digg

Join DiggAbout

Discover the best of the web!
Learn more about Digg by taking the tour.

LifeHacker's Top 10: USB thumb drive tricks

lifehacker.com — Is that a gigabyte in your pocket? And are you putting it to good use? Developers and road warriors have come up with all sorts of innovative techniques for putting these tiny roomy disks to good use. Step into my office for a list of our top 10 favorite thumb drive tricks.

Bury
show profanity settings
expand all
  • SeaBass22, on 10/12/2007, -1/+39I particularly like the idea of Damn Small Linux. You can have a self contained OS in your pocket that can boot from within another OS.
    • SnowBladerX, on 10/12/2007, -9/+9I prefer Windows PE on mine, Been running it for a few months comes in handy, loaded a whole bunch of apps on it for data recovery, removal, system tests, hard drive imaging software.
    • chingy1788, on 10/12/2007, -6/+9Linux and Windows Users, well PC users bringing their OSs everywhere
      now you don't see that With a Mac Do ya?! (Bringing a Laptop or Desktop computer around does not count, it must be on a USB stick, and dang near every computer with similar or higher specs can boot from it)
    • MyDocuments, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1or are they?

      http://nothickmanuals.info/doku.php?id=minivmac
    • pifko87, on 10/12/2007, -10/+1This is such a ***** ***** article. ZZZZzzzz......
  • KI4REX, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4I need to get organized better. Thanks for the tips.
  • DjOverEZ, on 10/12/2007, -22/+1I would have laughed so hard if the site had been dugg to death. The irony would kill me.
  • Ramble, on 10/12/2007, -22/+2That's all fine and good but what if, like me you use your key on computers that are so heavily locked down you can't do anything with it.
    • NinjaBoy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+19@Ramble
      You use a different computer.
    • NatieB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Look at the first trick on the list... NTFS permissions don't mean jack to DSL or Knoppix.
    • EtherGnat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Any competent sysadmin would lock out booting from an external device if they wanted to secure a computer, but it seems to rarely happen that way.
  • Nougat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+23I like this one:

    http://www.dailycupoftech.com/have-your-lost-usb-drive-ask-for-help/
  • pinniger, on 10/12/2007, -3/+22I have xampp lite on my thumb drive. A must have for any php developer in my opinion.
    • noahhoward, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18Not entirely sure why you're being buried, pinniger.


      If you are a developer and can't figure out the benefits of carrying an apache server in your pocket I feel for you, I really do.
    • EXreaction, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I used to have WAMP on my thumb drive...

      But now I have a laptop so I just use that instead. But still a portable web server is a must for web devs! :D
  • adml_shake, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11That "Don't forget your thumb drive" script is nice, wish I'd had that last year when I left my thumb drive in a lab PC at school.
    • bent_fender, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1anyone know how to do this in os x?
  • WebSerpent, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19Stash your pr0n?
    • thewaz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+47i borrowed my boss' drive one day to help someone move a file, and when the window popped open there were 100 porn thumbnails
    • sacherjj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+49Back in college, when I worked in the help desk, a Prof brought his home computer in for service. (I don't know why that was our responsibility...) As we were copying everything off his drive that was failing, I noticed 100s of Mbs of child porn. This wasn't questionable age stuff, it was sick child porn. When restoring his data on the new drive, I wrote a script to handle THAT directory. It created the exact folders and files, but filled them with random data. They were still files with extensions for JPEGs, still the same exact size, but contained random bytes. Then I turned in the "collection" to my supervisor, who turned it into the local sheriff.

      We took bets on if he would come back and complain about not being able to open his images. Never do though. Didn't teach there next term either.
    • bitt3n, on 10/12/2007, -1/+29he's rude for not sending you a thank you note for removing the evidence from his drive and also alerting him so that he could destroy all other evidence before the authorities raided his place.
    • sacherjj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Actually, if I copied it back onto his new drive, I could be liable for distributing child porn in a legal sense. That is why he got what he got. We also kept the original failing drive.
  • thewaz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21I keep VLC installed on my drive with some movies or tv downloaded the night before for work. Also portable firefox, my office won't let me install it.
    • EnderTheThird, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14"Also portable firefox, my office won't let me install it."

      I hear you there. Portable Firefox lets me be WAY less productive at work while providing me a way to be more efficient in wasting my time on Digg.
  • ForeverXeros, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10I have two four gig Corsair flash drives. On one I have had Damn Small Linux for a couple weeks. On the other I'm using PortableApps, pretty slick. Plenty of storage for everything I need throughout the course of the day for our Linux and Windows machines.

    http://portableapps.com/
  • runxctry, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6You know the Windows XP "you-just-inserted-a-thumb-drive, what do you want me to do?" window? I've been obsessing lately how to customize that menu... it could be as easy as putting a shortcut and some parameters, but how do i do it? anyone know?
  • orvtech, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2having been running gentoo for a long time (on my xbox, on my desktop, on my testing web server which runs on a NSLU2 with 133MHz and 32 Mb of RAM, currently running a bunch of services and cron jobs which can bee seen at http://www.orvtech.com ) i know that I am bias on this but pentoo is a distro based on gentoo designed to be a penetration testing tool, it comes with e17 and a bunch load of tools to recover data, passwords, hacking, cracking, etc... you can write to the file system if you want and is free. http://www.pentoo.ch/-PENTOO-.html
  • noahhoward, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I've currently got five somewhere in the gulf running a webserver and e-learning system. Don't drop those overboard folks.
    • sacherjj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Sounds like you need to carry them with boat key floats. :)
  • MisterFlaut, on 10/12/2007, -13/+2Hey everyone, you do realize lifehacker is spam, right?

    do a search in digg and you'll see for yourself.

    QUIT DIGGING UP THEIR STORIES.

    • MisterFlaut, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2Also note that each story lifehacker submits is a "Top 10" list stolen from other blogs purely to drive traffic.

      You people are so gullible.

      I think I'm gonna get a digg firefox extension going to block certain stories/submitters based on key words, and have lifehacker as a default setting in there. This ***** doesn't need to be front page.

      Look at mklopez' submitted stories for proof this is nothing but blogspam.
    • MisterFlaut, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0Wow, I can tell by me getting dugg down that you guys actually APPROVE of spam.

      Great. Well, enjoy feeding them.
    • HayString, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7aren't most of the sites linked to on Digg spam sites? or is there something really different about this site?
  • esengulov, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2100 portable apps for your USB stick(both for Mac and Win) (link: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/portable-software-usb/)
  • lotion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Here's a tip for anyone looking to bypass a work proxy using a thumbdrive:

    I have a 20g HD set up with two partitions: one visible with 200m and one invisible with the rest (19.8g). The 200m partition has TrueCrypt and a couple of other small tools on it.
    The hidden partition (which can be mounted by truecrypt) has a couple of tools on it that help me get past my work proxy:
    NTLMaps - A tool that runs a local http proxy through your corporate NTLM proxy.
    PuTTY - SSH client, connecting to my house (SSH server running on the SSL port) through the local http proxy, sets up local socks5 tunnel (be sure to make a public / private key pair and not just password authentication).
    FreeCap - lets you "socksify" other applications.

    I run every bit of portable software through freecap which ultimately tunnels back out to my home allowing me to run certain services securely (knowing it's going through an SSH tunnel), such as a vnc server.

    You'll also want to run every bit of software through freecap because freecap can force remote DNS lookups.. in other words, if you were to use firefox through your putty-enabled socks5 proxy, your network admin would still see what sites you were visiting due to dns lookups.

    I have the entire thing set up to run via two batch scripts (start and stop) from the 200m partition.

    I'm not saying you should do this and screw around at work all day but when your business relies on doing lots of research like mine does, and your NA and corporate proxy are too restrictive, it helps to know theres an easy way around it.
  • sephiroth965, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2custom icons? autorun.inf of course!
  • OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+19I've got a thumb drive trick they didn't mention, Trebek.
  • chuckpenzone, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1This just further proves my suspicions that thumb drives are useless.
  • sidd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Stickwiki http://swik.net/stickwiki is the ultimate thumbdrive app. Its a single html file, javascript-powered wiki to help organise all your thoughts.
  • Ascendancy5, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Articles like this are the shiz. So entertaining.
  •  

    Login or register to add a comment

    Create a new account or login to join in the conversation on Digg. You'll also be able to Digg stories to help promote things you like.


© Digg Inc. 2008 — Content posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain.
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.