I do book-keeping for a couple of small organisations, each of which have a few employees. This financial year I started using payroll software provided by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC, the United Kingdom's tax collectors). It's called Basic PAYE Tools (BPT), and I'm pleased to say that a version is made available for those running Linux-based operating systems.

[Aside: I feel to a tiny extent responsible for the UK government no longer restricting services to users of...

I have quite a few Ubuntu installations in the wild, set up for friends and clients. I support them all -- well, those of them that require support -- using Gitso, which is a nice little front end to x11vnc and vncviewer, with connections tunnelled over ssh.

The only work that needs doing at the support end is to set one's router to forward port 5500 to the machine on which you'll be doing the remote support. Then it's just a case of running Gitso, switching the radio button to 'Give...

My school keeper friend Tony has discovered a stash of half a dozen Asus Eee PC 701 netbooks, apparently an unused donation to the school where he works. These are the original netbook, which we were all very excited about when it came out five years ago. I still have mine, currently running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and although my Android phone has replaced many of its functions, I still use it now and then when I need a rugged, portable machine with a keyboard.

These 701s are as they came...

I use KDE's Kate editor a lot. Recently, it has complained about opening some of my messy HTML files, giving the following slightly opaque error message:

I searched for a portion of this text using Startpage and found just one result, in a post to the kde-commits list, pertaining...

Today a friend asked me how to change keyboard shortcuts in Nautilus, Gnome's file browser. He had looked at System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts and found no way to tweak them there.

I dug around and discovered that Nautilus's shortcut configuration is stored in the text file ~/.gnome2/accels/nautilus

A comment in the header of that file describes it as "an automated accelerator map dump". Does that mean I can edit it and have the changes stick?...