you might be wondering what i keep on my usb that makes me love it so much... and the answer is pretty much everything.
I keep her on a detachable clip string thing that is connected to one of my scungled lanyards with a teasuii lumity tamagotchi shaker charm and I bring it pretty much everywhere.
I keep her on a detachable clip string thing that is connected to one of my scungled lanyards with a teasuii lumity tamagotchi shaker charm and I bring it pretty much everywhere.
Technical Specs
The current USB I carry around with me (her name is Hortentia) is a 256GB SanDisk Ultra with dual USB-A and USB-C so not only can I fit lots of files on her, but I can access those files on any device, including my phone! I don't use her much on my phone though.Directory Overview
-
creation
- art
- blender
- code
-
hoarding
- 3D
- fonts
- images
- pdfs
- personal
- programmes
- temp
I'm not going to talk about every single unique file on my USB here but here's some of the more notable things !!!
Portable applications
Ok so before I list the portable apps I have on my USB, I do need to shoutout the portable freeware collection because so many of the applications I use I have found through that site.What are portable apps?
To those unfamilliar, portable applications are applications that require no installation and can be run from any directory and moved around easily. It's especially useful if you use multiple devices regularly because you can have portable applications on a USB or other external drive (some people even keep portables on cloud services like google drive!!) without having to install and reconfigure things for every device. You also typically don't need aministrator rights to use portable applications which if you're in a place like my old job where you need to get admin approval to install non portable applications is an extra bonus!!What portable apps do I have on my USB?
Creative Apps
Aseprite
Pixel art software!! I initially bought it on steam but later bought it again on itch.io so that I could get the portable zip files for it :3Blender
Free open source 3D modelling software!!Easy Paint Tool SAI 2
Paid raster art software, I think I'm using a technical preview version that is in a distributable zip file and had to do a bit of funky business to get it to work properly...FireAlpaca
A free raster art software!!Inkscape
Free open source vector art softwarePencil Project
Free open source GUI prototyping tool, I haven't really used it all that much for anything as the UI designers I've worked wiht in the past tend to use other tools like Figma or Adobe XD but maybe some day I'll get some use out of pencil...PicoCAD
A tiny application for creating tiny 3D models! Paid about 5USD for it on itch.io :3nanDeck
A free software that can be used for designing and printing decks of cards !!!! I haven't used it very much but I want to use it more in the future for some creative projects I have in mind.Gaming Related Apps
Apico
A cute little beekeeping sim game, available on a lot of platforms but I personally got it off itch.io for about 20USD.Flashpoint
A massive webgame preservation project! Remember flash games? Flashpoint has thousands of them in their collection and with the the flashpoint application you can play any of them! Love reliving my childhood with this... Even games I thought were lost to time before flash died are available on flashpoint.Lots of DS dev/hacking stuff lol
Might add more details here later but I have a lot of things installed for modding as well as ripping/extracting things from DS games.Utility Apps
Calibre
Free open source eBook management tool. I use it to manage my thousands of PDFs... Not all of them are books (many of them are research journal articles) and there are definitely better tools I could've used for this but calibre was the one I knew of when I first started the collection so I've stuck with it thus far...HeidiSQL
A free software for viewing and editing SQL databases of various different systems!OBS
Open broadcaster software! Useful for video recording and live streaming, I mainly use it in combination with veadotube-mini to act as a virtual camera on discord with pngs of my kittysona for a sort of pngtuber effect :3ScreenToGif
Free and open source tool that lets you take screen recordings and turns it into gifs!!!Tablacus Explorer
Tabbed file manager with add-on support. I don't use it as much as I want to bc I forget about it a lot but it makes navigating my insane file directories on my USB and other devices so much easier...Treesheets
Free and open source software that lets you create super cool heirarchical spreadsheets.TumblThree
Free and open source software that lets you export and backup Tumblr and Twitter profiles.VNC Viewer
Let's you connect to devices running a VNC server to control them remotely.WinMerge
Free and open source differencing and merging tool, super helpful to compare massive folders and see the differences between them if you've got different versions of them...WinSCP
Free file transfer client that has SFTP, FTP, SCP, S3, and WebDAV protocols!!Windows Live Messenger 2009
Remember MSN and WLM? Yea, there's a project that's revived it! You need to have a patched client from their site (or patch a client yourself) for it to work, and the specific portable version I have I had to track down from their discord and it took me a while to find, so I've uploaded it to my site and you can download it here. You may or may not get security warnings thrown at you trying to download it and it is up to you whether or not you want to trust it, I'm just some guy on the internet lol, if you do want to use escargot's WLM/MSN and are okay with a non portable version I would recommend getting a client off of their site instead though. (Also I'm emberfool@escargot.chat on there if you want to hit me up!!)Backing Her Up
The fickle thing about USBs is that they are prone to getting lost and also eventually after a lot of use (or if they go through the washing machine like one of mine did) can eventually die on you.For me this means that I have to back up my USB's content quite regularly, because I'm adding so much new stuff to it all the time. I've had incidents where I've lost a lot of data because of failing to back it up and I have hopefully learnt my lesson..
I say that but as of writing this I haven't backed my USB up since I moved about a month ago because I haven't got my homelab set up to have a backup solution ready for me to use... oops