For those of you out there who have been hankering for a decent free, open-source file renaming utility, I highly recommend that you give Métamorphose a shot. I've been using the v2 beta in XP and it's been excellent. It's written in Python and is also available for Linux, BSD and Macs.

There are a few minor UI bugs though, but I'm sure that they'll be sorted out in due course.

Hooray for FOSS!

I have been assiduously following the TV series "Agatha Christie's Poirot for many many years, and, largely speaking, have been a fan of both David Suchet and the adaption to television in general. While, it has been at least a decade since I read my last Poirot novel, I can probably claim with some degree of accuracy to have read all of Poirot's cases.

Today's Song of the Day is off the latest (better late than never) album by The Gunners - Chinese Democracy. I'm still listening to the album. But, in my first few listens, the song that has grabbed the attention of these ears of mine has been one the first singles off the album, titled Better.

Personal episode tracker for a few series that I'm watching now :)

• M*A*S*H [WP]
  • S01: 01 - 09
  • S02: 01 - 24 [Complete]
• Whose line is it anyway? [UK] [WP]
  • S01:
  • S02:
  • S03:
  • S04:
  • S05:
  • S06:10, 11
  • S07:
  • S08:
  • S09: 04

I just found out yesterday that Konqueror natively supports sFTP and another protocol which I wasn't aware of named FiSH. To use either, just enter sftp://foo@example.com or fish://foo@example.com as necessary in the Konqueror URL bar to create a connection. My fledgling experience with FiSH seems to indicate that it's considerably faster than sFTP.

My gmail account is also the catchall address for a couple of domains and usually clocks about 2000 - 3000 spam every day. In the aftermath of the McColo shutdown, this number is down to about 150 - 200.

Even if this is a temporary respite, it is still quite heartwarming.

SpamCop's statistical graphs are also a great indicator of spam frequency.

If you've run into the error message KDEInit could not launch '/usr/bin/ktorrent' on KDE 4, you are not alone. It appears that this is a KDE Bug that should be resolved in a bug-fix update in the near future. This also apparently affects other applications besides KTorrent.

In my case, when I clicked on a torrent file, the error message cropped up, but the file itself was open fine ...

In KDE 4.1, whenever you open a window, it invariably is never opened in a maximised state - something that annoys the crap out of me. While it's something of a chore, the following is how you can sort this out:

1. Open the application and right click on its title bar.
2. Select the advanced menu and move down to click special application settings.
3. In the ensuing pop-up, click on the geometry tab and tick both maximised horizontally and maximised vertically.

If you, like moi, just upgraded to Intrepid Ibex, and found that your VLC doesn't work any more, this here is the fix:

• Right click on an audio/video file and select properties.
• Click the edit icon (spanner) to get to the options page.
• Select VLC media player in the application list and click the edit button on the right.
• Select the application tab on the top and look for the command wxvlc on this page.
• Change wxvlc to just vlc. Click OK a few times to save the changes.

... and that's it.

Hope this helps :)

An excellent story on How to make money with free software has been doing the rounds today, and deservedly so. While I won't spoil the surprise for you here, I must say that I like the back better than the front :)