The programs available in the Suite (or separately) include: Firefox (web browser), Thunderbird (email client), OpenOffice (office suite), AbiWord (word processor), NVU (web editor), Sunbird (calendar & task list), FileZilla (FTP client), and Gaim (instant messenger). The whole Suite will fit on a 256 Mb drive. There is also a version without the OpenOffice (but including the stand alone word processor) that will fit on a 128 mb drive (which can be bought for $20 these days).

All of these programs have desktop (non-USB) versions, so you can work on your files at home, at work, or on the go. (One warning: Sunbird is still in alpha and so may not be the best choice for a desktop calendar program, but Portable Sunbird can import/export to Apple’s iCal or any other calendar program that uses the iCal standard .ics file format. Sunbird does not sync with Palm OS devices. Yet.)

This would be a great system for Mac users who are stuck using Windows computers every so often, too. No worries about whether or not Microsoft Office will read your Mac files, because OpenOffice has a Mac version that reads/writes exactly the same files as the Windows version. OpenOffice will read and save to Microsoft formats, too, and save to PDF and HTML.

The website is a little confusing, since it’s actually a TiddlyWiki itself. Find the DownloadSoftware tiddler for a blank TiddlyWiki file. The “empty” file does include a couple of entries of instructions. Just click on the links to change your title, subtitle, and basic settings. Then start making notes or “tiddlers”. The only rule is that your note titles must be have no spaces, for instance OnlineReserves instead of Online Reserves.
By assigning tags to each note, you can organize your notes into categories. For instance, I’m using a TiddlyWiki to, among other things, save text instructions for some of the basic library functions, like creating a library password and using online reserves. So one tag that I use is “instructions”. I have mine on a USB drive, so that I can edit it on any computer, but I back it up to my faculty web site, so that I can access the information from any computer. I can’t edit the web site, without saving the file back to the server, but I can view it whenever I need to. If you’re curious, the URL is http://home.southernct.edu/~hedreenr1/Tiddly.html (with a capital T).

If you don’t like the basic look, you can modify the CSS styling with by creating a tiddler called StyleSheet with a list of CSS formatting commands (background color, fonts, etc.) You’ll need to know basic CSS syntax. More information, with examples, is available on the TiddlyWiki site under CustomStyleSheet. You can also change the default tiddler to display when you first load the wiki, and the left side navigation bar.
Everytime I go to the site there is something new. Jeremy Rushton, a consulting technologist in the UK, is the creator behind TiddlyWiki and he is constantly fiddling and improving the site and the program.

Update (4/11/06): After using TiddlyWiki from my USB drive for a bit, I’ve noticed one awkward thing. When you save your file, TiddlyWiki saves a time/date stamped backup. After a while these get pretty numerous, so you should probably make a point of cleaning the old ones out every so often.

Just about every school, college, and university offers a free email account to any student. Many of them allow you to keep your email account after graduation. You receive at least one email account with any ISP account. There are also hundreds of free email services. So there is no excuse for not having an email account. You probably should have at least one main account, and a spare or two that you use for registering for accounts and services. By using several email accounts, you reduce the chance of getting spam and other unwanted email on your main account.

At least one of your email accounts should have a web interface. This way you can check your email at any web computer, and email things to yourself anytime you are online.

The collaboration aspects of email are obvious. However, you should remember the potential delay if you try decision-making by email. All it takes is one person not able to reach their email for a few hours to hold up the whole process. Having group-members in different time zones can exacerbate the delays. On the other hand, groups spanning multiple time zones can also take advantage of the “delay” by emailing projects in sequence. As the next person comes online, they can pick up the work, then pass it on to the next time zone. Email allows worldwide collaboration, without someone having to get up at 2 am for a conference call.

You can also use email to take notes. Send an email to yourself with the citation (author, title, etc.) of the book or article you are reading, and a link if it’s online, with a summary, facts, or quotes that you want to remember or use in your paper. If you use email that allows you to sort emails into folders, you can bring all the emails for a particular class or project into one folder. GoogleMail, Yahoo! Mail, Eudora, Thunderbird, Outlook, and Outlook Express all allow sorting, as do most email services and software these days. Thunderbird can even be used directly from a USB drive, allowing you to have the benefits of a desktop client (like offline reading/composing) and still be mobile.
Again, and this is probably the only “should” you’ll see in this site, you should have email to do online research.