take your pc everywhere

we use firefox. it has great add-ons like zotero, a tool for organizing your online research, or full screen homestar runner so you can watch strong bad emails in all their glory. we use openoffice. it supports the open document format, it allows you to publish your documents as pdfs, and it's totally free—not to mention that it's the office suite that's used in the public libraries of our own and neighboring burgs. we also like vlc, which plays about every media format under the sun; audacity, a great audio editor; the gimp, every bit as good as photoshop but for one infinite-th the price (i.e. free); and we like to burn optical discs, check email, and so on.

the problem is, not everyone agrees with our selection of software tools. some draconian schools and offices deploy only one option for a web browser or an office suite, and don't give you any choices. many of these pcs offer no photo or sound editing software at all, and certainly don't allow you to burn a cd. and what about all those customizations you spent hours making so that your software will work for you rather than against you? they don't just magically follow you to work or school.

but they could.

enter portableapps, the project that takes great open source software and makes it portable: that is, it runs directly off a usb flash drive with no installation required. carry your favorite customized programs and all your data with you everywhere you go. plug your drive into a windows pc and, voila! there are all your apps. the portableapps suite includes a menu that runs in your system tray, so your applications are always at your fingertips. and portableapps also runs on wine, so you can run your apps on a linux or mac computer where wine is installed.

oh, and when you choose which programs to include in your portableapps system, make sure you grab the clamwin virus scanner—you should always check your thumb drive for nastiness after you've plugged it into a strange computer. you never know where that thing's been.