Friday Techtip for November 21, 2008: PortableApps
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!