Gui Cremerius

A few weeks ago, I decided to go portable… I mean using portable applications, and the obvious place to start for me was heading to portableapps.com. They do have a nice framework to put on an USB stick and the quality of the open source applications they put out are really good, but I do use a few apps that are not open source, like Skype, and I really wanted those on my kit too. Googling around, I found two other good sites with many more applications, namely pendriveapps.com (that has the portable Skype tip) and The Portable Freeware Collection, which has a ton of (as the name implies) freeware applications and instructions on how to portabilize them. There are a few classic ones I had put immediately on the stick, like Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Filezilla, Putty, Notepad++ and a bunch of other tools I like to have around, just in case I need them.

Besides Skype, there are two other applications I use quite a lot and without them, my portable office would be incomplete: Evernote and My Life Organized (MLO) which I use as my GTD trusted system as I explained here. Fortunately both of them have portable versions. For Evernote, you actually have to install the desktop version and from there choose the menu option that allows you to install the portable one. Then you could get rid of the desktop version. For MLO, you just have to copy the folder from your desktop install, export your license and copy that to the stick too. That’s all you need and both work flawlessly.

As the designated family tech support I also use TeamViewer (a free for non commercial use remote control software) to support my dispersed family’s and friends’ PCs. Being myself located in Brazil, my mother and daughter in Buenos Aires, a brother and sister in Munich and friends over in New Jersey and Florida, makes this an indispensable tool to have around. Sometimes I even use it from the office to help my wife back home around some issues. TeamViewer has a simple client to run on the other end that generates an ID that I use to connect over http (so I can bypass any firewall) to the remote desktop and do whatever is needed to fix the problem.

For the time being, everything works fine with my kit that takes almost all my 2Gb stick’s space, even though I’m a little bit concerned with the write cycles a USB pendrive has, so I might eventually switch to a small portable hard drive, but nothing beats such a small stick with all those apps in there!

Laxi Taxi photo courtesy of F.M. Manufacturing, Inc., © Matt Rupp Photography, All rights reserved.