Regardless of what you call them, the small portable memory that anyone can afford can be used for many things. As an introduction to the possibilities, I would like to direct Masonic Technology readers to the article 10 cool things you can do with a USB flash drive by Greg Shultz over at TechRepublic.
In his article, Mr. Shultz touches upon usages ranging from using the drive as an MP3 player, to locking your computer.
Overall, the article does an outstanding job of introducing the versatility of portable drives, but do not limit yourself only to the article. A quick search on google will provide many other sites and articles that may just have the thing you were looking for all along. I, personally, did a search using only the terms portable apps and found an outstanding resource on makeuseof.com entitled 100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick (Mac and Win).
You can purchase a flash drive from any electronics store, Wal-Mart, or through online stores such as ComputerGeeks.com or NewEgg.com.
Happy reading.
Here’s two more that I use:
GNUCash for managing the Treasurer’s books. It is a straight-forward tool which is free, may be installed as a Portable App on a USB drive, and thus is transferable to whomever you wish, including your auditor each year. GNUCash is easy to set up for your books, and can create more than enough reports to meet your needs. Our Lodge, Hall Association & Shrine Club are using this product.
Dropbox for file sharing. This product allows you to store files in the cloud for retrieval on any of your, or your friends & acquaintances computers. You can also store a file and send a link to that specific file to anyone at all. If you create shared files, all users on that share receive updates when a file is changed. We have used this to maintain agendas between members of a working group, and keep one up-to-date working file, rather than having them diverge if shared by email. Dropbox only updates the parts of the file which changed, saving bandwidth, and maintains ‘old’ copies of changed files, so you can roll back if necessary. An account opens with 2 GB of storage, and you can accumulate 3 GB nore by participating in their referral program. More space can be purchased if you need it.
DAvid
David,
I have been using Dropbox for some time now, and I have to say it is a very nice service. It allows me to sync between computers, and even my iPhone, which is very convenient to say the least.
I will have to take a look at GNUCash; you stumped me on this one. Thanks for pointing it out to us. My lodge just purchased the newest version of Quicken, but the DropBox trick would be nice to use with it as well.
Unfortunately, getting any of my officers to use technology is like asking a pig to fly an F-16. Due to current personal reasons, my attendance at lodge is spotty at best, so I asked someone to email me announcements, etc for the website. The response was expected…..”can I just call you?” How many phone calls have I received? You guessed it….none.
Shane