________________________

[This project has been discontinued due to license compliance issues. Thanks everyone who assisted with your ideas and feedback.]

About

  • What is this? - this was a project dedicated to building an up-to-date collection of great, free portable software for easy installation and use.
  • What's in it? - list of included freeware
Releases
  • v. 1.3 beta - note that this release is over a year old and contains very out-of-date software. I haven't worked out how to solve licensing issues. Download

NEWS

Monday, March 30, 2009

Portablefreeware contribution

Updated all these programs in my own collection and sent them on to the good folks over at portablefreeware.com.

The process continues.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Torrent now available

By popular request, a torrent is now available for the latest version (thanks Wes). Should offer at minimum between 30 and 50 k/sec download speeds.

If you already have a copy, please seed!

Thursday, March 26, 2009

QJot fix

QJot is the Kitchen Sink's WordPad replacement, but the text by default looks nothing like WordPad -- who's text size I sort of like. Here's how to change it:
  1. Go into the "qjot" directory inside the Kitchen Sink archive
  2. Edit QJot.ini using any text editor (including one of several in the archive)
  3. Change "FontSize=8" to "FontSize=10". If you have a high monitor resolution, you may want to increase this to 12 or even 14.
  4. For a more text editor look, you can change "FontName=Arial" to "FontName=Courier New"
Future releases will have the font size set to 10.

Note that I set up CAFE to open "docpad" files using this program. So if you name a file with a ".docpad" ending, it will automatically come up in QJot. Other files, for compatibility, come up in OpenOffice.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Latest version is out!

Here's the latest-and-greatest: kitchensink-0.9.8.7. Instructions are here. Torrent should be available sometime today or tomorrow.

Notes:
This is a maintenance release over the previous version. The reason its so much smaller is that OpenOffice has cut down on the space their most recent release takes up and I replaced GNUCash, which takes up 100 megs, with something much smaller. I had no idea until I compressed the archive overnight.

Please give me feedback and enjoy!

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Delays, delays

The current release is all set but I'm having some kind of mysterious error.  I apologize to those of you that have been waiting on this.  The breakdown:
  • OpenOffice works fully.
  • The autorun feature either doesn't work or doesn't work under VMware.
  • The compressed archive takes up HALF the space of the previous one.  Since they both used similar compression levels, I'm looking into if something got deleted.  This is going to take time to iron out.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Programs added, subtracted, and updated

Added
  • Everything is a terrific search tool that I added almost immediately to the archive. Anything faster than LookDisk is very welcome. More info on this program soon, as well as some customizations I figured out.
Subtracted
  • Threw out the MLA generator. Programs like Zotero have killed any need for this.
  • Replaced GNUCash with Money Manager Ex. Both programs are fully GPL'd and Money Manager is a little cleaner. I'm still not sure which I prefer but I decided space and fewer files was an advantage so I swapped.
  • DeepBurner - didn't seem to work as well as other programs and certainly less updated.
Updated
  • 7-zip
  • SMPlayer
  • xpass
  • Bonkenc (NOT the portableapps.com version)
  • Toucan

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Get e-mail release notices

New announcement-only email list for people that just want to know when the next version comes out. (Basically trying to make sure discussion list members aren't getting a lot of useless inbox clutter.)

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Release delay: waiting for torrent

Help! If you run ANYTHING except 32-bit WinXP (64bit XP, Vista, 2K, WINE, ReactOS, etc.), please join the mailing list. I need people to test stuff.

So I've found someone to seed the torrent file so that will happen this weekend. Looking forward to getting the maintenance release posted. Its contents:
  1. Brought up to speed with current stuff on portablefreeware.com
  2. Fixed (I think) startkitchensink.exe path problem (thanks to m^(2)) as well as extras.exe so that Hotkeyz starts up minimized.
  3. Fixed the autorun.inf file
  4. Some minor internal issues, a few more language files deleted.
  5. Minor cafe.ini file fixes
  6. Figured out new Hotkeyz version out, even before PFW so I included that.
  7. Filezilla extras files cleanup
  8. Reinstalled Abiword, which was acting oddly, as well as PeerGuardian
  9. Pulled out PortBlocker -- my initial tests on it were very positive but I just don't think anyone will use it. Its also not very portable and very old.
Mostly this time has been spent testing out the program on a fresh copy of Windows. This will be the process before release from now on due to the lengthy problems with OpenOffice caused by my OS. Also need to find someone with Win2K and Vista to test them.

Monday, March 2, 2009

OpenOffice issue resolved -- updated version March 7th

The system that I run as a testbed for is a VMware image so it didn't take much effort to start up a previous version and find out that there's something in my test image that's causing problems.

I still don't know what's wrong but I know how to fix it. Further testing will have to be done but unfortunately I'm doing this all at the same time that I'm trying to find a job so things aren't moving quickly. A full update should be posted soon and will be downloadable in 10 mb chunks. I can't find anyone to host the torrent.

If you can, please message me.

Also, m^(2) has come through big time with a whole bunch of great suggestions. This project belongs to him as well.