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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'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...
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.
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
http://gmail.com
Don't even say you can't get an invite.
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!
And yet, it's selling. If something pointless falls in a forest and everyone around gets the point, does it no longer have orange sport cases available?
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
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.
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/
"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."
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.
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
great for form fields ...
http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/
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 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.
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?
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
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
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?
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*.
I used to think the same way.. About a year ago USB drives were about twice the price per megabyte over CF and SD cards... Now they are cheaper and more popular. So having this functionality is almost useless...
Still, if you still want this functionality, sandisk makes a very popular SD card reader which is just slightly larger than their cruzer Micro drive. It's a little thicker and a littler wider. But honestly this day in age you really are wasting your money to buy a USB drive if you plan on "upgrading" it later on.. as the usb drives are cheaper per megabyte than SD nowadays.
Now... when it comes to mp3 players... upgradeable mp3 players are definately the way to go as far as the near future is concerned... once flash supply can catch up to demand (probably will take another year or so) upgradeable mp3 players won't be such a big issue. But right now the mfg's are charging literally twice as much for twice the flash ram in an mp3 player... Ridiculous when they could just put an SD or CF slot in it and sell the ram for market value, not twice it.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
SpyBot S&D runs fine from a thumbdrive, which tends to come in handy.
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.