For the first 9 months of my round the world trip I hardly touched a
keyboard, except for the occassional email check. But after loosing my travel
campanion and getting a bit tired of travelling all the time, I started spending
more time in Internet cafes around South east Asia. Taking software and data
with you on the road is easy these days, all you need is a USB memory device
(USB drive) and an XP box somewhere. I'm a Microsoft guy, so please no comments
about 'you should boot into your own Linux from your USB drive'. Taking a laptop
with me was never an option. I travel around a lot and want to keep my bag
light, it's heavy enough already. I started out with an old 64Meg memory stick
which shows 'Microsoft .Net Server' in faded letters on its side and also a 5Gig
Rio Carbon audio player which I used mostly for listing to music and DotNetRocks podcasts. The Rio became very
unreliable when connected to a PC and the stick was getting too small. Luckily I
won an 2Gig IPOD Nano at a lucky draw in Bangkok and that's what I use for all
my software work. The other two I still use as backup devices.
Web Browsing
The most used application while on the road is certainly a web browser. Yes
IE is on every box and why should I care about security issues on a machine in
an internet cafe? Well I do care about it because I have my USB drive with my
data attached to the box. Also I used Firefox since its Phoenix days and just
prefer to browse the public internet with Firefox. If you install Firefox once,
you can just copy the Application files over to your USB drive and use it on
other machines without installing, however extensions may not work and your
preferences are stored in 'Documents and Settings' on the hard drive. One day I
discovered 'Portable Firefox', a standard Firefox with a startup wrapper
around it that stores all extensions and user files in its Application folder on
the USB drive. No data is left on the hard drive. This means you can even store
some of your less important passwords for sites in cookies. The only issues I
have about this are:
- I would like to store all my data under a single folder on the USB drive
rather than within the Firefox folder.
- When a new version of Firefox is released it seems to take some weeks before
an updated version of Portable Firefox becomes available. However if you install the new version locally and then copy all files from "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox" to \PortableFirefox\App\firefox you get the latest version. No changes have to be made to the wrapper. This worked for me from 1.5.0.3 to 1.5.0.3, for bigger updates it may not work.
Email
I'm using email since 1991, way before the web and never made the switch to
web based services. Even with the new Ajax features in the new versions of Yahoo
mail or Windows Live mail, the web can never deliver the richness of a proper
Windows application.
There is also a portable
version of Thunderbird available but as I'm using 'TheBat' as
my email client at home, this option was not for me. I do actually have a web
based email account as well but doesn't use it very much.
So I wrote two batch files that add and remove Registry entries needed for
The Bat! before and after I use the program. Just after I started my trip RiT
Labs, the makers of TheBat released a special version to be used on a USB drive
called Voyager and it
works perfect without any registry entries or any files of the hard drive. It
even encrypts your mail data so if you loose your device, it's not accessible to
others.
- It does cost money
- It also stores data within its application folder.
Office
When writing long entries for my travelog I rather use a proper word
processor rather than a rich HTML input box, I also used Excel to manage my
travel expenses in spreadsheet. On many PCs you can find pirated version of
Microsoft Office but it's not always there. The solution comes from Portable Apps, they have a version of Open
Office for the road which is perfectly sufficient for 95% of all
non-coporate office work and is similar enough to MS office to get into it
quickly. Of course it's free.
Photo editing
I have a map on my travel site which shows my current location and my
previous route. I also sometime want to edit some photos I took before I upload
them to Flickr. There is mspaint.exe in XP but it's very limited. I
had a look at Paint.NET some years
ago and as a .net application it runs within having to be installed. The latest
version is very powerful and more than enough for what I need to do. You need
.net 2.0 for the lastest version but I still found version 2.5 which is the last
one that works with .Net 1.1 which is more common in Internet Cafes.
Instant Messengers
I don't really do messenging but just in case I need it, I set myself up with
Portable Gaim again from Portable Apps, it supports all the
major services in a single app.
Media Players
In most cases these builtin Windows Media Player is suffient but sometimes I
want to watch a Quicktime video and don't want to install ITunes (you have to
search hard to find a standalone version of the Quicktime played these days).
So Portable VLC comes to the rescue. It plays Quicktime and most
other formats and in at least one case even played Movie DVDs without installing
any additional decoders.
Talking about ITunes, what a pain that software is! You have to install 40Meg
just to add a song to your Music player. It also doesn't seems to be very
traveller friendly. I put some photos onto the IPOD and changed all possible
settings to manual. Still at the next Internet Cafe ITunes synced the photo
folder with the MyPhotos on the hard drive which was empty, so ITunes deleted
all the photos on the IPOD. Also even though an MP3 file is stored on the IPOD
in MP3 format, I can't copy it back onto a hard disk. I can use Explorer and
find the file in a hidden directory but the file name has been changed and I
have a hard time finding the right file. But there are many third party tools
out there that allow you to copy music files back and forth. I use Yamipod which comes as a single .exe and it doesn't require
any setup. So much for user friendlyness Apple!. I also considered running NTFS
on my IPOD because FAT32 looses sectors once in a while, much more frequent than
on a normal hard drive. But Apple doesn't support this and music playback may
not work anymore.
Console Tools
My central command line tools is 4NT, see my separate entry for
it. The registered version reads the key from the registry but you can just
download the latest version, put it on your USB drive and use it for up to 30
days, it's not likely you spend longer at the same computer in the same Internet
Cafe in the same place. I have a whole bunch of command line apps and all of
them run without setup or registry entries. I would even say that's the nature
of command line apps. I may look closer at these later in details,
most important is the PsTools Suite
from SysInternals.
GUI Tools
Just a short list of some tools I use and that work perfectly on a USB drive
or without reinstalling on you next Windows setup for that matter.
File Manager (Winfile.exe), practically unchanged from the NT3.1 and comes in
a single small file. You can get it from NT4 Service Pack 6. After 12 years with
NT I never made the switch to Windows Explorer even for my day to day work. Old
habits die hard. I know there are many powerful Explorer replacements out there
but I never really got into any of them. I love the simplicity and practicality
of the two window approach. It also it much faster displaying lists of files
because it doesn't have to load any of the icons. Extensions like File Manager
StepUP or 'FM Applic' (which I can't find online anymore) are helpful and
when using them along with context.exe you can even get the
Explorer Context menu for a file in File Manager. However these extensions don't
work without setup. Try to find out what's really in your Font folder or the
Global Assembly Cache, impossible in Windows Explorer which also may hides whole
drives due to software policies. Use File Manager instead, it shows always the
raw files. But don't get too excited, winfile.exe will no longer work under Windows Vista, read more.
Sysinternals tools - As Scott Hanselman says 'These guys are gods'
and in addition to the command line tools their GUI stuff is just as good.
Autoruns, FileMon, RegMon and Process Explorer and musts and all their stuff
runs without setup consisting normally of just one file. Old versions of the
monitor programs has separate driver files but these are now part of the
executable and are installed temporarilty when the app starts.
Notepad2 or any other
good notepad replacement, a decent text editor is just essentials for any type
of work.
Foxit Reader is a free PDF reader that comes in a single file and works great from a USB drive, now you never have to use Acrobat Reader anymore. They just release a beta for version 2.0
.Net Tools
The two I use the most are Reflector and RegexDesigner.NET but most small .net tools work fine
standalone. If there install something into the GAC, you may just copy the files
into the Apps bin folder and it should work on the next machine, use File
Manager or the command file to do this. I really don't like the fact the .Net is
great for xcopy deployment and then most tools come with MSI installers and then
just copy 5 files into a single directory (But you don't know that and this
black box could do all kinds of things to your machine). A simple zip files with
the files is much nicer and feels much safer. The MSI package also leaves an
entry in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall which fills up
the list of installed software.
Developer Tools
Dependency Walker used to come with the SDK and NT resource
kits and even in these .NET days it is still are very valueable to to find out
about broken application.
SharpDevelop is a free IDE for .Net languages C#, VB.NET and
Boo and works great from a USB drive except that in my case it doesn't seems to
remember the location of the code completion database and asked me again to
create a new one on every new machine.
.Net Framework
Both the runtime and the SDK have to be installed (no surprise here) but
having copies of the setup programs on your USB drive allows you to install them
in a few minutes. Usually no reboots but you have to have admin rights. The SDK
tools themselves work standalone, so you can copy them onto your USB drive
once.
Web Development
Surprisingly many Internet Cafes use the administator user for their
customers, so you have all control over the box and can even do web development
by installing a web server. If you have XP Pro you can install IIS, I didn't
have an XP CD with me and in some countries I couldn't find any Cafes that had
one either. So I'm carrying the IIS files from SP2 with me, there are about 6Meg and
I just have them on my USB drive. Below is a list with all the files you need.
If
you only have an XP home edition you can use the Cassini web server, several
different versions are available online.
If you have moved to 2.0 like me, you can use the ASP.Net development web server that comes with any Visual Studio version. It also comes with the 2.0 Framework SDK but that's also 400 MB and you don't want to install either the SDK or Visual Studio on a machine just for an hours work. You actually only need three files to get the web server to work: WebDev.WebServer.EXE, WebDev.WebServer.exe.manifest and WebDev.WebHost.dll. Just copy them into any directory on your USB drive and use them from there. You need to copy them from a box with Visual Studio or the SDK installed. The first two files are in \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 the last one is in \Windows\assembly\GAC_32\WebDev.WebHost\8.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\ To get to the last one use cmd.exe because Windows Explorer hides the real GAC content from you. I use a small batch file to start the web server:
start /B \apps\webserver\WebDev.WebServer.EXE /port:80 /path:\mywebsite\wwwroot\The /B switch of the start command makes sure it doesn't start a new console windows, which would be useless because the server doesn't
output any status or debug messages.
Others
If your favourite apps require some registry settings to work, export them
into a .reg file using Regedit.exe. Then create two batch files to add and
remove the settings before and after you are using the app of a third party
machine. A batch file for setup could look like this:
regedit.exe /i /s
app1.reg
regedit.exe /i /s app2hklm.reg
regedit.exe /i /s app2hkcu.reg
and for clean up:
regedit.exe /u /s app1.reg
regedit.exe /u /s
app2hklm.reg
regedit.exe /u /s app2hkcu.reg
Most apps use settings in both Local Machine and Current User hives so make
sure you export both.
copyiisfiles.zip (.9 KB)