Status of this blog

As you can probably tell since the last post, this blog has been on hiatus.  While I'm still active on portablefreeware, github, and portableapps, I've been having a number of problems with my Google account over the past few years and not keen to keep using their service.

I may continue where I left off, it's just something I'm evaluating.

Backpacking with a USB

A discussion of the value of USB drives for travelers, this one highlighting my own preference for 7zip as a compression and encryption program.

Journalism and PFW

The format I borrow from most closely when writing on PFW is journalism, specifically technical journalism.  That field isn't doing particularly well at the moment, but the lessons of journalists are still as useful as ever, helping draw attention to important projects by focusing on the audience.

How to Write a News Story

Portable and ... "quiet"?

So a post on the site actually has me re-thinking some of our terminology -- specifically around the term "stealth".  It's interesting simply because the term has been in use for so many years and now I wonder if it was the wrong one.  The idea pre-dates my work on the site, but it's something I'll consider.

Anyway here's the full post in case the site goes offline or the comment gets dumped ...

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Ultimately portable software is more broadly a response to behavior by good software on many platforms throwing information, settings and other garbage all over the computer.   (Android is maybe the worst at this but Windows is guilty too.)  Over time that wastes space, slows down the computer, and is a privacy concern because you're not in control of your own data.  That means unless you encrypt the *entire* hard drive, you can't be sure what someone who finds the drive will know about you.

By this reasoning, to call something "stealth" isn't about subterfuge — it's about not throwing junk all over the drive.  I'm actually wondering if we picked the wrong word; I thought about calling it "registry green" for a long time now, but I got stuck on the fact that it's about more than just the registry.

Generally speaking, being self-contained and keeping most changes to the local machine restricted to the local folder means *better* portability, which is why "stealth" or "registry green" status is ideal.  Programs are *less* portable when they write to the registry, AppData, ProgramData, C:\WINDOWS etc.

(Source)

Zap Kindle DRM

I don't necessarily want to add this program to the database, I just want to point out that it exists both to point out the futility of DRM and to encourage people to zap any "rights management" nonsense on their existing books.

ePUBee Kindle DRM Removal

While it's ideal that you just stop buying books from Amazon, this may be a potential alternative.

Website analysis tools

So let's say you work on a website for a decade and then type in that website plus "tags" into a search engine.

Well at least for us, a lot of site analysis tools come up.  There's a lot of data here that I wish I had insight on but maybe someone can find something useful in this mess:

• Webdeveloper resources I frankly don't understand cuz I"m not a webdeveloper anymore and I don't really keep up with this stuff.
• Norton says we're safe
• Lots of neat graphs that I'm not sure say anything.
• Sort of a copy of some of the others I've seen, evidently just grabbing various public data sources.

Micro-transaction ratings

I like this idea for how to accurately describe game revenue models.  I'd like to see something like this generated for freeware, though there's so many slightly different variants (if it only nags you once a month, is that really nagware?), I'm not sure if it would work.