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When we think about USB sticks, we only think of it as storage of our valuable data. After all, USB flash storage is pretty much the best way to keep data conveniently at hand. What the average people might not know, however, is that it’s possible to install all sorts of apps on a thumb drive, meaning that you can use your USB stick as a mobile platform for your browser, email and instant message client, office suite and more. That means you can access these programs, settings intact, from any computer with a spare USB slot.


It’s all made possible by PortableApps.com, an open source platform for portable software. To get started with PortableApps, download whichever version of the portable suite suits your needs. Then run the installer, and choose to install to the root of your USB drive. In the future, if you want to add additional portable applications just download the app, then select “add a new app” from PortableApps’ options menu and browse to the .paf.exe file you downloaded.

Right now, there are portable versions of heavyweights like Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, as well as a whole ton of other, awesome programs.

Want Google to crawl your site faster? One of the fastest ways to make sure Google gets to those deeper pages of content in your site faster is to go ahead and use a Google Webmaster Tools.

For one thing, that's where you'll be able to submit a Google sitemap file. If you don't know what a sitemap file is, you might have just woken up from a 10,000 year old sleep, so, as a basic refresher, a sitemap file is typically an xml based file that contains listings of your page urls, along with a timestamp of when that file was created and last modified. This way, Google not only knows the page exists, but it will know when it was created, and also how frequently its updated.

Inside of Google Webmaster Tools, you'll also be able to set the crawl rate for your website. The crawl rate is basically how slow or fast the Googlebot requests pages from your site. Typically you can set it faster, but only for 90 days at a time, which should be good enough for Google to rip through your site and grab the content for indexing. If you have several million pages of content to get indexed, you should start off with several large sitemap files. The sitemap files should not exceed 50,000 urls or 10MB, so compress your files with gzip compression if they are larger then 10MB. Link directly to pages on your site that are several clicks away from the homepage, by doing that, you foce Google to take a look at that page, and the ones it's linking to.

Another method to get the deeper pages of your site indexed, would simply be to re-arrange your link structure, similar to what Amazon did, making the category pages link to sub-categories and even deeper pages in the heirarchy.

Back in the 1990s, you were an early adopter. You got yourself an Aol.com address or a Hotmail address. Or, you were issued an e-mail address when you signed up for your residential internet access, which you handed out to everyone as a badge of honor.

Times have changed, and that old address is a black hole for spam. You never check it, and you don't want to. But your stupid ISP, your stubborn family members and high school buddies insist on sending you important things there.

In other words, you are a slave to an e-mail address that you don't want or which makes you use an interface that sucks. You can't give it up because thousands of your close personal friends only know you as ClassOf92@aol.com or ILoveNKOTB@hotmail.com. A blind switch to a new e-mail address is out of the question -- you probably don't even know everyone who has the old one, and grandma wouldn't understand anyway.

Get a GMail Account

Get an account at real service like Gmail. Call yourself anything you want -- you won't be giving out this address.

Get a domain of your own. This is the best $10 you will ever spend. You probably won't be able to get the domain name you really want -- each one is unique, and all but the most obscure lastname.com and firstnamelastname.com combinations are already taken. Be creative (think vanity license plate) and you will probably get something close to what you want.

Once you've got a domain, set up your mail preferences so that every e-mail sent to the domain gets accepted. Otherwise, any incoming mail not sent to your master account will bounce. This is crucial for the next step of the process.

Note: Keep in mind that you will have to pay somebody to host this domain for you and handle your e-mail. Some hosting companies offer mail-only hosting for $5/month or less, but don't expect much in the way of prompt, personalized service at those prices. Alternatively, you can host your own mail server. And there are some domain hosters, like mydomain.com, which will let you manage mail for free.

Redirect the traffic

On your new domain hosting service, redirect your *@[yourdomain.com] to your Gmail account.
Tell everyone in your contact book your new e-mail address. Only about 5% of your friends will pay attention, and half of those will go to the trouble of updating your deets in their address book.
Give out different addresses as much as possible. So give wired@yourdomain to wired and put bc2008@yourdomain on your business card. That way when you start receiving spam, you'll know where they got your address from and you can block a single address without having to inform all your other contacts.
On your Hotmail/AOL/whatever account, forward all of your incoming mail to a unique name at your *@domain.com account. Forward your AOL mail to aol@[yourdomain.com]. Forward your Hotmail.com mail to hotmaill@[yourdomain.com], and so on.

Spread the word

Use the "Vacation reply" in Gmail (activate it in Gmail's Settings tab) to announce to each sender your new address. Make sure that new address is the unique name described above.
On your Gmail account, filter incoming mail so that the source of each of your incoming emails is recognizable. So, filter all mail addressed to hotmail@[yourdomain.com] so it shows up labeled as "Hotmail".
Tell each of these stragglers your new address.

Cut the ties

When the trickle of e-mail from an old account approaches zero, cancel the old account or connect it to an autoresponder telling the sender the address is no longer in use and directing them to your website.

Rumor has it over at TechCrunch that Apple is working on some type of search engine.

If you think about it, the idea is not so far-fetched: Apple’s Safari browser has 6-7% market share and currently uses Google exclusively as the search engine for both the standard and mobile versions on the iPhone and iPod. Through the maligned MobileMe, Apple has a suite of personal productivity tools that bring more traffic to them on a daily basis, which means there is a lot of searching going on without a lot of monetization on Apple’s part, according to Michael Arrington.

Plus, there’s the Android factor.

Google’s Android-y competition to the iPhone is not to be ignored. Arrington notes that Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who sits on Apple’s board of directors, usually sits out of discussions involving Apple’s mobile strategy.

Big hole in the theory, though: if, in fact, Apple were building a search engine, where are all the search expert and engineer hires? No one’s losing any bodies to Apple…yet.

Plus, Apple is on the receiving end of considerable fees from Google for search marketing money earned from Safari — and without an advertising business, too, Google would still be relied upon.

So it looks like there’s no full-scale search momentum going on at Apple — but for a company built around innovation and UI (and marketing), perhaps this is working toward a new interface built around search.

What do you think?