Ultaportable Apps: Take Your Thumbware Anywhere 279
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."
easier ways to have your bookmarks portable (Score:4, Interesting)
What about taking my configuration with me? (Score:3, Interesting)
HUGE question about media (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Re:Portable firefox? (Score:2, Interesting)
Portable Firefox (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:i do this anyway... (Score:2, Interesting)
Can't catch me, I use VNC!
Re:Uh huh... (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
My set: (Score:2, Interesting)
For AIM:
TerrAIM [sourceforge.net]
For IRC:
Dana [diebestenbits.de] I acutally use this little IRC client whenever im in windows, even on my own machines. very light and fast.
For Remote:
Both RealVNC [realvnc.com] and PuTTY [greenend.org.uk]
My favorive text editor:
Notepad++ [sourceforge.net]
And a number of tools from DS Software [ozemail.com.au] Notably TaskKill.
Re:USB Drive Encryption (Score:1, Interesting)
you will need to decrypt before running tho.
OS X (Score:4, Interesting)
Shortcomings of publishing one's bookmarks (Score:4, Interesting)
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:
Re:easier ways to have your bookmarks portable (Score:1, Interesting)
When you use that wiki on an office or public or school network or WiFi connection, do you always use SSL (HTTPS)? If not, I'll thank you in advance for your login and password to that wiki.
Of course, you will have edit history of what I shall do to your wiki. Revert! Revert!
wear and tear on USB drive? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is EXACTLY what my site is all about... (Score:2, Interesting)
But can't we have a choice? (Score:3, Interesting)
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*.
Re:flash is cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
Flash drives already do load leveling in hardware; they are after all, usually used with FAT.
For the few cases where you need to do it yourself, that's what JFFS2 [sourceware.org] is for.
Re:easier ways to have your bookmarks portable (Score:2, Interesting)
You'll be able to put.. TEXT... on his wiki!
Note: edit access to wikis is not really a problem. The only attack form that really matters is targetted robot attacks for example from spammers. These are generally blocked by subnet range exclusion, and are nothing but another form of DOS eventually, like pingflooding.
If someone edits your wiki and puts text on it, you can just go back to the last version or any other earlier version if you don't like their changes.