Yes, I am on KDE binge right now. Well, this is one of those times that I actually decided to really immerse myself into something new. Because KDE is a desktop environment with a whole lot of apps going with it, I might as well try whatever they are, right? So I checked out the KDE applications available and KTimeTracker.

KTimeTracker

If you have a lot of work to do and you want to measure how productive you are, KTimeTracker might be a good tool to consider. You could add a bunch of tasks and subtasks. You only need to select which task to clock in or clock out of.

Other features:

• Configuration of the look and feel of the columns for the time tracker, defining what the columns should be available to the user.
• Configuring it for the PDA.
• What is the desktop’s idle time
• The minimum desktop active time
• How often should saving be

I think I will plan of using this to track my tasks one by one. It will help when I need to enter the data in a timesheet. And maybe there are ways to figure it out so that it will easily be included in a worksheet. Then that is going to be a whole lot better.

This a really cool app with a very straightforward function. And hopefully you will find it useful too. If you have other time tracking tools, whether it is KDE-based or not, maybe share them so we could also learn some nifty new things about these tools.

Thanks to Bruce Byfield, we have other OpenOffice.org extensions to check out. He has recommended a bunch of them on More OpenOffice.org Extensions. His list includes the following:

Last Session
If you want to automatically show the last set of files you worked with on OpenOffice.org this is a precious extension you’d like to have. You just need to make sure you save that last session so that you could load it the next time you run OpenOffice.org. You can’t save multiple sessions though but that should be ok. Check out Last Session here.
Tags for templates
This …read more

So I’ve been looking for the best blogging client out there. Because I’ve been on GNOME and OpenBox, I’ve ended up mainly trying the Gtk-based ones and some tools which are not primarily made for blogging but could be useful anyway. Drivel and Blogtk have been my main blogging clients. But both of them lack a feature which I’ve been looking for. That happens to be inserting images into the blog entry and then it getting published along with the blog entry without me having to upload it on the server by myself via FTP or something. That has always …read more

Looking for other software sometimes makes try out a whole lot of different things. In this case I saw Bilbo, a blogging tool in KDE and so I was intrigued. The thing is that I wanted to go beyond trying out Bilbo. I ended up downloading KDE. There’s a Kubuntu desktop package in the repository so I decided to get it. There’s nothing to lose by trying out KDE anyway,
This is my personal experiment: Would I like to use KDE on a regular basis more than I’ve ever liked OpenBox or GNOME? I know there were times in the past …read more

Albany Senior High School in Auckland, New Zealand has decided to go for an open source-based infrastructure. They started the school using this approach to technology. They chose to do something totally radical especially because Microsoft has a contract with the government, apparently. (An article about the school could also be seen here: NZ school ditches Microsoft, goes totally open source.) Interestingly enough they use Ubuntu on the desktop and Mandriva on the servers.
This is really cool news. And it proves that not everyone has to rely on Microsoft products and that students can start learning …read more

Everyone would benefit from learning something new. And in schools, students would benefit from being exposed to other operating systems aside from the usual Windows. And it’s not just a matter of operating systems but a matter of free and open source software too. The goal of the project is to help schools in evaluating Linux as a cost-effective choice for the purpose of educating students. Eventually, it could also be used by home users who are thinking of providing their children computers could also opt to choose Open SUSE, especially Open SUSE for Education.
There are …read more

If you’ve been frustrated with what you can do with OpenOffice.org, then you’re probably looking for more. And that’s what Go-oo can help you with. Go-oo is OpenOffice.org with much much more! It bundles some features which lets you work better with files made with Microsoft Office and WordPerfect too. How’s that for compatibility?
So let’s have a quick listing of what Go-oo offers us:

Better interoperability with Excel.
VBA support – just in case you do need it for certain things to improve your productivity and workflow.
Support for files made in MS Works.
Lotus Word Pro import – …read more

If you’re like me, you need a whole bunch of tools to help you remember a lot of things. For example, you want to know what files you worked. If you’re working on many documents every single day then you might forget what they are.
GNOME Activity Journal gets to track your files. I like the fact that you could see what you worked on in the morning, afternoon and/or evening. Whether they are documents, images or something else. If you read or edited text files, then you might see them grouped together under the category …read more

I was going over my feed reader when I saw a comparison of two email readers: Kmail and Evolution. KDE and GNOME users have it by default, respectively. I have primarily used Evolution from time to time and I liked the way that it lets me thread emails or well, read them unthreaded. Bruce Byfield’s comparison of the two email readers will let you see features that you might not have considered before or maybe features you have missed. As much as I like the look and feel of GNOME’s Evolution, the features he pointed out …read more

If you’re on GNOME and you are already thinking about the possible issues that you might encounter with GNOME 3. There’s a GNOME 3 Myths wiki you should check out before you start worrying. For example you are concerned about GNOME 2.x applications you are using, don’t worry. There will be some time before one can use GNOME 3 technologies. And as for the file manager, Nautilus will still be around. Things will be fine as there are changes so that there is an integration of Nautilus in GNOME3. I suppose that as the …read more