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!

Spacejock Software offers a whole bunch of free software that can be run from your flash drive when you download and install the separate Pendrive Runtimes. An explanation of how to install the apps to your flash drive can be found in the site’s download section.

So what kind of apps can you find here? A very wide variety! A Launcher, ebook reader, text to speech player, MP3 player, timer, book maker, reminder program, tracker for lent items and a novel writing app to help you write a novel. And that’s just a partial list of the applications available! For a complete list, visit Spacejock.

Need to make more room on your flash drive for all those portable games? Most portable app collections are 80 MB and more but this little collection, called Floppy Office, could fit on a floppy disk (remember those?)! Well, if they are zipped, that is. Once all the apps are unzipped, the size is just over 2.5 MB – still incredibly small!

Here is a list of apps taken from the readme file:

KPad (kPad.zip) – A simple MDI Rich Text editor
(replaces Wordpad)

NPopUK (nPOPuk.exe) – A complete POP3 email client
(almost replaces Outlook Express)

Ted (tnp503le_uni.zip) – An unbelievably full featured notepad replacement which
supports unicode.(completely replaces notepad, and then some)

EVE (eve.zip)- A vector editor graphics program which can serve as a flow chart tool
(replaces MS Paint, even though Paint is a bitmap editor…)

iFtp (iftp-win32-v199.zip)- A simple FTP client
(replaces WSFTP)

110k Zipper (100ziper.exe) – A small zip/unzip utility
(almost replaces Winzip)

PDF Producer (PDFproducerExe.zip) – A simple text-PDF conversion application
(almost replaces PDF printer driver)

Spread32 (spread32.zip) – A full-featured spreasheet program.
Version 19991112 Beta is the last free one. (almost replaces MS Excel)

MemPad (mempad.zip) – keeps little tree sytle notes with a handy index.
(handy rudimentary outliner)

RenameFiles (renamefiles_v2.42_us.zip) – a handy program for
renaming multiple files in a single step

Plus:

dsCrypt (dscrypt.exe) – An AES/Rijndael file encryption software

X-Pass (xpass.zip) – X-Pass reveals all system password fields

dsDEL (dsdel.exe) – dsDEL is a secure file deletion utility

TinyWeb Server (tinyweb.zip) – Complete web server, WWW supports MIME file typing, CGI, common log format, and multi-hosting

TinyBox (tinybox.zip) – A graphical user interface for TinyWeb Server!

Here is a really interesting graphics app I found while browsing the list of portable apps on the Loose Wire blog. It’s an amazing 3D modeling and animation program called Anim8or. The program is self-contained in a single exe file and is incredibly small – under 2 MB – and it’s free! The site has a bunch of tutorials to get you started and an impressive gallery. After you’ve made some 3D pictures, you can even make some animated movies – there are also some user submitted samples of these on the site.

So if you’ve ever wanted to to try your hand at 3d modeling or wanted to make your own animations – this little portable program is a great place to start!

LifeHacker mentioned an awesome bare bones word processor recently for retro freaks called JDarkRoom. This java-based writer is a full screen text writer with no extra frills that could distract you from your writing obligations.

I thought I’d write this post with it; it sure brings back memories! A completely black screen with green text – no windows, menu bars or pop-up windows. Personally, I find it’s a wonderful tool to work with because it forces me to concentrate on content as opposed to wasting time formatting text and other things we do with our word processors when we can’t seem to get those juices flowing, like play with fonts and text colours. I also happen to prefer green (or amber) text on black backgrounds and usually change my word-processors to these colour-schemes.

Documents are saved as text files which you can then open in your usual word processor for formatting, spell checking and whatever else. Switching to your OS while writing is easily done, at least in Windows, with the ALT-TAB keys.

Since JDarkRoom is written in Java, it’s portable on a flash drive as long as the computer you plug into has the Java run-time. And at only 105 KB, it’s a great space saver for those with smaller drives.