Whats on my USB stick

This entry has been reposted from my old site. Please update any bookmarks.

A few weeks ago I came across an article on Lifehacker about “Must-have portable apps for flash drive” and ever since I’ve been honing and tweaking my own little portable software collection. It’s really been amazing how useful some of the stuff has been, even bits that I’d never thought of before have become real life savers, and so I thought I’d share my choices (there’s lots of other lists like this around so feel free to seek inspiration elsewhere too!)

All of the following applications will run directly from a USB stick with no further install needed:

Portable Mozilla Apps

Ah, there’s nothing like being able to settle in to the comfortable surroundings of your fabourite browser or mail client nomatter where you are, and thanks to John Haller’s fantastic Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird you now can. There is also a Portable NVU available which makes a fine ‘on the road’ replacement for Dreamweaver.

Linux with DSL and Qemu

Thanks to the Qemu emulator and DSL I’ve been able to get Linux working from my flash drive, and to run from within Windows with no need to reboot! I’ll be posting a little How-To on this later on, so stay tuned.

Abiword

Again from John Haller there’s Portable Abiword. It is a repackaged version of the lightweight AbiWord word processor designed with portability in mind, so it has all the same great features of AbiWord, but there’s nothing to install.

Filezilla

A nice lightweight and easy to use FTP program. Always useful.

WinSCP

And if your server requires SCP rather than FTP, WinSCP is a pretty unbeatable choice.

GreatNews

A great little RSS reader, I liked this so much I use it on my desktop box now as well!

Miranda IM

Instant messaging client with support for ICQ, MSN, AIM,…..

Password Safe

Bruce Schneier’s Password Safe - ‘The security of Blowfish in a password database’. Keep track of your passwords and secure information in a portable and secure database.

XMPlay

XMPlay is an audio player, supporting the OGG / MP3 / MP2 / MP1 / WMA / WAV / CDA / MO3 / IT / XM / S3M / MTM / MOD / UMX audio formats, and PLS / M3U / ASX / WAX playlists. A load more formats are also supported via plugins.

WOS

A web server on a stick! PHP, Apache and MySQL. This looks really nice and I’ve got it working but I’ve not really tested it too much yet. Still, very cool!

AstLog

Reveal passwords behind asterisks (***)

Foxit reader

Foxit Reader is a free reader for PDF documents. You can view and print PDF documents with it. It’s small, it doesn’t need any lengthy installation, and it starts up immediately, so you don’t need to wait the annoying “Welcome” screen to disappear.

PuTTY

PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator.

SciTE

A free source code editor, with formatting and a whole range of useful touches.

BareGrep

Regular expression matching across multiple documents. The power of Grep on Windows and with a GUI!

TiddlyWiki

Great for making notes, and keeping track of ideas. A small easily editable Wiki that fits right in your pocket!

Lupas Rename

Rename multiple files in seconds.

So that’s it, my take on the essential apps to have with you at all times. If you can think of any others, or want to comment on any of these choices feel free to leave a comment below. Otherwise I hope this list is useful to you.