Monday, December 3, 2007

Plugins for Pidgin and certifiably portable

Two plugins for pidgin that are both portable. Even though it seems obvious to me, maybe I should explain that they are as portable as the program that they were designed for.

Pidgin Off The Record(OTR).
Pidgin Encryption.

Pidgin OTR stores keys in the profile directory whereas Pidgin Encryption give you a choice to store them in the profile or elsewhere. PE also lets you choose the size(512-4096) of your keys as well. PE will of course automatically generate keys for accounts that already exist where as OTR requires manual generation. Both are good. Just a matter if you want AES or RSA as your means of encryption.


Pigin Encryption
Pidgin OTR

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Alternate shell from your USB

BlackBox is an alternate shell some of you have probably seen on Linux distros. But it has a port for windows. There are a few variants for Blackbox for windows(BB4W) as well. And best of all, they are to the best of my knowledge portable. Even though they are portable you have the option of full installation. It's fast, lightweight, minimalistic, and even though it was designed to be fast and not pretty you can have that too. If you don't like the styles that came with Blackbox or the flavor you downloaded you can always hit up BoxShots to see more or even make your own.

My Flavor of choice is BBLean, because I can drag and drop wallpapers to my desktop. Now I'm sure those of you who have tried running Blackbox from your USB or tested it without installing noticed there were some minor features you couldn't use without installing(or so you first thought). Ditto. Like how some icons never show up in the tray, I have a shortcut for you.

1.Three finger Salute Ctr+Alt+Del , This brings up task manager
2. Kill the Process Tree for Explorer.exe
3. From the task manager, start a new task:

[path-to-blackbox]\Blackbox.exe

4. Presto, you're running Blackbox without installing and your BlackBox tray now loads all icons.

With this you can have BBLean running portable.


BBLean
BlackBox for Windows
BlackBox Wiki @ Sourceforge