I’m Portable!

Thanks to PortableApps, I can now take my most useful and favorite piece of software, Firefox, with me to teach on my flash drive.

I have always been frustrated with the Windoze machines in our classrooms. First, they’re Windoze machines. Secondly, and more importantly, they never have Firefox installed, so I and my students are required to use IE. Big deal, you say. Well, I’ve gotten used to tabbed browsing, and once you do, there’s no going back to the to the design disaster that is IE.

With PortableApps, I can now take Firefox with me on my flash drive, including all the plug-ins I’ve grown accustomed to, like Greasemonkey, Google Browser Sync, and Word Count. With the cool launcher they have in their bundled suite, using these portable programs is a pleasure. I’ve been waiting for something like this for a while.

Oh, and PortableApps is not limited to Firefox. They have many useful pieces of software, from SSH clients to OpenOffice. Cool. Thanks, PortableApps.

Windows Sucks

Via BoingBoing: An overwhelming number of web users agree: Microsoft Windows sucks, according to the Operating System Sucks-Rules-o-Meter. Thank goodness there is now scientific proof of what I have long suspected. I wonder just how many of my previous blog posts have added to the results? Well, majority rules, I guess.

Choice

Tired of giving M$ all your money for a productivity suite? Well, contrary to what you might think, you do have a choice. Try AbiWord, a beautiful free alternative to Word, or OpenOffice, a free office solution. Both read and write popular formats, so you won’t be living on a computing island all by yourself. As far as alternative operating systems, any flavor of Linux or BSD is a good choice — especially for a server, or there’s always my favorite, Apple‘s Mac OS X.