The Eye of Kris

A guy at work recently told me about Portable Apps, which is a set of programs you can download and run directly off a USB thumb drive or memory card or something (you can even run it off an iPod). The apps have been specially built to run directly off your memory device, and save all their configuration, temp files, etc. to that drive. The result is that you can take your thumb drive and plug it into any computer (running Windows), and have your e-mail, your browser, your office programs (spreadsheets, documents, etc.) all right there with all your settings and preferences applied. And, you don't leave anything behind on the computer when you remove your drive.

With computers becoming ubiquitous these days, and high-speed internet almost as prevalent, it's a nice way to carry around your basic essentials without actually lugging around a laptop.

All of the programs are free, open-source apps like Firefox and Thunderbird, which I currently use for web browsing and e-mail anyway.

I've been meaning to try it out, but I don't actually have a very large USB drive. The biggest one I've got is only 128 MB, and they recommend more than that for the full install. I've just never had a good reason to buy a larger one, but maybe I'll have to look for a good deal on one just to try this out.

Many times, especially when I'm traveling, I have a laptop with me, but it would be nice to just carry a small memory stick in my pocket instead if I know I'll be somewhere where there is a computer available.

My current answer to this is that I have set up a secure tunnel into my network so that I can just use Remote Desktop to get to my computer at home from anywhere that there is a high-speed connection, and the whole session is encrypted. I'll have to describe that set up some other time - it's pretty cool.