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thumbdrive posts

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Blogging

Have thumb drive, will travel: 11 portable apps for the Mac

It used to be that a USB thumb drive was used mainly for transporting files to and from computers. Now, however, more people are using thumb drives to house portable applications. When you sit down at a computer that doesn't have Firefox, for example, and you're simply unwilling to double-click that Internet Explorer icon, just pop in your thumb drive, double-click your portable Firefox application, and surf away--no installation necessary.

Lists of portable applications are as old as the applications themselves, but lists of portable Mac applications are more rare. Over at Web Worker Daily, they have counted up and listed eleven portable applications for your Mac. Favorites on the list include Adium, that ubiquitous multi-protocol chat client, Bean, a lean and mean text editor, and iStumbler, a small app designed to find all wireless signals in your area, including Bluetooth, Airport, and Bonjour.

No longer will we envy those Geek Squaders with their multi-toned VW bugs and their keychain of portable thumb drives. Now we too can carry our USB drives with purpose. But unlike the Geek Squad, we will use our thumb drives for good, not for evil.

[Via Web Worker Daily]

Filed under: Security, Utilities, Hardware

Have your lost USB drive ask for help

Help! I'm Lost!
With USB drives getting larger in capacity but smaller in size every day, the space on which you can scrawl your "If found..." contact info is becoming more and more limited. The solution? Make your USB drive identify itself and ask to be sent home if someone finds it and plugs it in to their computer. The Daily Cup of Tech has a tutorial and a little program for making a box with your contact information (or anything else you might want to tell your USB drive's would-be finder) pop up when it's inserted into a computer. Unless you're a programmer, you'll want to scroll down to the bottom where you can download a pre-compiled version of the program. Of course, this will only work if a) the receiving computer runs Windows, and b) AutoPlay isn't disabled on it, but this is a pretty cool technique that just might get your precious USB drive returned to you the next time you misplace it.

[Via Street Tech]

Filed under: Office

Dictionary and thesaurus on a thumb drive

Merriam-Webster USB Dictionary & ThesaurusIn my opinion, selling software on a USB drive is a fantastic idea, and Merriam-Webster has taken it and run with it with their USB Dictionary & Thesaurus. It's a 256MB flash drive that includes MW's dictionary and thesaurus software, plus phonetic spelling correction, a grammar guide, and a "Confusables" function for correcting mistakes like their vs. there vs. they're. It also includes something described as an "eBooks and eNews Manager." The rest of the space on the USB drive (the amount of which is unspecified) can be used to store whatever you want. Unfortunately few details on the software itself are available, so I'm not sure if the dictionary and thesaurus software are the same as the ones MW sells on CD-ROM, or whether it works on a Mac. The Merriam-Webster USB Dictionary & Thesaurus costs $49.95. Now, when can I get the OED in my pocket?

[Via Engadget]

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

Portable Opera 9 for your USB thumb drive

Portable Opera 9Awhile back we linked to a tutorial on making the Opera web browser portable, i.e. modifying it so it can be run from a USB drive. It wasn't a perfect tutorial (and some people don't want to go through 16 steps no matter how easy they are), though, but and today something better came along: OperaUSB is a portable version of Opera 9 for Windows that you just need to copy to a thumb drive and you're ready to go. Installed it only takes up about 8MB of your precious space. Of course, it's not an official Opera download, so installing it is at your own risk. For Firefox users, they're always Portable Firefox-so, where's Portable IE7?

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