It’s all about the geek bling. Why wear gold chains when you can have high-capacity flash devices hanging from lanyards?

I finally caved and bought myself a USB thumb drive a couple weeks ago. After consulting with my buddy Tucker, I decided on the 1GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro. When it showed up I hurriedly pulled it out of its packaging and plugged it in. WinXP dutifully reported that it had found a USB Mass Storage device and autorun offered to let me view its contents.

On to the software! I wasn’t satisfied with the 200k or so of miscellaneous files I had thrown on there, so I started looking at a few sites and getting recommendations. The packages I finally went with are below:

• UberUSB: This distro is outstanding if you do any networking or administration. It has a little of everything from various sites like AnalogX, Foundstone, and SysInternals to name a few. I had to encrypt some of the utilities due to anti-virus losing its mind (password crackers and the like). Read the TXT files *carefully* before using these!
• PortableApps: Portable Firefox (web browser), Portable Thunderbird (email client), Portable OpenOffice.org (office suite), Portable AbiWord (word processor), Portable NVU (web editor), Portable Sunbird (calendar & task list), Portable FileZilla (FTP client), Portable Gaim (instant messenger) and will fit on a 256Mb USB thumbdrive. _(quoted from the site)_

The rest of the storage has been images, eBooks (html, pdf, chm), and various other apps I’ve pulled from sites like TinyApps.