With the latest terrorist scare, many flights no longer permit you to travel with your laptop and other electronic devices. That's understandable -- no one wants to be blown out of the sky -- but it makes things difficult for the business traveller.
Of course, when you get to your destination, you can always use computers in your hotel's business center, a loaner from the office at your destination, a local internet cafe, a friend's house, or even the public library. The problem, however, is that to be productive, you need your files, applications, internet bookmarks, and other things that your normally keep on the laptop.
Wireless Internet Usb Stick
Even more important: when you use the borrowed computer, you dont' want to accidentally leave behind any evidence of what you've been doing.
Fortunately, there is a way to finesse these problems: carry everything you need on a large capacity flash drive. Not only can flash drives carry reams of data, they also can run an amazing variety of applications straight from the drive. For security purposes, that's a key factor, because when you unplug the drive all traces of your visit go with you.
Several key applications can be run directly from a flash drive:
Your average businessman may need nothing more than files and Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is an free, entirely Microsoft Office compatible suite that can be run from your flash drive. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database. The portable version takes up just 144MB, so you'll have no problem fitting it on larger flash drives.
FoxIt offers a Foxit Reader, a free portable pdf reader.
CoSySys' Carry it Easy software lets users synchronize, consolidate and access Firefox Bookmarks from any computer and store them on flash drives. The No Trace Browing feature makes sure that all privacy related data like cookies, history, etc. are stored on the flash drive.
Portable Firefox installs a version of the popular internet browser on your drive -- including your bookmarks. It takes up 16.2 MB of space and has all of the neat features of the regular version, including tabbed browsing.
For totally anonymous surfing, you can install Torpark on your drive, using Torpark's servers to mask your real IP address.
For web developers, FireZilla offers a flash drive portable FTP Client. Webserver On A Stick from CH software installs on your stick a full powered Apache server with PHP and MYSQL. Portable NVU offers a complete web authoring system like Frontpage or Dreamweaver.
Graphics designers have fewer options, but a good one is the Photofiltre Image Editing Software. Open Office also has a drawing module.
To make sure that you don't pick up something nasty from those public computers, you need an antivirus. Avira offers a portable and free antivirus program. It takes up 30MB of space.
And finally, to ensure that all of this data is safe in case you lose the stick, you should get a flash drive with built in security measures, such as a fingerprint reader, or password protection -- or both. If your drive didn't come with encryption, TrueCrypt is a free, open source security program.
Links to all of the software mentioned above can be found at the Flash Drive Blog at www.flashdriveblog.com.
Avoid Air Travel Troubles With A Flash Drive