More Key Goodness

(scraped from my LJ, excuse the formatting…)

I got my new 4 GB USB drive in the mail yesterday and have it set up. Now I can goof off at work leaving absolutely no trace! I used TrueCrypt to create 3.9 GB encrypted file using AES-256 encryption, I used some auto-run tricks to get Windows to offer “Open TrueCrypt Volume” as an autoplay option, and to add “dismount volume” and “mount volume” to the shell menu.

I added APO USB Autorun to launch the volume automatically as a Z: drive. www.portableapps.com is a great starting point for applications that run from the filesystem without any changes to the system registry.

I’ve got portable versions of Thunderbird, Firefox, a media player, GIMP, GAIM, Putty, TinyIRC, Skype, uTorrent, ClamWin AV and WinSCP. I have UltraVNC, a remote desktop client, my VPN client, and a great program called ChrisControl that polls a system for RDS or VNC, automatically logs on, and if the machine isn’t running either, will *automatically install* VNC, connect, and uninstall on exit. Only works if you have domain admin rights.

I also have a self-contained Apache LAMP system, as well as TinyWeb and TinySSL.

All the http://www.sysinternals.com/ apps are here — get them before Microsoft closes them off!

More on GAIM — I have GAIM-OTR loaded to perform encryption in the data stream. Using standard IM transports, I can encrypt the contents of the message, making support much easier. I’ve got my work buddies all evaluating it, using a standard IM platform and performing encryption is a first step to setting up a Jabber server with SSL or SILC server in-house. I have a gig worth of music — mostly ambient stuff I like to work to. My 2 GB iPod gets filled with my lunch soundtrack, which varies. PStart is a nice menu system — loads in the system tray and has all of my key-drive applications loaded in hierarchical folders.

I’m tempted to take GTDTiddlywiki and make into an autostart target, my planning/PIM system, and a menu system all-in-one.

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