Launch Applications, Bookmarks and more with Launchy

I cycle through favorite applications, and for a few weeks now the top runner has been Launchy. Whether you need to launch applications, Firefox bookmarks, music, video, photos or anything else, Launchy can do it. All you need to do is specify which directories it should index and the file types it should look for. Then, press Alt+Space (or whatever key combination you define) and up comes a dialog box for you to type what you are looking for. Launchy will try to give you suggestions to save you keystrokes. Launchy is also skinnable, so you can customize it to look however you please. And if you are into portable apps, you can even put it onto a USB drive. But my most favorite feature of Launchy is its ability to handle Firefox quick searches. I’m a fan of political cartoons, so if I want to find one about Iran, I just key in Alt+Space, polcartsearch Iran, Enter. It is amazing. Once you check out Launchy for yourself, you won’t turn back to the Start Menu.

No Outlook, No Blackberry, Just .txt

I’m not much of a fan of complicated things. I, for one, do not need ten copies of my information floating around in different devices. I set my limit at two or less. One local, one on a flash drive. I also do not like to open my organization program to enter a to-do and be barraged with messages and buttons that serve no purpose to me. This is why I log my to-do list using some downloadable scripts and a plain text file. This method is known as Todo.txt. I personally use the todo.sh script. You can find the download links on the page, and install it through plain text editing and Cygwin using the instructions provided. Then, you can carry your todo.txt file on your flash drive and access it from any computer, Internet access or not. For more information, read this Lifehacker post.

Play Flash Games from a USB Drive

It’s easy to save Flash web games to your USB flash drive for play without an Internet connection.

You will need:

• USB Flash Drive
• Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla Firefox Portable (for USB Drive)

1. Visit https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/201/ and download the DownThemAll extension for your home version of Firefox.
2. Navigate to the website where your Flash game is located.
3. Press Ctrl+U to call up the page’s HTML source.
4. Press Ctrl+F to call up the “Find” dialog. Type “.swf” (the extension for Flash files) and press Enter.
5. Scan through the document until you find the Flash file for the game (it should have the game’s name in its filename)
6. Copy the full URL of the Flash file.
7. In Firefox, navigate to Tools>DownThemAll>dTa! Manager.
8. Press “Add URL,” paste the Flash URL and select the Destination Path (your Flash drive).
9. Press Start.
10. Open your Flash drive and navigate to the Flash file.
11. Right-click and select “Open With.”
12. Browse to Firefox Portable, select it, and check “Always Use This Program…”
13. Now, your Flash files will always play in Firefox without having to connect to the Internet.

One last note: If you already have Firefox running on the computer when you try to access Firefox Portable, then you will receive an error message saying that an instance of Firefox is already running. This means exiting Firefox. If you don’t want to do this every time, just set .swf files to open in Internet Explorer. Use the instructions in Step 12.