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[JoshuaFH]

www.portableapps.com

There's a lot of apps on here that are made to run off a flash drive, including Openoffice.
Worth a browse.

Thanks for linking to this! I never thought such things existed!

[JoshuaFH]

Man, just to tell you what I've put on one of my flashdrives, just from that website, I put:

that portableVLC player.
Abiword, a nifty looking word processor (I tried OpenOffice, but I hated it!)
Foxit, a PDF viewer
portable Utorrent (just in case...)

Also, some things I'm taking from my home computer:

some of my favorite music videos which can be played with the VLC player.
DoomRL, Nethack, and Spelunky (In case I ever get bored and need to kill time)
I also put some books in PDF format on it, which can be used with Foxit. It's amazing how many books can be placed with so little space.

Also, with Abiword, I can also write to in my spare time, and carry my writing with me. It's going to be very useful.

I still have lots of space on my little 4 gig, but I don't know what else to bring. I'm heading back to college pretty soon, and I don't want to get there and realize I've forgotten something, so I'm thinking pretty hard on what else to bring.

[JoshuaFH]

EDIT: Nevermind, it just started cooperating again.

[Duke 2.0]

 Close all programs possibly running from the flash drive.
 Yank it out.

 Unless you have a flash drive that is REALLY anal about being yanked out it should not be a problem. And such flash drives are of really low quality.

[G-Flex]

You might as well just play it safe and tell Windows to unmount the thing before yanking it out if you're running a bunch of programs on it. There's a little icon in the systray for it, at least on Windows XP.

[JoshuaFH]

EDIT: Nevermind, it just started cooperating again.

Thanks for the sudden surge of advice though.

[G-Flex]

Also, with Abiword, I can also write to in my spare time, and carry my writing with me. It's going to be very useful.

Unless it's changed a lot in recent versions, I wouldn't use it for anything you actually want to print. Its kerning/tracking is completely horrible. Again, this might have trained.

Spoiler: click for ugly text (click to show/hide)

Check out the spacing there in "provide improvements", for example. AbiWord has been kind of notorious for this sort of thing in the past.

[JoshuaFH]

What ugly text? It looks perfectly fine to me.

[G-Flex]

The spacing is god-awful. Just view the image and look at the word "improvements".

"o"s tend to have too much space after them, and "r"s basically wind up conjoining with whatever comes next. The spacing isn't even consistent; each time "Processing" is said, there's different spacing in "ss".

It's a really common complaint about the software that's basically turned it into a big inside joke amongst myself and my friends; most reviews I've seen mention it. Spacing in general is terrible, including if you want lines justified (you wind up with lots of giant whitespace rivers and that sort of thing).

[spoiler=another example]

An obvious example here of how bad it is can be seen in the word "finally" in the last paragraph; there's damn near an extra space after "i" and "ll", compared to some other letters that basically seem stacked on top of each other. The width of spaces between words doesn't even seem consistent, but that's no surprise.

[JoshuaFH]

I still can't see what you're talking about. It's perfectly legible, and it's not like it's something that's so awkward that it illicits a double-take. Even looking at it closely, I can only kind've see what you're talking about, but otherwise it just seems that you're being really pedantic about something that's completely workable.

Is there anything else about it that's wrong?

I have to ask though, what's kerning/tracking?

[G-Flex]

Tracking is the general spacing between characters. Kerning is the adjustment of spacing between different pairs of characters such that they have similar whitespace between them.


I don't really think I'm being pedantic; the people I've talked to about this before agree with me. Yeah, it's legible, but then again, so is my own handwriting, and that looks terrible too, and I certainly wouldn't use it for typesetting!

Really, I just don't trust the developers of AbiWord to know what they're talking about. There are various other rendering oddities I've seen as well. I believe there is a portable version of OpenOffice, though.

[JoshuaFH]

I don't like Open Office though, it just rubs me the wrong way. I can't seem to get it without getting all these extraneous programs that I don't care for, all of them seem horrifically overcomplicated and nonintuitive, and the word processor has this weird box around the entire document that just plain looks ugly.

Though, besides the spacing, I'm taking it there's nothing else really wrong with Abiword? I've noticed that it's dictionary is a little lacking, and it doesn't seem to recognize contractions as words, but besides that it seems easy and pleasant to use.

[G-Flex]

I read something by some guy saying that it screws up its smart-quoting and hyphenation, but aside from that and some various GUI/layout glitches I've seen (that you very well may not encounter), I don't know.


You could always just learn LaTeX! (this is not a serious suggestion, although I do plan on doing this, because LaTeX kicks ass)

[JoshuaFH]

I got to test out my flashdrive today! It works brilliantly.

I played a quick Angel of Haste game on Doomrl, scoring a fast half-hour victory. My first one on one of these library computers!

I tested out spelunky, and found that it works just fine, but apparently my save game isn't kept within the game file itself. What that means is that I have to start all over if I want to play again, with no shortcuts or anything. It's a short game though, so it's OK.

PortableVLC player players my few music videos just fine. I'm starting to wish I brought more music, because more choices is good.

Abiword is also nice, although I have to hand select Abiword from the file directory when I want to open up one of the documents.

One question though, and I'm really just being paranoid here, but is there a chance the flash drive being on my lanyard will damage it in some way, just through my normal casual movement jostling it around?

[Frelock]

All the data is stored chemically, so unless you hit it with enough force to jostle chemical bonds, you're pretty safe.

That said, you can make some stuff explode with the touch of a feather, but flash drives are a bit more stable.  Just don't smash it against anything.