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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."
Let me know when this electronic thumb can signal spaceships for a lift. ;)
The coolest voice ever.
"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."
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
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.
.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.
.pdf, basic drivers for my NICs, and pics of my kids.
Firefox can be unzipped to a folder. Another folder can act as the profile. You need
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
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.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I imagine that could lead to an akward moment...
It's OK! I'm a limo driver!