TiddlyWiki is a single html file that works as a wiki. You can put it on a
thumbdrives, save it to your harddrive, save it to a drive on the network somewhere, or put it on a web server. TiddlyWiki makes a great guerrilla wiki; a wiki you can use when you don’t have support/permission for a real wiki like mediawiki (the wiki that runs wikipedia).

At first, I didn’t see much usefulness for tiddlywiki. That happens to me sometimes. I’ll see something and not see much potential, but after thinking about it and having an epiphany, or using it for a while, it suddenly dawns on me that it’s great. The same thing happened to me with LifeHacker.com. I didn’t think it was that great at first, because it seemed so un-organized (It’s a blog) but then I learned that if you just visit it every day, you’ll see some really cool things. And if you know what you’re looking for, you can find some good stuff with the search function.

In all their divine wisdom, the higher-ups at work decided not to approve of a wiki for my department. They also took away our access to an electronic form of our documentation after someone made changes to a file. Apparently, they didn’t want to just write-protect the files. So I made a little wiki with TiddlyWiki and put it up on a shared network drive. Then I gave out the location to some trusted colleagues.

Only one other person has contributed so far, but the wiki is useful for me as I use it as a notebook to keep important information. I try to update it about once a day as new things pop up at work. Someday, it will probably catch on and become a valuable resource for more than just me, but for now, I’m still happy with it. The hyperlinking, and built in search capability could be duplicated by making a Word or Open Office document, but the way tiddly wiki presents articles without showing everything else in the document as well, really cuts down on the clutter. TiddlyWiki also allows you to tag articles, so that you can group them logically.

I’ve also used tiddlywiki to create the help file I use with autohotkey software I’ve written and distributed at work.

TiddlyWiki is a small file. It works really well for organizing lots of small articles or chunks of data like how-to instructions, recipes, and the like. TiddlyWiki is popular with students for note-taking purposes. When I was in school, laptops were too expensive for students to tote them around to class, but that seems to be more common now.

TiddlyWiki works best with Firefox, but Internet explorer works as well. Internet Explorer only seems to be able to save changes if the tiddlywiki is on a local drive though. And if you put tiddlywiki up on a webserver, you will need to install an extention to be able to save the file.

I recommend saving a blank tiddlywiki to your computer or thumbdrive so you’ll have it handy if you ever decide you’d like to use it. Once you have it, and you’ve played around with it, you might just find a great use for it like I did. Give it some time, and I think you’ll begin to see what all the excitement surrounding tiddlywiki is all about.

Foxit Reader is a small, fast, portable app for reading pdf files. It’s faster than adobe, and happily runs off of a cd, so it’s a useful app to have.

Comes in handy if you are ever working with a machine that doesn’t have adobe reader. Plus, it’s a lot faster.

Foxit Reader 2.0 is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 1.5 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Foxit Reader 2.0 supports Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/2003. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.6.

Version 2.0 introduces many exciting new features, including interactive form filler, multi-language UI support, on-demand download of add-on, self upgrade, Javascript support, improved printing speed, streamlined UI and much more.

CCleaner is a free application for deleting your internet history, private application data, and temporary files.

I find that that’s something useful to have at work. That way I can erase (as much as possible) my tracks from whatever machine I’m working on.

CCLeaner is a great app, and much cheaper than the competition (It’s free)!

CCleaner’s website is : http://www.ccleaner.com

CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it’s fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware!

PStart is a great application for creating a menu of all your portable application. It stores apllication locations as relative locations, so it won’t matter what drive your thumbdrive or cd rom is.

PStart gives you a system tray icon with a right-click menu of all your apps, as well as a window that shows icons and descriptions. just install Pstart, configure it, and optionally burn it to CD. It will even create an autorun.inf file to start it automatically when you insert your cd.

PStart is a great tool, and a must have for your portable app collection.

Process Explorer, by Sysinternals is a very powerful version of task manager. It shows you the command line used to open your running processes, which files they have open, and which processes spawned them.

Process Explorer allows you to kill process trees instead of killing one process at a time. It’s ability to kill processes seems much stronger than the standard windows task manager, and with the extra information you get, Process Explorer can be very useful.

The program is small and runs fine off of a CD.

Ps Tools, by sysinternals is a collection of free command line tools for windows that do such things as remotely run programs, show/kill processes, and start services. They come in very handy for remote administration/help desk.

All of them will run just fine from a CD, and by creating a gui with autohotkey, or a script with cygwin unix utilities, or a batch file, you can use them without having to remember the syntax for the commands.

Ps tools come in very handy for what I do. If you work with remote systems, you should definitely check them out.

WinVi is a windows version of the vi editor found on *nix machines. Vi is a very powerful editor with a steep learning curve. If you know how to use it, it’s very cool. And if you’re a good typist, you’ll appreciate that you can do everything without taking your hands off the keyboard.

WinVi is small and fast, and runs just fine off of a CD. Just burn the WinVi directory to CD and you’re all set. WinVi loads quickly and gives you the power of vi. There is no command line version as far as I know, just a gui one that looks like notepad.

Another vi clone, Vim, has a windows version that will run from CD as well, but I prefer WinVi as it is much smaller.

Audacity is a wav editor and the only one I’ve used that is portable. I haven’t really used it, so I can’t say how useful it is or anything, but It’s on the CD I take with me to work.

I might use it at some point to record the calls I take. I got a little device from radio shack that lets me record calls, or play back sounds over the phone. Maybe someday I’ll get around to doing something like that.

Win32pad is one of those notepad on steroids applications. It’s pretty good, and a handy thing to have for editing things. Not really essential, but nice.

Win32pad is one of those applications I keep on my work cd because it is very small and I might decide to start using it at some point, but as of now, I pretty much never use it.

Ghostzilla is a neat idea. It’s the mozilla browser, hacked to look very inconspicuous. When you fire it up, it sizes itself to fit within your open applications, so that it looks like it’s a part of them. Once you move the mouse out of the ghostzilla window, it disappears (or so it’s supposed to). To display ghostzilla again, just do a secret mouse movement. All webpages can be rendered in various ways to make them unnoticable.

Ghostzilla runs off of a CD or thumbdrive, and will leave no files behind on your computer, and nothing in your registry if you don’w want it to. You have the option of saving your profile in a password encrypted file if you desire.

At first, ghostzila ran perfectly for me, but now, it doesn’t dissapear when I move my mouse away. I don’t know why this is. Ghostzilla is based on an older version of mozilla, so it is not as powerful as Portable Firefox. It does seem to run from a CD better than Portable Firefox.

There is also an extention for Firefox called Ghostfox, which makes firefox behave much like ghostzilla in that it will dissapear and reappear in the same way. Unfortunately, it does not change the appearance of web pages like ghostzilla does.

I don’t know why ghostzilla does not dissapear the way it is supposed to on my machine at work. I would recommend it, as it seems fine on my home machine. I can still hide it with an Autohotkey macro, but I prefer the mouse method.

Update: I have ghostzilla working well from a cd again. it seems that it does not like to be located in a directory called, ghostzilla. Strange…