USB Key Fun -or- What I ended up tossing on my new key

Posted on November 19, 2006 3 Comments

Earlier this month I acquired a new 1GB USB Key and was pondering what I should do with it. Since then, I discovered Torpark which seemed like something useful to lug around. Last night I realized what would be truly useful, for me, would be a USB Key with my typical blogging apps and utilities on it. No more having to sneak stuff onto work machines…

The install starts with a very helpful little application called PStart by a company in Germany named Pegtop.

PStart is a simple tray tool to start user defined applications. Designed to run portable applications (like portable Firefox & Thunderbird), you can start anything runnable from USB key devices or removable disks.

For this scenario I installed it directly to the USB key. Then, under the Setup menu I clicked on “Create autoruns file.” Most windows machines (that I use, at any rate) will look for that autoruns file and offer to launch PStart when the key is plugged in.

Autoruns Image

Once that fires up you have a nice little menu pointing to your installed applications, documents or folders on the key. It also politely hangs out in the tray for your browsing convenience.

My PStart Menu

FileZilla Portable is the first on the list and just the first of several downloads from PortableApps.com. Really, you just can’t go wrong with an FTP client at the ready. This install doesn’t have any wrinkles — just install and add it to the PStart list and you’re ready to go.

While at PortableApps I grabbed 7-Zip Portable and VLC Media Player Portable. I frequently use 7-Zip as it handles many compressed archive formats. VLC? Well, you just never know what you might need to play. Like FileZilla Portable, these two are very simple installs and are ready to be portable right off the bat.

Next I tackled WinSCP, my preferred way of “interactively” working on my sites. Installed it to the USB key, but I had to make some changes to make it truly portable. Fortunately, there’s a nice little article that spells out the changes that need to be made. Not difficult at all, just good to be aware of it as by default you’re not nearly as portable as you think you are.

Sometimes there’s just no substitute for the command line when you want to look at something or make a fast change. For that, I use PuTTY. At the moment, I’m not truly “portable” with this one as by default it uses the registry and then I must remember to use “putty - cleanup” when I’m done. There are some other options out there (portaPutty for example) but I haven’t researched them enough yet. I’m open to ideas here, so drop a comment if you have a favorite portable’ized putty type thing.

Torpark for secure browsing via Tor network. More about that one on this article from earlier this week.

I struggled a bit with including a text editor. In most cases, for my purposes, regular old notepad would suffice… but in the end I broke down and installed Notepad++ to the USB key [last mentioned in this post]. As the machine I was working on already had a Notepad++ installation this step caused some challenges.

Pay attention while running the Notepad++ installer and you’ll see some options. Here’s how I set mine up for portable - the top option is the one you really don’t want to mess up and it’s off by default. I turned everything else off as they didn’t seem all that useful when thinking “portable.”

Notepad++ Install image

After the install I had a default install of Notepad++ running from my USB. But uh oh… my existing install was pretty traumatized by the whole experience! Lost my customized colors and such. I had to reinstall to the local machine with the top-box unchecked and all the others checked to get things squared away.

I added a folder to the PStart menu too. That folder contains all the stuff (and more) that I call my Toolkit. Selecting that option simply opens the folder and saves a second or two of browsing.

What don’t I have here that might also be useful? A good, portable, Password Manager. Initially I thought KeePass would do the trick, but after poking about in the forums I came to the conclusion that while it appears to be a solid piece of software it’s not quite a portable dream. I have some others to check out though.

[Update: Password Safe is a leading contender]

In a comment, Sam mentioned “website on a stick.” I might look at doing something like that for the future. Still pondering if I need that level of utility, but I definitely have the space — over 860MB left to burn.

Want a huge list of portable applications? Check out this wikipedia article, but first be sure to look over the PortableApps collection for quite a bit more than I’ve mentioned here.

Tags: 7-Zip, filezilla, notepad, portable, portable-apps, portableapps.com, Pstart, puTTY, TOR, Torpark, usb, VLC, winscp