Remember that good ol’ Commodore 64 game, GhostBusters? Well, now there’s a remake of this retro game for PC – and it’s portable! The game is about 14 MB. It took me awhile to figure things out; the game isn’t that intuitive. One thing to keep in mind is that you have to keep your arrow key (or whatever control key you assigned for left/right/up/down) depressed and then press the action key near a flashing building in order to access that building. The Ghost Headquarters is at the bottom of the screen – this is where you can replenish your ghostbusters and empty your traps.

http://www.scottige.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=16.0

I was looking for a free text to speech software over the weekend so I could catch up on some reading and I found a really good one that is also portable! It’s called DSpeech and you can download it from here:

http://dimio.altervista.org/eng

DSpeech can use Window’s integrated voices but if you prefer to get something better, it will integrate with commercial voices as well. You can download a free PDF plug-in from the website to read your PDF ebooks. It also allows you to make your own MP3 (or WAV if you prefer) audio books.

It doesn’t integrate with OpenOffice, unfortunately – if you want to read a .doc file, the program requires you have Microsoft Word. This isn’t really a big deal though, as you can cut and paste your OpenOffice document into the reader’s window or save it as a text file or even convert it to PDF to be read with the free plug-in tool. It also lacks a bookmark feature, so if you are reading a large file, you’ll have to note where you left off.

All in all, it’s a great little software – completely portable, very small and free (but the author welcomes donations if you find the program useful)!

Having trouble tackling those New Year’s Resolutions? Me too. So I was reading up on methods for tackling procrastination and found out about Dash. It’s a little formula that looks like this: (10+2)*5 which means, work for 10 minutes, take a two minute break, repeat 5 times, then take a real break. I don’t know if this is effective for all types of work but it looks interesting and I thought I’d give it a try.

So how does all this relate to portable apps? Well, I found this nifty timer called InstantBoss, (Windows) it’s a timer that helps you schedule the Dash method and it’s portable! Plus it’s small – less than 300K. So, if you want to try out Dash, you can carry this timer around on your flash drive to use at work, home or wherever!

Good Luck!

A fun and addictive Star Wars game for the weekend from Minonsoft! Although it’s a little big at 33 MB, it’s a great game to add to your flash drive’s game collection if you can spare the space. Cool graphics and sounds, too!