UPDATE 2017-02-04: My guess is that nobody reads this anymore but to be clear. TrueCrypt has been discontinued and is said to have a bunch of security holes, so don’t use it!

Is a small one. My brother was out traveling so I asked him to bye this USB stick. He didn’t, instead he bought this one:

It’s 1 GB USB 2. I’m a little disappointed I didn’t get a 2 GB but still I really like it.

So, what do I use it for? Well, I’m going to take this opportunity to present a few tools that make my life easier.

Synchronization

Yeah, I synchronize files (namely my ”my documents” folder) between my laptop and the USB-stick. That’s right, synchronizing NOT backing up. The big difference being I can shove my USB memory into any computer and work on a document and then sync it back to my computer. So how do I do this? Some expensive off the shelf software? Nope, it’s a freeware as a matter a fact. I use SyncBack from 2BrightSparks.

It does what I need. It’s not super smart, it compares dates on the file to see which one is edited last and if you don’t run it in batch mode you’ll get a question about which version of the file to keep. So no merging capabilities. But it’s free and I think its really good.

Password management

I’m getting a harder time remembering all my passwords. So for a while I’ve been looking around for a new password manager to help me with this. I came across KeePass (wikipedia about KeePass) a while ago and I’m trying it out now, so far it’s what I’ve been looking for. Does not need to be installed you can just run the exe from the memory stick. It’s open source and free to download.

Encryption

For encrypting my some of my files I’ve just started using TrueCrypt, it’s a open source encryption software. I was turned on to it while reading this post from Scott Hanselman. This app is also free from installation, just run the exe.

So, that a couple of tools from my utility belt. Hope the can inspire someone else and please feel free to drop a comment here if you of a good tool that fits this category.