Portable Apps – The universe on a USB stick
USB pen drives have become cheap (8GB < INR 1000) for organizations to hand them out on occasions with company logos. I have 5-6 of these already. At the recent Google Developer day, Google handed out 2GB USB pen drives as goodies. I was trying to put it to good use by installing Bootable Linux on it. However, after several failed attempts to install Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex and boot using it, I gave up. The problem was incompatibility between my Thinkpad and the USB drives. Some combinations do not work for USB booting 
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I looked at portableapps site and decided to give it a spin. Portable Apps are applications that can completely run from portable devices and use it as a data store. This was a great help for me as I keep moving between machines fairly frequently. I downloaded the installer and installed the portable apps. The installer is small and you get most of the apps you would typically use. You can also download more apps from the portable apps website. It has a nice launcher (shown above) that appears in your system tray as soon as you plug in your drive.
The portable applications are currently open source software as they are easy to customize and unencumbered by proprietary licenses and restrictions for distribution. Next time you need to do a presentation and do not want to disconnect some else’s laptop, you can just use your USB drive to make that presentation. All the software you need will be right there. The website also has several simple games as well.
Next I downloaded Stellarium from Portable apps Gallery and installed Stellarium which is an open source planetarium application which simulates the night sky at any location on earth. Now I can run Stellarium from any machine when I go stargazing. Pretty cool huh ? 
. Picture 3 above (click to enlarge) shows how the sky will look (looking west) today night.