Portable Thunderbird

Now I can have all my emails, contacts, extensions, settings into one folder, all thanks to Portable Thunderbird. Easy to backup, just archive one folder and that's it. Did your harddrive crash, your laptop stolen? No problem, just unpack the archive and you're back in business.

You can find Portable Firefox on the same site, and the story is the same: all your bookmarks, extensions, settings in one folder on your 1GB USB pen drive...

8051 Programming is fun

I've completed the practical part of the microcontroller course at the University with a house alarm project. The objectives were to sense if the door or window was broken and to program how to arm the alarm. Feedback was given on a led display, input/output was done through the serial port.

Man it was exciting! The programming was done in assember, that was a pain in the... but the "firmware" was only 381 bytes long, I haven't tested a C program though.

All that matters is that I had allot of fun programming the 8051 microcontroller! School is fun. Ha!

Portable Gaim

While reading the Gaim Windows section I've found out about Portable Gaim (on the bottom of the page), it reminded me about the days when you had to reinstall Windows 95 every month and the less applications you had to reinstall the better.

"It is relatively easy to set up Gaim to run from a USB Drive. Most of Gaim is very good about not assuming that it is installed; a slightly customized launcher makes it all come together nicely."

Gaim has these features that make it indispensable:

• I can use the programmer's layout of the official romanian keyboard layout
• it can use a spellchecker (this doesn't work at this moment in the portable version)
  
• it can handle multiple instant messanging protocols
• it works on multiple operating systems
• you can carry it on your USB pen drive
  

I'm hoping for Gaim 2.0 as a Christmas gift.