How To Make Skype a Portable App

As yet, Skype doesn’t offer an official portable USB version of their software (with the exception of the U3 smart drive version) which frustrates a lot of people (including myself).   This has led people to make an unofficial hack of a portable version for themselves.

Read on to find out how to do it.   It’s extremely easy.

1.  The first step is to make the folder on your USB stick where it will all stay.   So call it whatever you want.  Let’s call it “Portable Skype” for example.   But you can give it whatever name you want.

2.  Now go to the installed Skype app on your computer (normally located at C:\Program Files\Skype) and look for a file called Skype.exe

Right-click and copy that file.   Do not move it anywhere.   Just right-click and copy.

3.  Now go to the “Portable Skype” folder and insert that copied “Skype.exe” file into the “Portable Skype” folder.

4.  In the “Portable Skype” folder, make a new sub-folder called data

5.  Inside the “data” folder, make a new text document using Notepad or something similar.   Name the file skype.bat

6.  Open this file up and insert the following line : skype.exe /datapath:”Data” /removable

7. Save and close the file.   That’s it.  You’re done.  You now have a portable version of Skype.

I tested this by moving the whole lot onto a USB stick and then launching it from there.   It launched immediately but the firewall asked me if I wanted to let it pass.   So you would need to configure the firewall of the computer you would be using the portable Skype on to allow the app through.

There is an interesting thread on PortableApps about what should be put on the skype.bat file.  If you want to fine-tune the file, you might want to read the thread.

This is just a “rough and ready” hack to put Skype on your USB stick and future releases of Skype may cause this hack to stop working.   I am hoping that Skype will eventually bring out an official portable version that works for ALL portable USB sticks, not just the U3.

How to search images with Google

Google lets you use four syntax elements to focus your image searches. All four are the same ones used in Google’s regular Web search . Keep in mind that because image searches are something of a crapshoot, you’ll probably have to fiddle with these syntax elements till you find exactly what you’re looking for.

Intitle can be a good way to hone searches because it looks for your keywords in Web page titles, which removes some of the guesswork for Google about what a page contains. Use it like this: intitle:"taj mahal".
Inurl works strangely in Google’s Image Search, because when Google records the text on a Web page, it considers certain elements—like JPG extensions—as part of the URL. Thus, if you search the image bank for inurl:poker, Google might show
you a picture from the URL www.dogsplayingcards.com/velvet.html because that
page contains a picture called poker.jpg.

That weirdness aside, inurl is like intitle in that it can whittle your results from thousands or tens of thousands of images down to a manageable number, like a few hundred.
Filetype is available as a choice in the Advanced Image Search, too, although you can use it to search only for the formats Google keeps track of—JPG, GIF, and PNG.
The one trick you’ve got with this operator that you don’t have on the Advanced Google Images
Image Search page is that you can specify filtetype:jpeg or filetype:jpg, which gives you different results (the advanced page includes only an option for JPG). Use it like this: "poker chips" filetype:jpg.
Site is also part of the Advanced Image Search, and you can use it to limit your searches to particular sites or domains, which include segments of the Web like .com and .net, and also countries, like .au (Australia) and .fr (France). The site syntax is especially handy when you want to restrict your results to images from Web sites from a certain country, like this: sitcom site:UK, which gives you pictures from British sites. And if you know that something you want to see is somewhere on one large site, use it like this: friends site:nbc.com.

Google Adsense Vs Adbrite

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.