Survival as a Geek

When you’re a geek like me and you’re forced to survive in the wild (outside of your room), you might not know what to do. Conversations can be awkward, and often lead to you striking up conversations about that shock video you saw last week online. But I find when I’m at school, surviving in the wild is much easier, because I’m surrounded by computers. The only problem is that its not MY computer. With this article, I aim to help you make any computer YOUR computer.

All you need is a USB flashdrive. I use a 1gig LG flash drive, but something as small as 128mb will do. First of all, go to Portable Apps and download the Portable App installer. Install the program onto your flashdrive. Once that’s done, you’ll want to start up the portable version of Firefox. This is where a majority of your survival kit will be going.

If you don’t already have one, head over to google and sign up for an account. With this account you’ll have access to Google mail (gmail), Calendar, docs, and many others. With this account, you get 6GB of online storage. And the best way to use that storage is a little Firefox plugin called GSpace. With GSpace, you can upload/download any file you want via Firefox. That means that if you’re finishing up a class and you’ve got some homework you need to finish up, you can upload the word doc, the images, the audio files, or whatever you need to Google and head home, download/complete the assignment and reupload for download at school. Now you might be saying that you can easily do this with a flash drive. This is true. But if you’re a graphic or web designer, you’ll have MASSIVE files that will very quickly fill up your flashdrive. But with Google + GSpace, you can fill up your 6GB with endless amounts of stuff.

This next one is setting your homepage to http://igoogle.com. Here you can find little widgets and dock them on the page. Personally, I’ve got Calendar, Gmail, and a few others docked so I can easily view my schedule, email, etc. Also remember to trick out your Firefox. Even though its portable, this version of Firefox can use plugins and themes just like the full version. The only difference is that Firefox auto-clears the browsing history when you remove the flashdrive (this reduces the amount of space needed to store Firefox).

Lastly, make use of the programs on Portable Apps. There are a ton of smaller versions of popular programs that you can use. There’s graphics editors, text editors, IM clients, and more. Also, you can easily add your own programs that will show up on the Portable Apps menu on the computer.