Wibble Wobble Gwibber

It happens to us all in the end. "No there is no point in being on FaceBook, Twitter is pointless", you know the drill. You are certain you do not need these things in your life but you sign up just "to be in touch with so and so". Before you know it you have about 20 accounts and no idea which one to check when, and little inclination to do so as time is so in short supply. Gah!

I have recently discovered Gwibber. A simple little desktop application which does all that checking for you and shoves all the interesting titbits in one box. Gwibber reads all your incoming updates and shoves them into a single personal timeline, even colour coding the entries so you can tell them apart. Want to reply to something just hit the reply icon and it sends the reply to the right place without you even needing to know which service they are from. What more could a minimalist want I ask you? Struggling with your feeds, give it a go.

Bookmark Knots

I have bookmark knots in my life. I have a laptop, a new netbook, oh another laptop, a media server on my TV. Err, plus my bookmarks are different on every single one of them. In fact I have given up cause I could never find the right one and deleted them from all but my day-to-day machine.

Gaining a new netbook has brought a new urgency to solving this problem. I want to be able to take my netbook away to conferences and yet I need that to be a workable environment. Bookmarks are key to my finding anything it seems, so I need to get those synchronised on both these boxes. As I am already owned by Google I started out evaluating the google task bar. It looks ok I guess but it adds a taskbar which on a netbook is like stealing half the screen, it also does not have sidebar support. On my netbook I have taken to removing all the taskbars and using the bookmarks side bar instead to gain some space, so whatever I found really needed to support those.

Enter GMarks. This Firefox extension basically replicates the Bookmarks menu and sidebar but synchronised with google bookmarks. It even seems to support a toolbar though I have yet to find out how one gets that to display. So far so good. I will let you know how I get on with it.

Hamster Wheels

Ever wondered just how much time you are spending on things at work? Constantly forgetting what you are working on, finishing the week with no idea what you contributed? Certainly that is my experience. I have been looking for some tool which would quietly remind me to record what I was doing. I think I might just have found it. Hamster.


The hamster applet sits quietly on my gnome menubar, showing what I am working on and how long I have been at it. A quick click and I can change activity. Once you have your tasks recorded you can then categorise them. For example I am interested in how much of my time is spent on Development tasks and how much on Maintenance. Needless to say it produces pretty bar charts for review. Overall an interesting app.