Shirking Responsibility

I recently got one of those little USB drives for school and have been searching for the best tiny apps to keep on it. Like any new gadget, it’s lots of fun. First you need to find something that’s small to begin with and that doesn’t require lots of writing to the registry to function. Then there’s the act of getting rid of all the support files that aren’t necessary. Things like translation files, readme files, help files and so on. Then I run the appropriate files through UPX.

So far I have chosen the following apps:

• Color Cop – A color sampling tool.
• dsDEL – A “secure” file deleter. It may not stop the FBI, but at least it’ll stop most people at the labs. The guys who made dsDEL has a ton of other cool tiny apps.
• EyeDropper – Another color sampling tool. I can never decide which I like better.
• FileZilla – My FTP client of choice. Supports SSH, has a clean interface and is open source.
• Media Player Classic – While I actually prefer ZoomPlayer while at home, MPC is more suited for a USB drive.
• Popcorn – My favorite light email client. Freeware mode allows only one POP3 account to be defined, though.
• PrcView – Tiny little process viewer for when the Windows Task Manager is restricted.
• PSPad – Amazingly good freeware text editor with built in FTP and tons of other cool features. Luckily, it writes all options and settings to ini files.
• PuTTY – The well-known telnet/SSH client. Perfect for when I need to log into my shell.

That’s all I have for now. I was able to whittle the size of all the apps down to a combined 5.07 megs. Not bad, I think. Theres a few other apps I am fiddling with to see how small I can get them. I’ll post them with links later if I am satisfied with their size.

Sadly, though, the main class I purchased the drive for is my art class (Photoshop work mainly and those .psd files can get BIG), and so the lab we’re using consists mainly of Macs. I’ve never used a Mac for more than a few minutes, especially OSX, and I have no idea what cool tiny software I could carry around.

Any help?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2004 at 4:26 AM and is filed under Hardware, Portable Apps, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.