Waiting for the Ajax-Web2.0 revolution, I found this intermediary solution that allows to bring around great collection of softwares without the weight of a laptop or an handheld. Sometimes, in fact, I found myself in the situation of needing a decent piece of software on a machine I was working on without the hassle to have to install the thing.
Recently I started noticing a growing number of projects to port common software apps into a USB stick format so that can be run cross platform. Here is a collection I assembled recently:
- Chat/instant messaging: Miranda, Trillian Anywhere
- Browsers: Portable Firefox
- Password storing: Keepass, Pass2Go
- Operating Systems: Linux, Windows CE, VPM (Linux)
- System tools: BBLean,
- PIMs/organisers: EssentialPIM, Sunbird
- Email: JBMail, Portable Thunderbird, EmailVoyager, PocoMail PE
- Encryption: CryptoAnywhere, PuTTY
- Office: AbiWord, OpenOffice (instructions in a PDF here), Papyrus
- Sticky Notes: ATNotes
- Music: Zoom Player, XMPlay, Coldplayer, Foobar2000
- Web Authoring: NVU
- Programming: Movable Python
- Web services: Miniserver (Apache, PHP server)
- Email: iScribe, Foxmail
- Task management: ToDoList
- Wiki: Pimki, TiddlyWiki
- Games: SteelSK, Fotaq
- PDF Reader: RD
Tags: hack