More Portable Freeware

Sunday, February 5, 2017

USB drive won't stop being "read-only"

Want to note about a trick that really helped me unlock one of my drives that was mysteriously set to read-only. Note that this uses the command-line "diskpart" tool.

Why open source software is important

I wonder how much development time has been spent since the dawn of computers that is just sitting in a closet somewhere? How many great programs, graphics, interfaces, and ideas have been written for computer users that for some odd legal reason never saw the light of day? An open web ensures that software doesn't die; once its out there and once the code is available, it becomes part of the community of effort that lasts well beyond any one person.

Related quote:

"That's one of the things that Ellison, and Microsoft for that matter, don't get. You can't kill open-source projects. Companies come and go, but popular open-source programs like MySQL just keep rolling on." - Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on Oracle and MySQL.

[When] are you moving to 64-bit?

This is a conversation I always wanted to respond to but I sort of missed my window. As such, I decided to post here:

But that was about 3 years ago IIRC, so I'm curious about the reason(s) that make you stay in the 32-bit land as it's obvious that you'll have to struggle more and more against the flow? (source)

In fairness, there are still millions of perfectly good, plenty fast machines still in the 32-bit instruction set.

That said, I'm a bit of an outlier. I'm running a 64-bit Mac with Windows in a 32-bit VM and I could conceivably switch or run a 64bit system right alongside the 32-bit (although that would be a bit of a pain). The reason I'm keeping it at 32-bit in order to maintain compatibility with the many great programs we host here on the site that may or may not agree with a 64 bit API/handles and whatever compatibility layer Microsoft and Intel have tried to include. I lost a few good programs when I bumped up from WinXP so I'm just dragging my heels.

With Linux, Google, and Apple, it's easy to recompile popular programs with minor modification because either the source code is open or owned by them. However freeware projects that have been abandoned are out of luck. I constantly see this happen in the Apple space, which is why I barely use my Mac.

Inevitably I'm going to have to move to 64-bit, especially as more and more development work is done to embrace available speed optimizations. If that sounds silly, there are very few programs I've seen that embrace hyper-threading / SMP and those systems have been around for at least 20 years.

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Update: on a related note, a privacy-based Linux distro is dropping 32-bit support. When small projects move to 64-bit when their charter is around ease and accessibility, that's a good indicator.

Portable automation tools

We don't quite have a category for it, but these are some portable automation tools:

Pulover's Macro Creator

AutoHotkey

Mouse Recorder Premium

TyperTask (my fav)

Friday, January 20, 2017

The scale of portable

When we're talking about portability, we're not just talking about "can it run from a USB drive"? We're talking about whatever settings you change, they stay with the program, regardless of the medium it's launched from (USB, DropBox, OneDrive, etc.) Re-running a process or re-changing a setting on each computer is not portable.

Most programs work on a scale from very portable to not portable at all:

Command-line tools are very rarely anything BUT portable so we don't spend much time on them
Writes unimportant data to C:\Users\USER\AppData\, but for example just a recent file list. This is one that falls on the line and may be acceptable to some users.
Runs outside of Program Files folder and without dependencies, but but doesn't write settings to the local folder. This is considered "no-install" but is not portable.
Windows Explorer integration by it's very nature isn't portable. Registry entries don't transfer from computer to computer. You would have to run this process every time you launched the program and it leaves behind junk each time you do so.
Program requirements like DotNET 4.0, which mean that functionality on older computers (like WinXP) isn't a sure thing.

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Adobe fail

It would be very good for my career if I really sat down and took the time to learn the Adobe line of products. One thing that keeps stopping me is the remarkably poor performance of their showcase products (like Adobe Acrobat):

I can think of worse ways to word this, but it's pretty bad.

Transfer files via webcam

I've been digging for a way to work with QR codes on Windows and, in this process, found, a novel way to transfer files from your desktop to Android.

Some items on the list to check for portability: