms when I'm on the road. (I don't consider waiting for five to ten seconds every time I want to do anything with a piece of e-mail to be acceptable.)
Gimme an ssh connection and a copy of PINE any day.
This would be great for traveling, except that most of the cyber cafes in Europe don't allow you to use their USB ports.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
I very heavily use my thumb drive on school/library pubic systems, and have an allmost entirely different set of programs i use: ,sure its ugly, but it works a lot better than miranda
For AIM:
TerrAIM
For IRC:
Dana I acutally use this little IRC client whenever im in windows, even on my own machines. very light and fast.
For Remote:
Both RealVNC and PuTTY
My favorive text editor:
Notepad++
And a number of tools from DS Software Notably TaskKill.
Wherever you can use a thumbdrive. Which doesn't fucking include public terminals. Use a bookmarking service. Fuck thumbdrives.
This is one of the things I've come to like about Mac OS X. Most good applications are nothing but a single icon. This icon is represented by a single directory. If you drag this directory to a USB drive (and it fits), then it will run from that drive. Installing these sorts of applications consists of dragging them from an archive or disk image and dropping them into your folder of choice. I really wish more OS X applications were like this. Uninstalling is great. You just throw them away.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
As opposed to the USB device, you would need to be connected to the internet to access your bookmarks :=)
Plug your USB drive into a virus-infected machine; run firefox; and you now have a virus-infected copy of firefox on your USB drive. Carry it over to another machine; plug it in; run firefox; and you now have another virus-infected computer.
I'm sure McAfee, Symantec, and Sophos will all love this idea, but I think I'll take a pass here...
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Yahoo has had this for many, many years (in Internet time).
I don't respond to AC's.
There's this new thing out called a "CD". They hold at least 650 MB, are disposable, can be bought in most convenience stores, and cost about $0.10 each. They're almost universally readable, and there are probably 10x the number of CD drives out there than there are USB ports. Welcome to 1992.
I don't respond to AC's.
http://www.no-install.com/ I just started this site a couple months ago because I could not find any 1 site out there to get portable applications. So I did a little research myself and thought I put them together in 1 place. Feel free to sign up, post links to downloads and/or articles to related news/software/anything.
There are some caveats to publishing one's bookmarks or participating in collaborative bookmarking which less technical users might not catch at first glance: you probably don't want to publish anything about your browsing if you bookmark:
Digital Citizen
I practically run my business from three gigabyte flash drives, with appropriate CD/DVD/GMail backup.
It would be very useful if I could have an install on flash that would allow me to run Firefox on say FC3/WinXP and OSX, yet just have the one store of data. I'm finding more and more that I'm using different OS's for different tasks, but its always useful to have my browser with me. With flash getting cheaper and cheaper there is probably little reason other than configuration why I can't have binaries for different platforms sharing the same files.
Why spend your valuable quatloos on a USB drive when you can throw a CD in a $10 CDROM drive?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Apostrophes, commas and capital letters aren't something you sprinkle over sentences randomly. Even if you have a very good reason for having crappy English skills, you still look like a moron when you write like a ten year-old, and people will still place less importance on your opinion when you express yourself so poorly. You would be doing yourself a favour if you improved your English skills.
I've made a similar project called "Friedfox". This is for when you (1) don't want to carry your Firefox around all the time and (2) can download from the Internet fairly fast. It's also for people like me who just don't believe in hardware. It is a small Firefox installer that installs to a Windows user's profile rather than the system, so it doesn't require Administrator-level access.
In addition, I've streamlined the installer so it's a total of two clicks to install it. Since IE will let you "Open" programs from the web, you can instant-launch the installer by going to http://friedfox.mozdev.org/go . You can check out my cheesy web site for it.
I also have an Internet2-connected machine as the primary mirror for university students.
|/usr/games/fortune
You can export and import putty's registry info pretty easily, it's all in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Simon Tatham.
/.
Eeuww, I typed backslahses on
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Any specific evidence from anyone on the wear and tear on flash drives, that thousands of read/write cycles can inflict? Anytime I've read elsewhere about people running applications off USB drives, someone has mentioned r/w cycles. Anyone have a drive fail from this?
There's this new thing out called a thumbdrive! It holds 1GB, is easy rewriteable, and there are at least 5x as many USB ports as CD drives in the world! Welcome to 2005!
-----
jonathan barket
until my company blocked access to Gmail. Yahoo and Hotmail were the first email sites to go, though. I'm certainly not in a small company, either.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Yes, because they're so easy to fit in your pocket/on your keychain, resistant to dropping/scratching, and since every computer has a CD-R drive with packet writing software that is universally compatible with any program that might be installed on the CD.
Do any machines boot from the thumb drive if it is present?
I suppose that would be a big security hole.
No. You do this, and you'll have about 157 copies of the same .dll's on your system.
Who fucking cares? Storage is $0.50 per gig, so I blow a couple of gig on duplicated libraries. Can't I at least get the choice of a "static" install that doesn't rely on shared libraries?
Most people never rebuild the own Windows DLLs, so the "dynamic update" argument for shared libraries seldom holds water for applications in that environment, and the loss of storage is meaningless in today's hard disks.
At least build the installers (or the Makefiles) such that a statically linked installation is at least a *choice*.
Great place to find innovative ideas/applications for USB drives. I plan on getting a Treo650 soon and look forward to tweaking it using some ideas posted on your site.
Windows-Tools on CD-ROM (or USB stick)
Well thought you might enjoy that compilation of tools as much as I did.
(I'm not affliated with the page.)
Ultaportable Apps
;)
UltRaportable mate
Had this idea for a while and hopefully a company will pick this up: How about a USB device the same size/dimensions as a normal USB flash drive but you can swap SD/MMC/XD Cards in & out, this way I can carry pretty much un-limited portable storage? least, makes more sense to me and wouldn't have to carry like three USB Flash drives. Well, If this device does exsist (No wires), where is it in the UK? (yes, I did have a portable 2.5" drive but that's too bulky)
/. is good for you.
is Portable Sunbird!
I was thinking of buying a PDA (for scheduling purposes) when I stumbled upon Portable Sunbird. I experimented with using it for a couple of weeks thinking maybe it could save me some money.
The first week was a semi-disaster-- I kinda wasn't at ease with the interface and Sunbird's task list leaves a lot to be desired. But after that week, using it became smoother.
I would recommend Portable Sunbird to people who are comfortable taking notes on paper, then use the PC to sort everything out (like me! :D)
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
Classic is a fantastic little media player. It'll handle nearly every video file (including .mov, dvd's and .rm) and it all works without an install. Just a tiny little program that goes everywhere with me on my USB drive.
2 kxp6484.zip?download
Snag it at sourceforge here http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/guliverkli/mpc
I'll get it when it starts eating lox.
I use del.icio.us to access my bookmarks from anywhere, what I need is a way to access USENET from home and work without seeing the same posts over and over again.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
SpyBot S&D runs fine from a thumbdrive, which tends to come in handy.
I could not find any 1 site out there to get portable applications
Guess you somehow managed to miss tinyapps.org
I am looking for a solution where I could set up 3 Thunderbird executables: one for Windows, one for Linux, one for Mac OS X. I would then have them use the same profile. This shouldn't be so difficult. But what I really want is to set up some encryption scheme accessible across each of the "big 3" OS's. That way I can encrypt my profile so should I lose my keydrive, I won't have to worry (within reason). Is there any such solution?
I'm also interested in finding a standalone audio encoder for either flac or ogg on Windows or Mac OS X. I've looked but to no avail...
Shouldn't You expect more from your DJ?
First off, RUNT Linux ( http://www.ncsu.edu/project/runt )is a great linux distro you can just unzip onto a pen drive and run a script to make the drive bootable or create a boot floppy.
. php?p=1 84#184
Secondly, I've posted a complete list of all the tools I keep on my pen drive here:
http://moses.sca.ncsu.edu/phpBB2/viewtopic
It's got a few tools you list, and several that are a little different. Several are useful installers to keep around, and several are single static binaries that I always like to have around, like putty, WinSCP, VNC, and MS Remote Desktop Client. unixkit-tiny has lots of useful utilities, like cygwin, but not requiring access to the registry. I also keep around a copy of McAffee stinger for quick virus scans. Plus lame and vorbis-tools for audio encoding. Take a look at the link above.
I tried using CD-RWs to complement my iAudio player(doubling as 512mb flash drive). Doesn't work. Windows and most apps will balk at the very high latency and it will usually stay spinning noisily the whole time it's in the drive, making the whole experience unpleasant at best.
Bottom line, if you want small portable storage, use a flash drive.
If you want big portable storage, use a hard drive.
If you want outdated/inconvenient techologies, use floppies, tape or CD/DVDs.
I've used different sizes of Lexar and PNY drives. I'm using the 1GB Jump Drive now. I've run my Eudora 3.05 Lite mail client like this for a long time. I used to have it on a zip drive, but those DEFINITELY have wear and tear problems. Then I did this technique with CF drives and Smart Media, before I went to the thumbs. Anyway, I've had zero problems doing this on 365 day a year basis in spite of the warnings about limited write cycles. Just in case, though, I do back it up automatically every night.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Recent versions of Putty can connect via proxies. Using that, SSH connections may be possible even if there is a restrictive firewall. I used this several times.
So you hook into your ULTRA SECURE POP connection (you are using https, right?).
Then you send an email! Zoom! Look at that protected bugger go! No way Teh Spooks can get to that, eh?
Oh, except for whoever is the admin of whatever box your POP server is at. They can read that email (and all incoming mail in the spool)
Or anyone, anywhere, along the whole freaking chain of mail servers inbetween you and whoever you are mailing or getting mail from!
And you are worried about a googlebot automatically feeding you up a somewhat relevant ad? Get real.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Many of my bookmarks are not appropriate for work or other places where the keyboard is not waterproofed.
Is there some way to keep some of my bookmarks across machines while still keeping some only on one machine?
That seems to be a problem with data syncing in general, actually. Not just bookmarks.
Ultaportable
Mmmm...
Most flash drives have a small switch that can set them to read-only mode.
Previously I posted a link to Dekart Private Disk. When creating your image using this app, you can set the read-only parameter and live a happy life afterwards.
The only advantage of the cd is that it is read-only by default. But hey, its not that convenient, it does get scratched... and you are more likely to forget a cd in a drive rather than a usb flashdisk in a usb port - that's a fact.
The saddest poem
Some others that have not been mentioned that work well:
askSam (database application)
CyberScrub
FlashGet
PC Pine
Radmin
Recorder
Visio 2000
Xitami (web server, for running an intranet from your usb drive)
Zork
This website portablefreeware.com is dedicated to listing such portable freeware apps.
TrackEngine - VCR for the Web.
I use Hyperlinkomatic .. its generally a little easier to use than del.ici.o.us (whatever) I have found, and it integrates well .. i have a hot-key for two bookmarks 'add current to hlom', and 'access hlom', just option-1 and option-2 to access and manage my bookmarks from anywhere.
.. roll on Apache installer!
looking forward to the OSX-local version of HLOM
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
how do you go with upgrading ?
I keep a port version but just upgraded to a desktop verison again. I have yet to check for a new version. This is problem as the port version is always behind the official release.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I've been wrestling most of this semester with the powerful and mighty SunOne Studio that's installed on the workstations in my college's computer lab. Powerful and mighty as in powerfully slow, and crashes mighty easily. As an aside- yes, I know NetBeans has superseded SunOne, but try telling that to the shiftless lab admins here, I've rarely seen them leave their desk.
Enter Gel IDE, it has much of SunOne's functionality with none of the nasty behavior, and it runs happily from a USB drive. I realize it's not a new application- the GelIDE Yahoo group was started in 2002, but it dosen't seem to have received any attention around here, and it wasn't terribly easy to find via the obvious searches. On a functionality scale, it fits in somewhere between Scite and NetBeans.
And it's not written in Java.
When was the last time you updated JUST a Windows DLL in a Windows application?
I can only think of two instances when you might update just the libraries for an application:
1) Windows OS. Libraries make sense here, but it's not like any service pack has ever been just DLLs or there's some expectation they'll be small. IMHO the OS libraries are the only place that sharing makes sense.
2) Large applications (think SQL server, Exchange, etc). Modularity makes sense here from a scale perspective, since updating a static Exchange install would be pretty painful. But again, it's not like E2k service packs have been small, either.
The "critical security fix" usually applies to OS-supplied libraries and moreso on the UNIX side when holes have been found in stuff like ssh or other crypto libraries linked all over the place.
But this is why I said "make it an option" -- if I want to install a statically linked/private library application, I should have the choice.
For passwords, PassVault is extremely useful. Definitely better than a text list of passwords. Recognizes webpages and application windows with password fields and prompts for learning + remembering and auto logging in too. Passwords are stored on the USB flash drive. Some application features such as auto quiting upon removal of USB drive actually designed specifically for USB flash drives.
Plug your USB drive into a virus-infected machine; run firefox; and you now have a virus-infected copy of firefox on your USB drive. Carry it over to another machine; plug it in; run firefox; and you now have another virus-infected computer.
This is an issue, actually. I've written a page on Safe Portable App-ing that outlines some general guidelines that will help to minimize the risk (and keep it as non-geeky as possible). You'd still be at risk for any nasties that aren't yet know by the A/V software. And, of course, you're always at risk for keylogging and network sniffing on the machine you are using. It's best to keep all this in mind while you're using it.
All that said, there are some USB-based A/V products in the works and some other methods of ensuring application integrity (think hash-checking of all installed apps).
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I was in a Realtor's office the other day, and wanted to print out my bank statement (e-statement)... She wouldnt let me use it for 'security' reasons!
...) but using somebody else's computer to access a bank account is the last thing you should be doing securitywise, specially if you value the money in your accounts...
She was right, even if she didn't know the real reason why: what garantee did you have that there wasn't a key logger (hardware dongle or software version) installed on the machine? Anything you type on a computer you don't have full control of should be assumed to be potentially available to hackers. You could connect to a remote server if there's enough safeguards (one time passwords,