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."

Comments

easier ways to have your bookmarks portable

[philo_enyce]

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

Portable Firefox

[AbRASiON]

Hooray I can be on topic for a change....

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 :( - 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.

Re:Uh huh...

[stratjakt]

Until you're behind a firewall that won't let you through, which I was all last week.

It was ridiculous, I was working at this cities administration building, and they provide (in tandem with the local university) free wifi outside, which won't penetrate through the walls.

I had to keep running outside to connect to my home office' vpn, to get to the stuff I needed, as I too, am one of those "I can do it all remotely" types.

Lesson learned, next time I pack it all up to take with me. Of course, in my case, that means a portable 80 gig drive, since I couldn't fit all our stuff on flash.

Re:Portable firefox?

[Bios_Hakr]

Not really. The problem is that many people don't have access to the "admin" account. You can't really install apps (you can "install" them to your desktop and hope an admin doesn't get notified), and can't change any settings. Lots of admins have draconian disk quota policies.

Firefox can be unzipped to a folder. Another folder can act as the profile. You need .bat file to tell it to start and use that profile vice creating one under "Documents and Settings/$user/whatever/". After that, removing disk-caching and boosting the memory cache helps out. Add a shortcut to the desktop of the client pointing to the .bat file on the thumb drive and you are set.

VLC 0.8.1 works great from a thumb drive and plays just about anything you throw at it. When my coworkers curse the admin for not having $codec, they come see me.

WinRAR works perfectly once "installed" to a thumb drive. All you need to do on the client is choose "Open With..." and browse to find winrar.exe on the thumbdrive.

I also have cygwin on my thumbdrive to show off the power of command-line completion to my peers. Plus it always comes in handy for various tasks.

I keep several documents on there too. A current copy of my resume, a list of sites and passwords, some random pr0n, helpful regedits, PHP books in .pdf, basic drivers for my NICs, and pics of my kids.

BTW, banish the thought that pics of my kids and pr0n might be one and the same...they aren't.

We also keep USB keys in the safe with server passwords and configs, router passwords and configs, VPN clients, Sniffer Pro, and anything else the NOC guys ask for. They can literally take the key to any site and turn any laptop into a network config workstation.

It's amazing some of the random shit we find on there when they sign them back in.

Anyway, having tons of apps run from removable media is highly desired in my environment. The ammount of work some guys put into hacking these things to get $fav_app working from them is mind-numbing. To have someone else come up with a "certified" list could save tons of time.