I finally got my 16GB Kingston Data Traveller flash drive from Future Shop last night. I ordered it on Christmas Eve from their website as soon as their Boxing Day sale started and had to wait 32 days for them to actually deliver something that they supposedly had 8000 of in-stock. So now that I actually have 16 pocketable gigabytes I figure I should put it to good use. I’m currently working on making up an ultimate flash drive full of portable apps. My plan is to have a full compliment of Mac and PC portable apps loaded up and ready to go.

Mozilla Firefox: Portable Edition, for Mac too
This is the biggest annoyance of using someone else’s computer, having to use their browser. So many people still use Internet Explorer 6 on their computers still, so having the ability to pop in my flash drive and run Firefox with my own settings and bookmarks is quite handy.

Adium Portable and Pidgin Portable
Being able to pop onto MSN with my preferred apps on a borrowed computer can be quite handy. Saves having to use a friend’s app, log them out and sign yourself in, then make sure you sign off after you’re done.

VLC Portable
No more searching for codecs and trying to get Quicktime or Windows Media Player to play a video off your drive.

You can also get portable versions of Adobe applications, OpenOffice and much more. It turns your flash drive into a swiss army knife of awesomeness. With the cost of flash memory anymore, it almost doesn’t make any sense not to do this. My 16GB drive was $22, that’s like 6 dvds worth of data that you can have hanging from your keyring.