Friday TechTips

Today’s tip will help you take advantage of the myriad USB flash (or thumb, or jump, or your term here) drives that seem to surround us. PortableApps (http://portableapps.com) provides a suite of applications which you download and install on your drive of choice (1 GB recommended) and includes mobile (and fully functional) versions of Firefox, Open Office (the open source office suite, compatible with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), Pidgin which is an open source multi-service IM client, games, image and audio editors, as well as media players. It’s sort of like having a Swiss Army knife of software in your pocket! The benefit of using applications and documents on a drive is that they’re with you where ever you are, and can be used the same on any other computer (as long as it’s running Windows). You also don’t have to worry about losing any of your settings or customizations. However this is also a hazard, because if you forget your drive or lose it, then your docs and apps are gone as well.  So be mindful and don’t leave it behind, plugged into a library computer like so many UR students do! When you download PortableApps you’ll see that it comes with a standard pool of programs, but you can download even more at http://portableapps.com/apps. For the Mac geeks, you can even run OS Classic 7 and relive 1991 all over again. Speaking of running a full computer off of a usb drive, there are multiple variants of linux you can install on a usb drive, giving you your own virtual computer everywhere you go, just plug it in, launch the OS and off you go. Check out http://www.pendrivelinux.com for additional details.

So if you’re traveling for Thanksgiving and aren’t sure if your hosts have Firefox, or you need to work on that grant proposal, try taking PortableApps along with your documents, and settings. It’ll probably make life much easier.

BONUS TIP!

And since we’re talking Turkey (or Tofurkey if you’re so inclined) that reminds me of all of the sites which host the leaked sale flyers of our national day of spending, Black Friday, which is Nov. 28 this year! If you want to get a jump on the competition and plan which stores to hit first, have a look at http://gottadeal.com/blackfriday. You can see each store’s sales, all of the early bird merchandise, as well as look at sales by product type (e.g. Laptops). So forget that Citigroup is currently trading under $5.00 and do your part to re-energize the economy!

Today’s tip comes from Microsoft, the tech company we love to talk smack about! That said, Microsoft has released a number of new projects lately that I think show it’s on the right path. These include:

• Microsoft Mesh
• The Azure “Cloud Computing” Platform
• An Overhaul of their Live.com platform which will fully integrate with other social sites and tools you may be using

I’ll leave it to you to search for the above topics, because today I’ll highlight PC Advisor. It’s a new tool that will examine your Windows system from top to bottom and alert you to any issues that might affect performance. It is not a replacement for antivirus or antispyware software, just a tool to address less serious performance issues. Paul Thurrott, a long time journalist and Microsoft watcher has posted about PC Advisor here and provides the download link:

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2008/10/24/download-microsoft-pc-advisor.aspx

I’ll advise that this is a new product, and they may have not worked out every but, but I’ve tested it on my two home XP computers with no difficulty. All of these changes makes me think that we’re going to see a “new and improved” Microsoft in the post-Gates era. Time will tell!

Good Friday afternoon everyone!

Today’s tip is Evernote from the fine team at http://evernote.com. Evernote is a VERY useful “web clipping” tool that is highly flexible and can be used in just about anyway you can creatively imagine. Using Evernote, you create “notes” to yourself to remind you of:

• work to-do items
• shopping lists
• capture a photo or image you want to remember
• leave yourself a voice note
• paste in a web site or text you want to remember later
• include a pdf in your notes for later review
• your idea here!

It’s very handy with so many different uses. Maybe the best way to describe it is that it’s an organizer for things you want to remember, now matter what format or media type. And instead of me yammering on about it why don’t you watch the introductory video:

Best of all, Evernote is free and has mobile versions for the iPhone & iPod Touch, and Windows Mobile Devices (sorry BlackBerry users, at least for now). Perhaps most importantly, there are desktop clients available for both Windows and Mac integrating all of your notes into your daily work without having to necessarily surf to their site in your browser. Give it a try and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. And don’t take my word for it, here are some real world examples:

Knitters using Evernote - http://spice.littlefeetbigsky.com/2008/10/01/iphone-knitting
Bloggers using Evernote - http://www.idano.net/new-blogging-tool-evernote-on-my-iphone-380.htm
20 Awesome Ways to User Evernote - http://www.inquisitr.com/2179/evernote-why-it-will-make-it-20-awesome-ways-to-use-it