If you ever wanted to install WordPress on your flash drive, here are two tutorials that explain how to do it:

1) http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/usb/

2) http://ralph.fm/2007/03/08/how-to-install-wordpress-on-a-usb-stick/

Update: Once the local version of your blog is ready to go live, you can easily migrate it to your web server. Andrew Strojny’s tutorial, Convert A Local Wordpress XAMPP Installation Into A Live Site explains the steps involved.

I was looking for a guitar tuner this week and found this site: http://www.yellow-gold-soft.com/.

It has a Guitar Tuning Fork and several other music-related free software such as

• Tonometer to tune a variety of musical instruments
• Musical Examiner to train your musical ear
• Metronome
• And a little Flash-based Virtual Piano

Time to upgrade your development skills with a new language? Why not try Ruby On Rails? Here’s a complete and portable Rails development environment called InstantRails, although you might want to add an IDE (I used Aptana’s RadRails, but it’s not portable).

Instant Rails contains everything you need to start coding, including Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL. It even includes PHP, in case you want to learn that too!

I’ve been searching for a simple outline tool for writing and found this little gem, called TKOutline, which happens to be portable. This application is simple to use and is self-contained in a single exe file of 1.2 MB. It exports to text, HTML, OPML and XML.

It features the usual from outlining tools that can’t be found in a typical word processor, such as hiding levels, promoting/demoting and easily moving nodes up and down. This version of TKOutline doesn’t have an undo feature, though, so keep that in mind as you write your outline!

A useful portable app to have on your flash drive is the Unstoppable Copier.

From the author’s website:

Recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts were not recoverable in the end.

I finally decided to do something about all the bits of paper hanging around containing my user ids and passwords. On PortableApps.com, I tested out a really good utility for managing and storing your passwords called KeePass.

This small utility (1.27 MB) allows you to group all your user names and passwords by category so they are easy to find. A master password needs to be set for the whole database – don’t forget this password! This application has a lot of features and it even has a password generator. You can export your passwords to different file formats and import them from other sources such as a csv file.

Now, time to enter all those passwords…

Here’s a really good portable IRC app I tested over the weekend called Hydrairc. It’s only 2 MB, free and very easy to use!

I came across this application today that allows you to covert a Windows CHM file (help files and ebooks) to HTML: CHM Decoder

This little utility is useful if you like reading ebooks on your Palm or PocketPC as it takes the CHM file and converts it to a whole bunch of HTML files. It’s portable, very easy to use and only 510 KB!

Convert is a very handy conversion application for Windows that you can carry around on your flash drive. It’s also quite small at 548 KB!

It converts just about anything and if you find something missing, you can even add your own conversions.

I’ve been using ToDoList by AbstractSpoon for a couple of week’s now and already consider it to be an indispensable tool to manage my tasks. You can break down tasks into several levels of sub-tasks and also use it for time tracking. While it doesn’t have extensive reports, it does come with the ability to export to CSV, HTML, Text and XML so that you can make your own.

Each project has its own file but ToDoList has a multi-tabbed interface that allows you to open all your projects at the same time. For each task within a project, you can add notes (with rich text formatting).

A great portable organizer/time tracker at only 1.50 MB!