Gomeler.com

My Thumbdrive Desktop

10.06.06 - 09:17pm

There is something special about having the ability to carry your desktop everywhere you go. No I am not talking about lugging your computer tower with you, I mean the applications that you use on a daily basis. I have a select few programs that I have become accustomed to using. When I have to use another computer and those programs aren’t available I waste countless minutes searching for similar applications and then configuring them to my taste. Now you may say “Chris, you have a Macbook, why not just use that?” and I wish I could simply use my Macbook for everything but that is not the case, especially as a college student. In a normal day I hop from 2 to 3 Windows computers and sometimes more if I happen to also visit the library to print off documents and such. All this computer hopping makes for a lot of time wasted searching for proper applications so to help combat this problem I have assembled a list of portable applications that I have found to be indispensable.

Firefox

One of my largest peeves about using public computers is the web browser of choice. Most computers that I frequently use tend to have Firefox on them but often enough I find a computer with Internet Explorer 4/5/6 and no Firefox. Since I spend all of my time using Firefox and Flock, I have grown used to tabbed browsing, my Bookmark setup, and most importantly the secure feeling of using Firefox. Since I can’t install Firefox on the public computers I use, the first application in my lineup is the portable version of Firefox 2.0. Besides being able to use Firefox wherever you go you also get to drag around your bookmarks so that you will never have to search for that elusive URL that you have on your desktop’s Firefox bookmark tab.

Gaim

You will be hard-pressed to find an instant messaging program on most corporate and public computers. Apparently upper level management got it into their heads that instant messaging was a tragic destroyer of productivity and they would rather have you walk a hundred feet to visit your buddies in the cubicles on your hourly coffee breaks. I recently found out that sharing Physics 2 lab results is also against multiple honor codes so instant messaging clients aren’t permitted there either. Now with Portable Gaim you can chat it up with all your buddies no matter where you are. Gaim includes support for IRC, Jabber, AIM, MSN, Napster, Yahoo, and much more. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve been at a computer and wanted to ask somebody a question and there was no IM client available.

FoxitReader

PDF files have become the de-facto format for nearly all documents and this is great and all except when the computer you are on doesn’t feature a PDF viewer. OS X has built in PDF viewing abilities but Windows is lacking in this department and it can be a rather troublesome issue. Enter FoxitReader, a portable PDF program that features all the abilities of Adobe Acrobat reader and a few more. FoxitReader has the ability to print PDFs, convert files to PDF, edit PDFs and more. Weighing in at nearly 25% of the Acrobat download and with no installation this program can be crucial for reading those important memos, reports, and mail in rebates.

Crypt Note

When selecting a text editor I knew that not any text editor would be able to get the job done correctly. Text documents can can reveal a lot of information about a person and sometimes you don’t want everyone reading what you write. Since this text editor would be floating around on a very mobile platform and these USB sticks have the nasty tendency of getting lost, data encryption was a requirement. Crypt Note does exactly what its name suggest, it encrypts the notes that you write with a universal key. When you fire up Crypt Note it will ask for the encryption key and without this key your files will be unreadable. This feature is a must for those of you that leave important text documents on USB sticks or prefer to have a layer of security in regards to your documents.

Thunderbird

I hate checking my email from web based applications. While GMail, WebMail, and Hotmail all have sub-par to great interfaces I prefer having a standard interface for all my email activities. Thunderbird has been my email app of choice for more than a year and now there is a portable version. Thunderbird portable responds just like the standard Thunderbird installation except there is no installation step and you can take your email with you. Now just a warning if your email server features POP then remember to set Thunderbird to leave emails on the server otherwise they will be deleted.

iftp

Besides writing material to blog about I often have to upload pictures to my server so that I deliver something akin to a picture book rather than an encyclopedia. Due to the fact that most “normal” people don’t know about or use FTP, FTP clients are even more rare than IM clients on public computers. More often than not I find myself in the library writing up a little post and trying to trick the computer into installing an FTP client so I can upload a few supportive images and normally I am met with a sound defeat. Now with my portable FTP client this will be a problem of the past.

portaputty

Ironically 3 months ago I could have cared less about having a good SSH client on my desktop. Now I seem to live from an SSH connection as this is the primary interface that I use to develop work and develop on my dev server. Ironically this current theme was all hacked together via an SSH connection with an initial upload of Wordpress and K2. Some might call this theme a success, others might call it a failure, either way it shows that SSH can be important to those that use it.

7-Zip Portable

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a portable copy of Winrar so I went for the next best compression program, 7-Zip. Rarely do I need to compress files however I do like to archive large amounts of files when I need to email code and documents to myself and other people and this is where 7-Zip steps in beautifully. The standard Zip archives created by Windows rarely compress files to the max and at times Internet connections can be slow and unstable (last 2 weeks at my apartment for example) so the small file sizes resulting from 7-zipping files can be very beneficial compared to zipping via Windows.

VLC Portable

I carry around VLC player for a very particular reason, sometimes I haul around some of my favorite movie clips and movie trailers to watch when I need to burn some time or take a break during a heavy coding session in the library. Since a good number of videos and trailers online are encoded with codecs that aren’t native to Windows this can make playback a pain and most of the times impossible on public computers. VLC comes with support for nearly every codec on the market and then some and I have yet to find a video file that I couldn’t play.

Portable Winamp

For the same reason with VLC Portable I carry around Winamp. While iTunes 6 is my music app of choice, rarely is it installed on public computers. Due to the fact that I absolutely hate Windows Media Player I haul around Winamp as its interface is very clean and simple. It does the job and that is it, there is no bloat and there is no crowded interface to deal with.

Unique Applications

The following applications probably have no point in the standard desktop however I find them to be very useful. For a little bit of background information, when I do serious benching runs when overclocking I have this unnatural ability to completely destroy Windows beyond all repair. Now simply re-installing Windows isn’t all that much trouble but then installing drivers to get Ethernet working, fixing other bugs, and finally downloading my tweaking and benchmarking programs can be a pain in the butt. To counter this problem I have a special folder that contains Super Pi, CPU-Z, BruteBenchmark, ClockGen, Memset, and ATI Tool just to save those precious 5-10 minutes that installing drivers would normally waste. When your processor is slowly cooking itself at stratospheric clockspeeds while the motherboard is slowly freezing over in frost, 10 minutes can be the difference between a fried motherboard and a world record. My only advice is to transfer the files from your USB drive to the main drive as slow/unstable USB read/write times can affect your bench results.

Drastically underclocked to save power and keep heat production down.

I believe I should also mention that I have included uTorrent as occasionally I need a torrent client to download patches, programs, and ISOs. Earlier this year I did a few tests between uTorrent and Azureus and uTorrent used considerably fewer resources while offering equal and sometimes faster performance. If you hate the bloat of Azureus and Java I highly suggest checking out uTorrent, you can’t beat the size and the features that are packed into it and the speed is phenomenal.

Conclusion

This list simply has the programs that I use on a daily basis and feel the need to drag around with me. If you feel like some of the files that I have listed just don’t get the job done feel free to check out No-Install.com and PortableApps.com and assemble your own list. You will be surprised what you can find in portable form, I was considering adding the Doom 1 portable however the added size with no practical use would have been pushing my original concept. Hope you enjoy the list and let me know of applications that you feel could/should make the list.

Download

The download can be found HERE. It weighs in at 39.3 megabytes and contains all the programs I listed above and Clamwin, a rather decent anti-virus program which can be useful for scanning machines before working on them if you are paranoid. Some of the executables will require you to extract the programs before they can be used, for best use simply extract to the same folder the executable is located in. I could have hosted all the files extracted but I have to look out for my available bandwidth. File may be taken down with no notice if bandwidth consumption scales too high. I do not guarantee anything with this assembly of programs so use at your own risk.

Category: Articles, Software