cajolable.com

One of the goals of my trip to SEA (southeast Asia, that is) is to take as many pictures as possible and to post some of those pics here at cajolable.com so I can assure my parents that I’m still alive.

So it’s time to nerd up. I bought two more SD memory cards for my camera, both 2GB, both from Newegg. One’s a Transcend 150x card ($22) and the other a Kingston Elite ($28). I already have a 1GB Kingston Elite and it works just as well as my Lexar Platinum card, so I figured I’d buy another Elite. I bought the Transcend because I’m cheap/jobless/on-a-budget. Both of them seem to work great in the D5-0.

Another thing that I ordered was a USB flash drive on which I could install all the applications I needed to run from the road. I figure I’ll be popping into internet cafes to do my writing and I want to use a browser that has all my bookmarks, saved settings and all that jazz. So, I bought a cheap (and, as it turns out, slow) 1GB flash drive that was all rubberized and ready to go into the jungle.

Playing around with this thing, I got maximum sustained write speeds of 2MB/s where my fast SD cards clocked in all at about 6 MB/s (read speeds are a much more respectable 8 MB/s). Consequently, it takes a long time to copy stuff to and fro on this drive — or at least longer than I’d like.

Finding apps to put on the drive was my next challenge. I was looking for a web browser (Firefox), an ssh client (putty), an FTP client (?), and an image editor. Fortunately, I found almost all of them at portableapps.com, a free repository for applications that have been adapted to live on portable drives (like thumbdrives and iPods).

Here’s what I got:

• Firefox 2.01 - installed it painlessly for browsing fun.
• GIMP - the open source clone of Photoshop
• FileZilla - a free FTP client, though kind of a janky one
• ClamWin - a Windows/portable version of the open-source ClamAV anti-virus scanner. Never know what you’ll pick up on the road.

The last thing that I wanted was a portable SSH client (putty isn’t, it uses the registry for settings) so that I could pipe my connection through a nice secure SOCKS tunnel to an ssh server, as per this Lifehacker article. I’ve been doing this for a while now with a SOCKS4 tunnel on my MacBook, following Rogue Amoeba programmer, Mike Ash’s instructions.

Enter PortaPutty, the scatalogically named portable version of the free SSH client, Putty. After some futzing around with Putty, I discovered that I’m too old fashioned to figure out tunnels in it. Maybe I’m mental, or maybe it’s the absolutely awful documentation for putty. The only way I could make it work is to create a little batch file with the following command:
plink.exe me@myserver.com -D 9999
(where -D 9999 specified the socks proxy tunnel and port number). Run that batch file from the directory where plink is — plink is part of putty — and the tunnel works like a charm.