Social Bookmarkers - which one do you use?

With the use of FireFox Portable comes the issue of syncing bookmarks. While there probably are apps and FireFox extensions that can sync your bookmarks, all of these (plus the bookmarks) take up more and more space on the flash drive. So I've decided to give "social bookmarking" a go. The thing is, all social bookmarking sites are not alike. Digg.com, while I do use it, is more of a popularity contest than a bookmarking site. Del.ico.us is a good option, but the colors and layout are harsh on the eyes. Since I've used my browser for bookmarks up until this point, I want my social bookmarker to have a few basic qualities:

1. Hierarchy. I want to be able to organize my bookmarks not only by tags, but also by folders and subfolders.
2. Easy on the eyes. Using a custom skin would be nice, but I'll settle for something that doesn't melt my eyeballs.
3. Privacy when I want it. There are bookmarks that I want to keep to myself. Mainly the syllabus pages for my college courses.
4. Buttons! If at all possible, I want an in-browser button that I can click to bookmark the current page.
5. Import/Export capabilities. I don't want to have to add my bookmarks manually. And, should I decide to change services, I don't want to transfer them manually.

Yes, I know, I'm picky. But you already knew that :P When I first thought "Hmm, I need a social bookmarking account," naturally the first place I looked was Del.ico.us. Importing the bookmarks was wonderfully quick and painless, I got some neat FireFox buttons during the setup process, and privacy comes standard. However, as I mentioned before, the color choice was painful. Light blue and gray on a white background? Ow! Worse yet, there was no hierarchy option. The next place I went was to digg to try to find a list of social bookmarking sites. From there I found a rather extensive list of bookmarking sites. Skimming through, the first name that caught my eye was Ma.gnolia.com (or maybe it was the pic). It had all of the Delicious pluses (though I had to search google for the buttons), but it had a nice color scheme and layout. Downsides: it took longer to import my 'marks and, still, no hierarchy feature. Skimming down the same list, the image for Spurl caught my eye. While I'm still waiting for my FireFox bookmarks to be imported (I'm supposed to allow 24 hours on this one), I've added this blog as a bookmark, and there appears to be a decent hierarchical feature. The colors and layout are nice (I like blue-black, and the layout is moderately spacious). A Spurl FireFox addon is available, and seems to work well. Privacy is an option, though the option isn't as obvious as I would like it to be after I've submitted a 'mark. Overall, (and if my 'marks ever get imported,) I think I'll be sticking with Spurl for now. Though, of course, I'll still use Delicious to boost my traffic ;) On a usability/design note: At the time of writing, Spurl's front page says "We are currently forced to offer reduced functionality due to heavy spam attacks." Actually, maybe they should keep this "clean" front page. I can imagine what the front page would normally look like, cluttered with 'mark feeds, but I like the near-emptiness that is currently "up". If I want to see the latest, hottest bookmarks, I'll try to find a page that offers them. So, what bookmark service do you use? If you're not satisfied with what you've found, what do you look for in social bookmarks? Also...anyone know a good RSS aggregator that respects my preferences?

ThunderBird: email accounts across Windows accounts

This may not apply to a lot of people out there, but, in case you're interested, I've figured out how to make your Thunderbird-accessed email accounts available to all Windows XP user accounts. Unfortunately, Google was not much help in my endeavors. Here's the background: our family computer has almost a one-to-one ratio of user accounts to users; unfortunately, when surfing the internet/checking email, my parents tend to just use whichever account happens to be active when they sit down. So, I had to find a way to make their email account available to every account without having to manually add the email to every single Windows account (Oh, the horror!). So, after a little file-browsing, I finally managed to do it. Best part is, if I want to add another email account to all Windows accounts, I only have to add it once. The worst part is that you can't have an email account on just one Windows account, unless that account works under its own profile, which defeats the purpose. Anyway, on to the how-tos: Prep the folder structure You will be pointing all Thunderbird client instances to the same mail directory on your hard drive, so you should *ahem* quarantine a specific folder for TBird to dump all its email in. I created a directory email under C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\ . Create a base profile First you want to create a new profile that you can work with as a base. Go to Start->Run... , type cmd, and press Enter. This will bring up a command line. Navigate to your TBird program folder and run thunderbird -profilemanager: > cd "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird" > thunderbird -profilemanager Once the little profile manager pops up, click "Create new profile...", click Next. Give your profile a name (I used my family's last name), then select "Choose Folder..." and select the folder you setup in step 1. Click finish. Optionally, you can delete your "default" profile and/or any profiles you won't be using from here out. Finally, select the new profile and click Start Thunderbird. At this point, you may want to setup an email account under the new profile to see if it carries over to the other Windows accounts. After that, exit TBird. Copy the profile settings to all users In the C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Thunderbird directory, where [username] is the account name that you created the new profile under, there is a file called profiles.ini . You can open this file in notepad to see the contents. Under my configuration (using the email folder for all users), the contents look something like this:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=Rowls
IsRelative=0
Path=C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\email
Default=1

The IsRelative line tells TBird whether or not the Path line is using a relative (1) or absolute (0) path to the desired email folder. We want 0. Path should point to the folder from step 1. If you still have other profiles that are listed in profiles.ini, you will only want to copy the contents that refer to your global profile. Otherwise, you can copy the entire file over. Where you want to copy it is to the C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Thunderbird directory of every other Windows user you want to share email accounts with. And you're done. Log into someone else's account (or have them do it for you), pull up TBird, and see if the email accounts carry over. Enjoy :)

Slimming down OpenOffice.org Portable

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that deleting any file from the OpenOffice.org Portable installation is not recommended by the portableapps.com website, as evidenced by their OOoP FAQ and support forum. By following the steps outlined in this article, in part or in whole, you agree that I am in no way responsible for messing anything up. But, as one Linux motto says, "Go for it. You can always reinstall."

OpenOffice.org Portable is a great little office suite, ideal for working with documents on the go. Unfortunately, while the download is only around 70MB, the full install is 181MB, which may be more than you want to give up -- or even more than you have available, after installing your other portable apps. Fortunately, the full install comes with some fairly large nonessential files that can be gotten rid of ;)

This guide assumes you've installed OOoP to the directory "\OOP".

Dictionary files
These files are used for spellchecking. Languages that come in the default installation (to the best of my knowledge), are: three variations of German (de_*), two variations of English (en_*), Hungarian (hu_*), Italian (it_*), Dutch (nl_*), Swahili (sw_*), and Thai (th_*). (language codes , two-letter codes are under the ISO639-1 list).
While all these languages are nice, I know that, unless I get a German penpal or something, I won't be needing anything other than English, and it's reasonably safe to delete the other dictionary files to save space.
The dictionary files can be found in the \OOP\App\openoffice\share\dict\ooo directory. Files you want to delete are in the following formats (the asterisk [*] is a wildcard, in most of the following cases indicating one of the two-letter language codes):

• *_*.aff
• *_*.dic
• hyph_*_*.dic
• README_*_*.txt
• th_*_*.dat
• th_*_*.idx

For my intallation (keeping only the US English dictionary), I kept only the files DictOOo.sxw, dictionary.lst, en_US.aff, en_US.dic, FontOOo.sxw, hyph_en_US.dic, and WordNet_license.txt. This cleared up about 52MB. You may also want to keep the files th_en_US_v2.dat and th_en_US_v2.idx, which seem to be either word definition or thesaurus files, but they will add an extra 20MB to your setup.

Templates
I know that some people out there use templates when creating new documents, but I'm not one of those people. I just create a new document, maybe set up its margins and stuff, and start typing. If you don't use templates, either, you can delete the entire \OOP\App\openoffice\share\template directory, to save almost 8MB.

Gallery
I really don't know what this directory would be used for in the OOoP program, but a quick look at the files inside indicates that it's not important for daily document-editing rituals. Delete \OOP\App\openoffice\share\gallery to save almost 5MB

READMEs
If you have no use for the README files, delete \OOP\App\openoffice\share\readme to save a whopping 76KB

Help Files
You may actually want to keep the help files, located in \OOP\App\openoffice\help , in case you ever need a quick how-to or what-is on something in the program. If not, delete the directory to save 22MB

Java "class" files
OOoP comes with the option to add java support, but I haven't yet seen the need to have this support. If you don't care for Java support, either, delete \OOP\App\openoffice\program\classes to save 8.5MB

Extraneous Icon Sets
OOoP comes with a few nice icon sets that you can customize your toolbars with, but the cost is 18MB in icon set files. Open Writer, Calc, or another OOoP program, look through the icon sets (Tools->Options..., then OpenOffice.org->view in the left pane, in Writer). Once you've found an icon set you like, go to \OOP\App\openoffice\share\config and delete the three images_*.zip files that you DON'T want. I chose to keep the Crystal icon set, images_crystal.zip. This saves around 13MB

And that's it! You should now have slimmed your OpenOffice.org Portable installation from 181MB to 70-75MB. Congratulations :)

Your Life on a Stick

College courses that involve essays, reports, presentations, and other communications-related assignments -- most of them, that is -- make flash drives essential, especially if you don't own your own computer/laptop. And even if you do have your own little workstation, a portable flash drive is very handy for accessing the campus printers.

But those little storage devices can store more than documents. Duh.

I'm working on getting a business running where I basically come to your computer and clean it. Take out the trash, clean up the spyware, spank the viruses, polish the CPU. Kinda like Geek Squad. Anyway. In this business there are a few essential programs that I will be using, but it'll get very old very quickly if I have to download each and every one to my client's computer to run it. Not to mention it'll take more of their disk space, which is NOT a good thing. One alternative is to lug my laptop around to each person, setup a local file sharing network (somehow) and work on their drive from my comp.

No, thank you.

My solution: portable apps on a 1-gig flash drive. There are LOTS of programs that work from a flash drive, many of them free.

However, in choosing programs for your flash drive, you have to keep a few things in mind.

Size: Programs, along with all their add-on dll files and lengthy EULAs, can take up a good chunk of drive space. And with flash drives, you are limited to the drive's capacity. So, obviously enough, the smaller the better.

Storage methods: How does the app store information? Most programs use files, but way too many programs use the Windows Registry. This is a BIG no-no for portable apps. On one hand your registry settings won't be available on another person's computer, and on the other hand you don't want to inadvertently edit your client's registry. As such, you want to make sure any program you bring won't make registry changes.

Relative path support: Life on a flash drive means never knowing what drive letter you'll be assigned. Therefore your programs have to be able to cope with changing letters, and they can't be using absolute paths.

So here's what my life-on-a-stick currently looks like:

Dock: With many programs come many directories. My file structure is pretty deep. As such, I don't want to go hunting for my apps with my client's Windows Explorer. So I downloaded RKLauncher. Yes, you could probably go with another dock program, or even a floating menu app, but I prefer RKL because 1) it's a dock, and I like docks, 2) it supports both ObjectDock and Yz Dock docklets (don't worry if that didn't make sense), 3) it's a standalone executable, 4) it supports relative paths, meaning it can find my programs even when my flash drive's letter changes, and 5) it's FREE!!! Free is very important to me.
Total size of RKLauncher + Dock Icons for all my apps + the following docklet: 3.24MB

Menu Docklet: When traveling, you can't be sure what resolution the computer you visit will be working with, and you don't often want to mess with the settings (if you can). As such, your traveling dock will ideally be as small as possible. Enter the menu docklet, KKMenu. It's not really a docklet anymore, it's a standalone executable, but as such it should work with any dock that supports shortcuts. The download includes a DOC subfolder with a file help.html that gives a rundown of how to use the program, along with a couple of menu skins. In my installation, I've deleted the DOC folder all but one skin (one INI file and one PNG file), and all extraneous files (everything in the root docklet folder other than kkmenu.exe and kkmenueditor.exe). My RKLauncher has 4 links to KKMenu, one for each category Internet, Utilities, Security, and Office. Put together with the two links to local copies of Windows Explorer and Task Manager, it's a very small dock.

Internet

Internet Browsing: Yes, chances are any computer I walk up to these days will have high-speed internet connected to a browser of the owner's choice -- but I'm not the owner, and their choice may not be mine. I prefer FireFox (along with my choice of skins and extensions), so I downloaded FireFox Portable. The owner has even kindly put up instructions for copying your current FireFox settings for use under the portable version. Must-have extensions I take with me include DownThemAll!, SearchBar Autosizer, Cooliris, and PDF Download for use with Foxit Reader (more later), but it doesn't yet support relative paths :(
Of course, since space is limited, you want to set some settings that prevent FFP from using more than it absolutely needs. Mainly this means turning off cookies, disk cache, and history.
Total file size of FFP, extensions, and one theme: 26.4MB Edit: I talked with the author of PDF Download, and we managed to get relative paths working ^_^ In order to do this, open the PDFD options. Under the "General", select "Open PDF". Under the "PDF Opening" tab, select "Use this viewer:". In the text field to the right, put the relative path to your PDF reader executable, starting at the directory where FFP starts. This method uses a lot of "dot-dot" directory specifications ("../", meaning "one directory up"), but it is also set-and-forget; once you find the right path, you don't have to modify it again (unless you're switching PDF viewers).

Email: While it's true that most email services have a web interface, I prefer a program that brings all my accounts to the same place. Enter ThunderBird Portable. Along with the Webmail Extension, it can bring just about any account type to the desktop. And, of course, you'll have to explore the settings to reduce disk writing to a bare minimum.
Total size of TBP and two extensions: 27.6MB

Utilities

Advanced Text Editing: A good program that works like Notepad and has a little extra kick is Notepad++, but for flash drives go with Notepad++ Portable.
Total size: 2.25MB

File Compression: Let's face it: the ZIP compression format stinks. For all the other formats, the best program out there is 7-Zip, with a portable version. Supports almost every compression format out there.
Total size: 2.08MB

SSH Client: My college career involves a lot of work on Linux computers through SSH clients. All I did here was copy over the SshClient.exe file from my local SSH installation, and it seems to work fine.
Total size: 3.07MB
There is also a portable PuTTY, if that's your app of choice.

Lightweight PDF Viewer: Down with bulky Adobe Reader, long live Foxit Reader! Download and extract the ZIP file from Foxit's site, and you have a standalone, lightweight PDF viewer!
Total size: 3.85MB

Other utilities: I have a few other small programs that might come in handy. These are Process Explorer (a bulked-up Task Manager), TightVNC Viewer (viewer executable only, along with a personalized build of UltraVNC Single Click, though I haven't tried the combo yet), FolderSize, and a small program that creates a System Restore Point (edits the registry, yes, but in this case you want it to ;) ).
Total size of all four apps: 4.91MB

Security

Antivirus: My app of choice for antivirus is actually AVG Free, but I haven't yet figured out how to run it from a flash drive. Until then, I will use ClamWin Portable.

Antispyware/malware: At the moment, my spyware apps include only files copied over from local installations of Ad-Aware SE and Spybot SD. I have NOT tested these for registry modification yet, however!

Office
My portable office suite is OpenOffice.org Portable. Unfortunately, the installation program doesn't let you choose which parts to install, and there's really not much you can remove to save space. I've managed to slim my install down to 76MB total, but it's still bigger than I like, when I'll only occasionally use Writer and Calc.
Total size: 76MB slimmed, 181MB full install

Last, but not least, I have two files on the root of my flash drive: an autorun.inf and an rklauncher.bat. The autorun.inf is setup to automatically run RKLauncher (setup with some help from lazycoder.com). The rklauncher.bat file is essentially a shortcut in the case that autorun doesn't autorun. With flash drives (and, therefore, changing drive letters), file shortcuts don't work, so simple windows batch scripts have to be used instead (setup with a template found on a fatwallet.com post -- be sure to use relative paths!).

Altogether, my 1GB flash drive shows 225MB used space, 747MB free space. Plenty of free space for any documents or relatively small downloads I may want to grab :)

Other sites for portable apps:
portableapps.com has a wide range of programs specifically built to be run from a flash drive.
That fatwallet.com post also has an exhaustive list of programs that can run from your flash drive.

Intro

Even geeks don't know everything about technology. I learn new things about the tech world at least weekly, if not daily. Web usability, the latest server-side techniques, iPod junk, all sorts of stuff. So stay tuned ;)