thumb(driving) our way

Over the weekend, we got one of those portable USB Flash Drives that the cool kids have. And sure, we love the idea of quick portable media, but we got to wondering what else could one do with it?

The big dream of the thumbdrive world is booting from it. Of the installs we’ve driven by, Damn Small Linux looks the most promising. (On a sidenote, a few weeks ago, we tried downloading Knoppix on the promise that one could boot from CD, but it took up so much media — at least 3 CDs — that we feared our ability to boot easily from the disc.) Granted, we don’t know much about Linux, so we would rather screw up a tiny portable drive than our home drive.

2 “must have” apps are portable OpenOffice and portable Firefox. We once had OO exclusively on our home machine, but we admit we installed MSOffice once when a Word doc absolutely had to look a specific way when we translated it to PDF. That was with an earlier version of OO, and if they have gotten better at exporting, then we would be more than happy to return to the fold. As for FF, we might be one of the few people who like being able to differentiate between our home and work browsing.

There are some other apps we are looking forward to using: ReNamer — we seem to always need to do mass renaming of files at some point. We remember having some app at some work computer once that did this very cleanly and neatly…. But it would be nice to be able to carry this app around, to have it when we need it. WinMerge — another thing we need to do a lot of is comparing files, to see what is different in them across versions. Sure, we know Unix has some great tool we saw someone use once that made us green with envy, but we are not Unix wonks. So a small app like this we can easily use is key. Rainmeter — We mentioned before how we once tried Norton Systemworks. One of the nice things about it was its little meters reporting on how things are going. Rainmeter does all that and more without the Symantec overhead. NeoMem — this looked to be the best of the information management systems (and believe us, there are a lot, even for thumbdrives). It claims to be a cross between a word processor and a database, which sounds promising for storing lists, book titles, and phone numbers.

Then there are a few “nice to try” apps we are not sure we need, but they might be nice. DM2 — this one promises nice Windows enhancements, including floating icons and WinRoll’s great feature, roll up to titlebar. Imagenomic says it will clean up noise on pictures. And WhyReboot tells you what will happen when you reboot a system.

There are plenty more apps out there for thumbdrives. AskMetafilter has a great list of them and where to get them. And, as always, Lifehacker has a great collection of anythng you need to find.