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."
spelunking cheque (Score:4, Insightful)
I know an Ultaportable App (Score:5, Funny)
It's a great Firefox extension. You can spell check any field.
Re:I know an Ultaportable App (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I know an Ultaportable App (Score:3, Insightful)
I do government contract work, and correspond with all sorts of bigshot muckety-mucks from cities across the US, from city IT managers to police and fire chiefs, mayors, judges and city attorneys.
Coming from a Canadian living in the US: It's downright sad that Americans are not taught to read or write, and lack basic communication skills. Or maybe they're taught, and forget, because the general culture doesn't place
Re:I know an Ultaportable App (Score:5, Funny)
beurocrats
*cough*
Re:I know an Ultaportable App (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I know an Ultaportable App (Score:2)
BUT.. when they post to slashdot, use instant messaging or send a quick email to tell their lacky to dump the trash, spelling and grammer do not need to be their number one priority. Give it a rest when it's on "instant" media. You no more need to correct a slashdotters grammer than you need to correct the guy who talks in incomplete sentences. As
Re:I know an Ultaportable App (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I know an Ultaportable App (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I know an Ultaportable App (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I know an Ultaportable App (Score:2)
Re:I know an Ultaportable App (Score:2, Insightful)
The other thing is that whilst no one should be expected to spend half an hour carefully double checking every slashdot post for errors, they also shouldn't _need_ to.
Average spelling and grammar abilities should be high enough that someone can quickly spew something out, and be relatively certain that it makes sense, and is spelt right _without_ the use of spell checkers or anything m
forgot the link (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I know an Ultaportable App (Score:2)
i do this anyway... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:i do this anyway... (Score:2)
Re:i do this anyway... (Score:2, Interesting)
Can't catch me, I use VNC!
regarding bookmarks... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:regarding bookmarks... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:regarding bookmarks... (Score:2)
how do you create bookmarks?
how do you access them?
do you have to use the web-form, or does the extension allow you to submit them?
further, can you create a live-bookmark of your chimparks?
Re:regarding bookmarks... (Score:2)
(You do need to restart Firefox after installing the extension.)
Re:regarding bookmarks... (Score:2)
Re:regarding bookmarks... (Score:2)
However, this would be nice for that small set of bookmarks that overlap.
Re:regarding bookmarks... (Score:2)
Re:regarding bookmarks... (Score:2)
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:Shortcomings of publishing one's bookmarks (Score:2)
Portable firefox? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Portable firefox? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Portable firefox? (Score:5, Funny)
I imagine that could lead to an akward moment...
Re:Portable firefox? (Score:3, Informative)
http://exocet.ca/phpwiki/BradsTools
Almost all of what's at that wiki I keep on my 256MB USB drive.
PS: I'm tired of paying for WinRAR/WinZip. 7-zip works fine, supports zip, r
Re:Portable firefox? (Score:2)
Re:Portable firefox? (Score:2)
Just FYI: You don't need cygwin. The Windows command line does this.
Re:Portable firefox? (Score:2)
Re:Portable firefox? (Score:3, Informative)
Does not require booting from USB drive.
-nB
Re:Portable firefox? (Score:2)
"now my browsing is the same wherever I go."
Which led me to think of Firefox, not Linux distros.
By commenting that you would have to boot the machine from a USB drive in order to browse implied to me that you had not read the article and assumed this was a thin/mini linux with a browser integrated in it.
-nB
Yeah, but what I really need... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't tell me... (Score:3, Funny)
Uh huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I don't have to carry around all those apps. I just ssh to my machine that does.
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.
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:HUGE question about media (Score:5, Informative)
here you go (Score:4, Informative)
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 [csant.info]
and
http://armory.nicewarrior.org/projects/cygmp/ [nicewarrior.org]
Re:HUGE question about media (Score:3, Informative)
I'll skip the opportunity to complain loudly about so many different media players being named "mplayer"...
What you want is mplayer... (grumble grumble)
http://mplayerhq.hu/ [mplayerhq.hu]
Go to the download section, download the latest MPlayer-win, and also the ~20
Bookmarks (Score:2)
Re:Bookmarks (Score:2)
Ultraportable Email (Score:5, Funny)
Don't even say you can't get an invite.
Re:Bah (Score:2)
Gimme an ssh connection and a copy of PINE any day.
Re:Ultraportable Email (Score:2)
Re:Ultraportable Email (Score:2)
That was convenient (Score:2)
How big are these apps? (Score:5, Insightful)
flash is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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.
Thest are great... except - the only problem is... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Thest are great... except - the only problem is (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
already do this (Score:2)
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.
Re:already do this (Score:2)
Main Problem (Score:2)
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
Bookmarks Synchronizer (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Bookmarks Synchronizer (Score:2)
Security (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Security (Score:2, Insightful)
So why haven't they simply made the gateway route all 80 and 443 traffic through the proxy? No need to configure any clients.
Create a .rss file (Score:2)
The hard part (Score:2)
It's stuff like extensions (firefox) or blobs & newsgroups (tbird).
Shouldn't this be how all software is designed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this how all software should be released?
Re:Shouldn't this be how all software is designed? (Score:2)
Re:Shouldn't this be how all software is designed? (Score:3)
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 buil
Library updates are BS for 99% of Windows apps (Score:3, Insightful)
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 upd
USB Drive Encryption (Score:2)
LS
Re:USB Drive Encryption (Score:2)
The post by un1xl0ser (up a couple) asks a good question; What's the cross platform solution for this?
that's the way it used to work (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:that's the way it used to work (Score:2)
There are huge security risks in this. I would never allow anyone to execute unknown binaries on my machine. (ie; in a production enviroment), and I wouldn't want my binaries exposed to a potentially infected system,
Foobar2000 (Score:2)
WSJ Article (Score:2)
until Cyber Cafes give you access to the USB ports (Score:2)
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.
OS X (Score:4, Interesting)
How long before viruses exploit this? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure McAfee, Symantec, and Sophos will all love this idea, but I think I'll take a pass here...
Re:How long before viruses exploit this? (Score:2)
Yes, that is rather oldschool now -- which is why I think current viruses which attach themselves to executables might not be a particular problem. I'm not sure if a virus written in the days of MS-DOS (or even one written for Windows 95) would function properly on a Windows XP system.
If this approach of carrying around applications on USB drives catches on, however, I d
This is EXACTLY what my site is all about... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is EXACTLY what my site is all about... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is EXACTLY what my site is all about... (Score:2, Interesting)
What would be useful is a cross-platform install (Score:2)
Related project - Friedfox (Score:2)
In addition, I've streamlined the installer so it's a total of two clicks to install it. Since IE will let you "Open" pr
wear and tear on USB drive? (Score:3, Interesting)
Great Windows tools resource (Score:2)
Well thought you might enjoy that compilation of tools as much as I did.
(I'm not affliated with the page.)
SpyBot (Score:4, Informative)
Re:MP3 player (Score:2)
I agree; it is pointless.
Re:MP3 player (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ahhh the good old days (Score:2)
The added bonus is that you can use mod_auth to control access and can use your portable Firefox or Subversion client to access your data anywhere.
Yahoo (Score:2)
Re:Yahoo (Score:2)
Re:Hello. Introducing the "CD". Now with 650 MB! (Score:2)
Re:USB Device I'd like to see.. (Score:3, Informative)
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 [sandisk.com]. 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