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Portable / USB Apps Links

Like a lot of people, I like to carry around a collection of apps on my thumb drive. But, sometimes I forget to bring it or don’t have an available USB port to work with. In any case, here’s a list of a few sites that have Portable Apps:

Tell me about others in the comments.

Averatec 3200 shuts down without warning

I had an Averatec 3250H1-01 that shutdown after a few minutes running. Sometimes it would last long enough to get into Windows & other times it would barely make through the BIOS self-test.

I immediately suspected a power supply/battery problem, since that was the original issue. But, after a little thought, I decided to see if the real problem was overheating. After pulling off the CPU cover & removing the heatsink, I was amazed to see that there was almost no heatsink compound left and what there was of it had become hardened & crusty.

After a little isopropyl alcohol & cotton swab action to clean off the old junk, some fresh ArcticSilver and I was back in business!

We sent you an email last year. Why didn't you read it?

A client of mine uses a catalog service from someone else. The catalog guys changed the format of the link slightly & sent out an email to all their customers at the end of last year. Apparently, my client didn’t see the email so, for the last 9 months, all of their customers have been going to the wrong catalog.

My client happens to notice something’s wrong and emails Customer (Dis)Service. Instead of simply replying with the correct link, Customer (Dis)Service responds with a slightly chastising “we sent you an email last year” and an unclear explanation of what the correct link should be. Not content with just confusing someone who’s not HTML literate, they implied that part of the link had been changed to include a customer code like “XXXX”, and then didn’t supply the code.

My gripe? Answer the customer’s question completely the first time and save everyone time and money! But more importantly, if you’re sharp enough to write an online catalog app you’ve got to be smart enough to write a one-liner that makes sure all your customers changed their links and another one-liner to email those that didn’t.

WordPress 2.2.2 – Default (Kubrick) theme sidebar is missing its closing tag

After a couple hours of trying to add content to the sidebar, I noticed the closing </div> tag was missing. I added the closing tag and, like magic, the content appeared. Good grief!