All Macs come with a DVD drive that you can use, so in most situations, you won’t have the need for a USB installer disk. However, there can be times when your DVD ROM is spoilt and you need to reformat/upgrade your OS. This is where an USB installer disk comes in handy. In addition, with this USB disk, you can also use it to install Mac OS on a machine without CD-ROM (i.e netbook).

In this tutorial, we will go through the way to create a Snow Leopard USB installer disk.

Requirement

• An existing Mac with functional DVD-ROM
• Snow leopard installer DVD (upgrade set or box set)
• A USB thumb drive of at least 8GB in size

For those who own an iPhone/iPod Touch and at the same time is an Ubuntu (or Linux) users, here’s is a good news. You can now easily mount your iPhone in your Ubuntu without having to jailbreak your phone.

In the past, the dirty but effective way to access the iPhone from your Linux system is via SSH. This requires you to jailbreak your phone and it voids the warranty. With iFuse, you can now mount your iPhone/iPod Touch under Linux with just a USB cable. You can also view/edit/cut/copy/paste the file just like any USB disk drive.

A while back I posted 10 Useful Portable Applications to Run On Your USB Drive. I thought it was time to do the same type of post for all of the Mac folks. If you do not find something in this list to suit your needs, with a few Google searches you are likely to find something to work for you.

1. Cyberduck

Opensource Mac FTP client. If you aren’t using Cyberduck, here is a basic run through.

Password protecting my USB drive is often the most important thing that I do when I went on travel. With all the confidential information in the USB drive, the last thing that I want to see is to lost it and have others to access all my precious data.

Although I have previously covered two useful software for encrypting USB drive: Windows 7 BitLocker and TrueCrypt, one thing that prevented me from using them on the move is that these two software require administrator privilege (or the ultimate version of Windows 7) to use, which in most Internet cafes, you don’t have access to.

There are also several others encryption software out there, but the one that worked well for me, and apparently free and does not require any administrator privileges is Rohos Mini Drive.

USB drive is a great tool for you to bring your data anywhere you go without having to lull the whole computer along. The bad thing is, it is small in size and can easily be misplaced or stolen by others. When such incident occurs, the last thing that you want to happen is to let others view your confidential data, and probably do something bad with them.

In Windows 7, there is this new Bitlocker To-Go function that allows you to encrypt your USB drive. In the event that your drive is stolen, there is no way that others can access your data, unless he/she has your password.

Portable applications are modified versions of a desktop application that can be run on a USB drive. iPods, USB flash drives, external hard drives or any other portable device can be used. When the applications are stored on said device, the application can be used on any computer running the proper operating system by being plugged into the USB port on a computer. Most of the portable applications are still operating system dependent, but many have cross platform versions. Many open source and a few OEM applications have a portable counterparts. Numerous utility programs are available in a portable version as well.