Today's article is about "taking it with you" -- on your thumb drive. James shares more tips and suggestions by way of portable applications...
One thing I use is portable applications. Once again, there are several to choose from -- but I recommend you go to PortableApps. They have quite a few, including a suite which has the more useful/popular apps. These are applications that you can run off of your thumb drive. Even if you don’t run them off your thumb drive, you can download them to your computer and run them there. Since the idea behind thumb drives is portability, some of these can be very useful in that capacity. For example, if you choose to put Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome on your thumb drive, then you retain your favorites wherever you go. Want to show someone a cool website you found? Just plug in your thumb drive and run your browser on whatever computer you go to. Do you want to do some online shopping for the holidays but other members of your house use the same computer? Use your portable browser and your history and cached files are on your thumb drive and not on the home computer. Want to go check out the local dating website but don’t want your spouse to know? I’m just kidding -- but you get where I’m going with this. Before I continue, let me state that an IT person with basic computer forensic know-how and the desire/need can still discover this kind of stuff, but this works for the average person.
Another thing you can do with portable applications is email. You can set up a web client on your thumb drive. If you're on the road and want to check your email without using a public computer’s web browser then you're set. Or if you want to set up an email account for that dating website that is not on your home computer, then this is what you do. (He's kidding again!)
Download GIMP and you have a portable graphics program to take with you. It’s not Photoshop, but it's free and you can do plenty of stuff like cropping or resizing photos while you're away so you can email them or post them on your web page before you get home.
Open Office is a suite of tools like Microsoft Office or Wordperfect’s Office suite, except it’s free and portable. It has programs like the others for documents, spreadsheets, presentations and so on. Not everyone has the same office suite and especially not the same version. With Open Office you can take yours and work on any computer.
I’ll stop plugging all the portable applications they have out there, but they have more, like games, security applications, mp3 players, and so on. These run off your thumb drive so you don’t need to install them on any computer you use.
James
