Hamster is a very handy time tracking tool for Gnome. It is an applet which lives in the Gnome panel which is great as it is always readily available. You can switch tasks and projects effortlessly, add tags to tasks, see pretty graphs and print out time sheets for your boss or clients.

By default, Gnome does not provide a print option in the right-click menu of the file browser. Luckily it is very easy to add more functions to this menu.

I run Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 on my Acer Aspire One netbook. A couple of days ago my SSD drive died and until the replacement drive arrives I would like to continue using the netbook, running the operating system directly from a USB stick.

I was very excited to learn that the developers of the VLC player are working on a cross platform non-linear video editor. I spent some time getting it to compile and made a script that will install it automatically.

The radio in my car has the strange habit of ordering the mp3 files on my USB stick by the timestamp of the files. This can give very unpredictable results, many albums play back in a seemingly random order. It would of course be much more logical if the radio would follow the track order given in the ID3 tags, or even simply order the files alphabetically as the filenames are often prefixed with the track numbers. I wonder at the logic behind this design decision.

I made a small BASH script that updates the timestamps in alphabetical order. This fixes the playback order.

There are two different versions of the unace package on Ubuntu. The standard version is fully open source but dates from 1999 and can not unpack recent ace archives.