Wow.. so, the semester is almost over, and probably, I’m procrastinating on doing my hw. Huh? Well, one of the things I’ve thinking of semester was getting one of those nifty/new-fangled USB Thumb Drives that I’ve learned about and seen all over school (this semester.)
I found an extra-cool feature too, I never thought about it before, “Firefox in a Box,” I can load Firefox, and other apps (I bet Opera would work, Blender apparently does (and is like 10MB), if I was into 3D), onto it, then have all my Applications with all of their settings/etc with me all the time. FireFoxInABox in particular would allow me to do user-agent spoofing regardless of what computer I’m using, which is, of course, cool. :) I got the idea from a Slashdot story: Ultaportable Apps: Take Your Thumbware Anywhere. That article linked to this list on Loosewire, which actually has OSes too!

So.. I’m off to Parras soon, and it would be very nice to be able to have all my things with me on any computer I’m at.
Wait, that makes me wonder–Will the computers we use even have USB?? Well, I guess USB is pretty old now, so maybe.. hmm..

In any case, I decided to start searching, see what the prices look like. My first stop is of course always Pricewatch. It looks like the 256 MB USB pen/flash “drives” start at about $20, the 512 start at about $33. My roommate’s g/f got her thumb drive _really_ cheap because it came with a rebate. So! Off to google (whose Search History Feature I just started using today, and it seems pretty cool. More about that another day.).
Searched for thumb drive rebates or some such.. I think somebody mentioned (maybe it was on the groups) tigerdirect, so I went there.. I was thinking of them recently because they’re suing Apple over naming the new release of Mac OS X “Tiger”. So I checked them out.. one of those low-cost retaillers, with lots of “free” (rebate, a la Fry’s Electronics) products for sale. And then I found this, the Ultra MP3 / 256MB / FM Tuner / Thumb Drive / MP3 Player! “8-in-1″ as they advertise, though as a review I found correctly points out, it’s more of a 6-in-1. (email progs can be d/l’d though theirs is small, language learning seems meaningless, Id3 Tags are de facto, and..)
But regardless.. the 3 features mentioned above would alone make it a very cool thing! I’m always in the market for a voice recorder of course, so that’s a pretty awesome 4th feature too! It uses a AAA battery for power, which recharges when you plug it into the USB slot! Tell me that’s not awesome!
It’s only 256 MB for $90, with rebate from Tiger that’s $59 w/ ~$10 S/H (~$70), quite expensive for its size. So its features have to make up for it, and it seems pretty cool. Creative has a similar product, but I haven’t read up on it yet. Ohh, the 5th feature! It can read MMC/SD cards!! TIGHT! So when those get cheap, and I run out of space, I could just start exporting my data to its “external storage”! WOW!
The company’s website is their name, Ultra Products, and here’s the Product Info Page, which lists this device as $130 (MSRP).

Well, this is getting a little long, so to Extended/More we go!

The two major drawbacks are its price, and the fact that it’s USB 1.1, not the much faster USB 2.0. This is a drawback, and kinda sucks. Especially since I usually save all my documents on my web site, which is a much faster thing to do. However, maybe I wouldn’t be transferring all that much onto it (at one time). Or would I? Hmm.. if so, then I’ll just have nuked one objection, and feature-creep may allow me to nuke the second. I could wait for the next generation to be faster, with more storage, but then I’d have to wait for its price to come down. Maybe that’s too much.

Wowza, google to the rescue! I tried to find this type of item on eBay briefly, but didn’t turn up anything, so gave up, but! Better google search criteria turned up the eBay search results for it! And wowza!
I found a pretty similar item, lacking the SD/MMC of course, with 512 MB, for a cheaper price!! It sounds like the charging time is really high (4 hours), which is more than the other one sounded like it was, but otherwise, seems fairly comparable! So lesse.. what are the features that whichever one I get should have?

USB HDD boot
USB 2.0
Rechargeable in USB slot
256+ MB, headphones, ID3 support (the more music formats the better? one on eBay supports MP1, MP2, MP3, WMA, WMV, ASF, WAV, most just mention MP3 & WMA, though I assume WAV is implicit). Hmm, and this one is “Firmware upgradeable”! reminds me of that wireless linksys router 802.11g, oo..

Aye, too many things to think about, and the lab is closing down, so I must go. Back to the topic of Apps-To-Go though..

What apps would I want? I mentioned browsers (Opera and Firefox) above, I’d also want Word Processing, so I’d go for AbiWord. It’s kind of sad* that apps aren’t portable nowadays, that somebody has to specifically package a “Box” version of the Mozilla offshoot. The same with AbiWord apparently, there’s a AbiWord for Thumb Drives web site. Portable Firefox is 8.60Mb installed, AbiWord seems like it would be about the same. I hope there are no other apps I’d need, I’d fill up my drive quick! Hmm, there’s a “Trillian Anywhere,” funny since I was just thinking about if I wanted to use AIM (and Yahoo too, though I barely ever use that b/c my version of everybuddy/ayttm sucks) when I wasn’t at home.. but that sounds like a bad idea :) And there is always del.icio.us and similar web bookmarking schemes (I was thinking of making something of the sort on my site too), but.. eh, they don’t seem very appealing, from the little I’ve looked at them.

* Wow, a slashdotter by the nick of Combuchan articulated my statements perfectly! “So I guess by “ultra-portable” they mean software that installs files in one place, doesn’t touch the registry, and is easily 100% removable without bits o’ crap left over behind?

Isn’t this how all software should be released? “

Slashdot suggestions: putty, VLC 0.8.1, WinRAR, cygwin, “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 .pdf, basic drivers for my NICs, and pics of my kids.”

  
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