I am a big fan of my USB stick and so one of my favourite websites is John Haller’s Portable Apps. However, it’s been some time since I last checked the site and when I finally took a look at it again at the weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he has been busy.
So let’s take a quick look at five of the new useful portable apps that have appeared on the site :
If you’re a blogger that uses Windows Live Writer and Portable Apps, you’ll be pleased to know that you can have the best of both worlds! Scott Kingery at TechLifeWeb put together a nice tool to make Windows Live Writer portable!
You will first need to install Windows Live Writer to obtain all of the program files (if you don’t have it installed already).
After you’ve installed Windows Live Writer, download WLWPortable3.zip and extract the contents to your USB drive. Finally, copy all of the files and directories from C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer to the WindowsLiveWriterPortable\App\WindowsLiveWriter directory on your USB drive. To run Windows Live Writer Portable, just launch WindowsLiveWriterPortable.exe from your portable drive.
While looking for some portable apps to add to my USB drive I came across really cool utility for working with PDF files. The app is called PDFTK Builder. It’s a standalone program (so you can carry it around on your USB driver) that allows you to:
For the most part the program is fairly intuitive, simply select the input PDF docs, choose desired action and click on save button. Though some other features like rearranging pages within the document or merging a part of one document with the other require brief illustration.
Hey, Hey, Hey!
AskTheAdmin here again with another free tool that I can’t live without. As TheAdmiN I have literally over 10,000 servers in production. Most of them are on the same corporate open license program and have the same serial number and need no activation. BUT there are more than a few machines that are not owned by my company and were installed, configured and shipped to us as-is.
When one of these machines crash or are about to fail there is little I can do other than call the respective company’s support staff. I hate relying on other people!
If you have been a computer user for a while, then you may have heard of FloppyOffice, which was - as you probably already guessed, a portable office software suite on a floppy drive!
Now in 2008, you probably can only find floppies in the dark recesses of closets, boxes and landfills - but FloppyOffice has been reincarnated as Tiny USB Office, which offers a wide variety of free, standalone portable software.
Tiny USB Office can be installed on any flash drive, even the 128MB ones, because it only takes up only 2.5MB of space on a drive, so you will still have plenty of space for your documents.
No matter how good a PC you have at home, there are often times that there is no other way but to use a public computer to get the work done.
When I say public computers I refer to computers at airports, cyber cafes, libraries or even a friend’s computer. Beware the computer may be spying on you!
This guide applies to those situations where you have to use anything but your own PC. So I invite you to Make Use Of these:
Tip 1: Use portable software or LiveCD wherever possible
If you have your own website, most likely you will be used to the regular task of transferring numerous files to the website from your computer. Whether it is an image, a document, a HTML page or a zipped attachment, it can be pretty tiring transferring them one by one if you are using a simple uploading tool provided by your web hosting company. This is where a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client comes in extremely handy as it can do a bulk upload of files from your computer to a web domain (or vice versa) at the click of a button.
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