Adam mentioned something in the X2 thread that was interesting: He keeps a copy of Br@y Term on his flash drive. That’s cool.
I read an article a while back in a photo magazine where someone was listing some of their travel tips for photojournalists. One was that they keep an installation of Firefox on a flash drive so that no matter where in the world they wind up, they’ll have a browser that speaks their language.
I’ve got a flash drive! I even have two. One’s got the source to my mini-sumo on it along with some g-code files for some parts I made almost a year ago. The other one is still in its original packaging, largely unused. You can tell I haven’t quite figured out what to do with them.
So what do you keep on your flash drive?
I’d love to keep a live running copy of my AVR toolchain for Windows, but I’m almost certain that would be tough to do (so if I’m wrong someone let me know NOW!) I do tend to keep installers for things lying around, but that’s not the same. It’d be even better to keep live environments for Windows, Linux, and OSX on the thing but now I think I’m stretching things.
A terminal program sounds like a good idea, as Adam pointed out (I’d never even considered that!) For reasons of my own VNC and Putty would be good.
But what else? Tools are tools, be they mechanical, electrical, or software. What tools would you keep in your pocket?
Tom
Size: 1GB
Executable Programs (i.e. things I want to be able to run on any computer I sit down at):
-Total Commander (best windows file browser EVER, with FTP, sFTP, and some other neat plug-ins)
-Putty
-Br@y Terminal
Installers (recent, they never stay long):
-Dev-C++
-Adobe Acrobat Reader 8.0 (the actual install executable you only get on OEM CD’s with PDF manuals, not the “download manager/installer” you can get from Adobe, I hate those!)
Documents:
-All my coursework from last semester (116 meg)
-My current robotics research files and reports, to sync computers at home and work (466 meg)
-Folder of personal projects including programs, source code, CAD files, AVR code, robot arm laser cutting patterns, etc… (83 meg)
-Folder of projects for my wife, mostly relating to little things I set up in her lab, including control programs for various pumps and motors, and some LabView data acquisition virtual instruments (also 83 meg, weird!)
Free Space: 270 meg
Glad you mentioned syncing!
This is why I tend not to use the flash drives I’ve got: I have a laptop I carry with me, but yeah, sometimes I don’t and sometimes it breaks. It’s got cygwin installed on it, and in there is a directory tree that’s synced to my Linux desktop machine at work, and to a Linux box at my house. So if I’ve got a file in one place, I’ll have it at the other two. The sync runs several times a day, so the files are pretty current. It would take losing all three machines to lose my work (yes, I’m paranoid.)
Which is why I’d tend to use mine for software rather than data. I kind of envisioned using it the same way I do my Leatherman Micra: stick it on my key ring, and when I need it it’s there. Only I haven’t really figured out what to put on it.
