This site is dedicated to fan fiction, the genre where the author sets the story in an established universe. An example of this is A Different Point of View, a serialised audiobook from the viewpoint of a Star Wars stormtrooper.
This is a contested issue from time to time because of the copyright issues, but here we have Broken Sea, a site apparently dedicated to a wide range of fan fiction.
I have not listened to all of it, for several reasons. First, there is an insane amount of audio, they have really been hugely productive. But also, the authors set some of the stories on the background of shows I have never heard of. An example is Logan’s Run, a show a lot people have said good things about, but I have no idea…
What I can say is that I have listened to the Dr. Who show, and that is very well done. While I only really got into the Tom Baker version of the Doctor, I liked the show, and this audio show certainly fits well in that atmosphere.
Another show I caught was Gaia, a show set in the Star Trek universe. Of course, one would expect to find Trekkies on a site like this… the show is well-written and well-performed, and I find that the characters are quite balanced and interestingly diverse. Gaia is a zoo ship working as a sort of ark to prevent ecological disaster wiping out the Earth species, a situation the Earth has recently been recovering from.
While I have not had time to listen to the others yet, I noted Battlestar Galactica, X-files, Twilight Zone and Planet of the Apes. Already with this list – about half of the shows – I would have enough audio to last me for a very long time,  even if I took a break from podcasts.

I started listening to audiobooks when I had a dog. This may seem a curious result, but our dog Pushkin (every literary reference intended) got me walking ten miles a day, and it gets old… at the time I was listening to podcasts like Lugradio and Linux Reality, and Chess Griffin did a Linux Reality episode where he mentioned podiobooks – serialized audiobooks.. I listened to a couple of them – 7th Son by J. C. Hutchins and the outstanding and extremely creepy sci-fi horror story Crescent by Phil Rossi – and have been doing it ever since.
When I was a teenager, I briefly looked into audiobooks and… hated them. At the time, I was entirely unable to deal with the fact that they ran at a pace different from my reading speed. Also, I suspect that this was because the people reading the audiobooks were talking… very… slowly… and… without… variation…
So that wasn’t a winner.. But it has changed. Partly because a book like Crescent has good effects and a narrative style that will keep my attention.

I get the impression that people are getting more into it, along with the popularity of podcasts. I actually see audiobook CDs in the stores nowadays, a sure sign of the time. I suspect this is partially because nearly everyone has an audio player available these days. Even a fairly cheap phone like my Elm has a decent MP3 player and 2 Gigs of storage built in.

But where to start? Well, I have a solid selection. I’ll show you.

Detective stories

From the thriller-plus-entertainment department: Black Jack Justice is a classic hard-boiled, banter-centric series of episodes, where each episode is a finished story.
Jack and his girl detective sidekick Trixie Dixon and a gallery of entertainingly stereotypical characters work their way their way through their cases, aided and obstructed by cops and crooks alike. If you are into old sleuth movies, you will want to listen to these.
Also, they are a good introduction to audiobooks, because they are finished segments, well-read and with good effects.

Though other themes are involved here – but genre mix is probably the case with independent publication more often than mainstream -  Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword is another detective novel set in Chicago in the thirties. Billibub is a dwarf warrior magically transported from his own Tolkien-style universe, ending up in Chicago. After getting his bearings, he starts his own detective agency. The story is a curious mash-up of Billibub’s reflections mixed in with experience from his old world – as in battle axes and elvish ladies – but Tee Morris also manages to wrangle a real detective novel out of it.
The story is published as a podiobook, i.e. a series of recorded chapters.

Sci-Fi and variations

Jake Bible’s Dead Mech is a potent action-packed sci-fi horror novel. The population has been decimated by a zombie infestation. As a result, soldiers go out in giant mechs to fight the zombies, and with good results; however, when a pilot dies in his mech, you suddenly have a zombie mech… and that’s a different story.
If you can’t stand blood and gore, don’t consider this one. If you don’t mind and can take the soldier jargon, this one is for you. You certainly won’t be bored.

It is hard to get around published and bestselling Scott Sigler (more of him in this article) when talking about audio- and particularly Podiobooks. I would actually recommend listening to all of it, but a good place to start is Earthcore. He is tough and talented.

One of the most well-known and appreciated audiobooks ever must be the 7th Son books by J. C. Hutchins. After the assassination of the US president, a group of people with very different backgrounds are captured and brought together, and it is revealed to them that they are actually clones – that their childhood memories are not actually their own, but belonging to the original person, John Alpha, from whom they are cloned – and who has now gone rogue. He is behind the murder of the president and with plans for considerably worse acts.

Action/Thriller

Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff won a Parsec Award – the award of excellence in the field of audiobooks/Podiobooks – for his high-paced thriller Number One with a Bullet. In this story, retired hitman Johnny Dane is drawn into a contest setting the world’s best assassins against each other with a group of very wealthy men betting on the outcome.
Nemcoff tells the story with great voices and ever-changing pace.

In his podiobook 65 Below, Basil Sands takes us to Alaska. Retired Marine Marcus Orlando Johnson is confronted with a complex plot for a terrorist plan to unleash an extremely potent biological weapon.
A well-told story with good characters. While this is my favorite Basil Sands book, consider also listening to his Faithful Warrior.

Horror

I have to say, I would never have expected an audiobook to be scary. I also have to say that Crescent by Phil Rossi had my skin crawling. I often listen to these books while doing something else, but this one had me stopping to listen. The story takes place on Crescent Station. This is a story in space, but there are bad things even there, lurking in the night, wanting to chew on your flesh…
There are good… as in effective… effects in this story. Don’t listen to this if you have a heart condition, but if you like a good horror story, go for this one.

Steampunk

Only one recommendation for this category, but a strong one. The Gearheart by Alex White introduces the Seekers, a mysterious order merging mechanics and magic. There is spying and deceit, there are mechanical beings, there are intricate mechanical devices kept running by magical glyphs signed by magician mechanics. Very pure steampunk. Certain things – particularly the order of the Seekers – reminded me of the universe portrayed in the incredibly immersive (and addictive, if it is your thing) video game series Thief.
It is worth taking a look at the interview with Alex White at The Traveler’s Steampunk Blog. He has done the voices – an impressive array of distinctive voices – with his wife, and he has composed and played the featured music himself.
Note that there is also a sequel, Maiden Flight of the Avenger; I recommend listening to The Gearheart first.

Fan fiction

A new addition to the original article, I would like to mention Broken Sea.
This site is dedicated to fan fiction, the genre where the author sets the story in an established universe. An example of this is A Different Point of View, a serialised audiobook from the viewpoint of a Star Wars stormtrooper.
This is a contested issue from time to time because of the copyright issues, but here we have Broken Sea, a site apparently dedicated to a wide range of fan fiction.
I have not listened to all of it, for several reasons. First, there is an insane amount of audio, they have really been hugely productive. But also, the authors set some of the stories on the background of shows I have never heard of. An example is Logan’s Run, a show a lot people have said good things about, but I have no idea…
What I can say is that I have listened to the Dr. Who show, and that is very well done. While I only really got into the Tom Baker version of the Doctor, I liked the show, and this audio show certainly fits well in that atmosphere.
Another show I caught was Gaia, a show set in the Star Trek universe. Of course, one would expect to find Trekkies on a site like this… the show is well-written and well-performed, and I find that the characters are quite balanced and interestingly diverse. Gaia is a zoo ship working as a sort of ark to prevent ecological disaster wiping out the Earth species, a situation the Earth has recently been recovering from.
While I have not had time to listen to the others yet, I noted Battlestar Galactica, X-files, Twilight Zone and Planet of the Apes. Already with this list – about half of the shows – I would have enough audio to last me for a very long time,  even if I took a break from podcasts.
I will update this section when I have listened to more of the shows.

I should not neglect to say: These deeply talented people have made these stories available to us. Consider giving them a contribution. Most of them have versions of their works for sale, sometimes in print, sometimes ebooks, sometimes higher-quality recordings.

First, Jono’s statement:

• Respect is not judging people based upon their genetic or social attributes, but instead the quality and content of their discourse.
• Respect is not just civility in communication, but also respecting other people for making their own choices, even if you disagree with them.
• Respect is sharing opinions so a mutual understanding of principles is understood, but then giving others the freedom to pursue their own paths without fear of persecution by those who have made different decisions or have different definitions of freedom and openness.
• Respect is engaging in honest, open and polite debate with the goal of enriching each others perspectives, not for the purpose of proving each wrong.
• Respect is understanding that others often pour their heart and souls into their work, and being sensitive of this emotional connection to their work, particularly in times of critique

Source: OpenRespect.org

Now, the issue he is addressing here and in a previous blog post is as old as debate itself, but is perhaps – probably – aggravated by the internet troll mentality, the online literary equivalent of road rage; some issues simply inflame people. Many reasons for this, and I could discuss that as well and get flamed to a crisp.
Part of what makes this particular initiative problematic is that respect is actually ambiguous, as is made clear in the responses to his blogpost. An example of this is a comment by Fab, known by listeners of the Linux Outlaws podcast; Fab comments that in his view, respect is something you earn. And I dare say that when Jono uses the term, he talks about respectful behavior in the sense of politeness. What he does not address is the fact that people who do not have a civil tone in a debate, online or personally, simply do not respect the person they talk to. As in, they feel a personal disrespect for the person they are debating with.

Frankly, I hear a lot of voices on the net – people I simply do not have any respect for. People I think are wrong in their interpretations, naïve in their views and repulsive in their morals. But what is that to me? It is, of course, the dilemma of a gentleman that one of the most uncivilized things to do is telling people they are impolite.

When there is a debate, criticizing people has nothing to do with respect, and I find it clutters things to bring that up. I write this piece to say that Jono is going about this the wrong way – partly because I believe such an initiative is futile, whatever the intentions, partly because I find his choice of title unfortunate – but at the same time, I have a personal respect for Jono for the work with Lugradio and for doing his Severed Fifth project to draw some conclusions about the strength of Creative Commons and the community around his music. And so, a critique would be the decent thing to do, because that is part of the debate.

It is, of course, a question of basic decency. It is a question of addressing a debate in a civilized fashion. I would want to do so to people I hold in great esteem, and I would want to do so with people in whom I find little to respect. In the end, it is a question of respect – for yourself. And one would do well to consider when a debate is actually needed; often enough, these debates can look like the unstoppable heading towards the immovable with no sort of agreement on the horizon except, in the very best of cases, agreeing to disagree.

And why do I find the futile? Consider a sign beside a trashcan saying “Please put trash in the trashcan”. My old workplace was always cluttered with such signs until I tore them all down. Those who will be civilized about it will be civilized about it – is a sign going to make any difference to the others? I feel that Jono has made a digital signpost trying to ask people not to be unpleasant. The results are predictable.

The Kimai project originated from Germany, which is also evident in some of the default values you encounter along the way – but to comment on first glance: You are asked whether you prefer an installation in English or in German.

There are several aspects of time tracking. On one hand, there is measuring the time – how much time has been spent on what; second, there is how much time it has taken to work on a specific task, perhaps as part of a larger project. Maybe there are more people we need to track, but they still may work on the same project. And maybe this is one of several projects associated with a client we would like to wrest some money out of.
Kimai is a web client allowing individual users to log in. You select a customer and a project – and a task to track time for.

There are two ways of doing this.
One way is to simply use this as a notepad for time you have already registered – and a calculator to report on how much has been registered so you know how much to squeeze the client for.
The other is to push the huge green button on the interface – and it will start a stop watch. Now, doing that like this is clever; it is tied to a web-based system. That means that if you need to use another computer to do this work – or the copier, fax, scanner or hangglider – the clock will keep ticking, and once you come back, you can log in and stop the clock. It will register the hours you have spent on the task. This also means that if you have to do client services while on vacation by the hot, sandy beach, you can still go to your local internet café, log in, start your timer, help out your client, quit it – and your home accountant can log in to collect the cash from the client, and your colleagues can log in to see what has been done on the job.

Now, your home accountant doesn’t have to go that far to collect, because Kimai will create a timetrack report, and even an invoice for the client. Kimai doesn’t really do accounting, so it is simply a question of converting the relevant billable time to an invoice, and your accounting system – and we will be covering the very promising Phreebooks soon – will do the rest.

There is one issue we have come across, and a potential feature – both of which have been taken up in the development forums: First, there is a bit of confusion when you are in a different timezone from your Kimai installation, because while the installation will show local time in the interface, it will use server time in the tracked time and report. And while this will not change the time spent, it may place billable time on a different date from what you – and, more importantly, your client – has experienced. This is a real issue in a world where your system hosting is not necessarily on the same continent as you – and with a company spanning many time zones, this would be an issue. After addressing this on the forums, it seems that it is a recurring request – and a fix has been committed to be included in the upcoming release. As a completely web-based operation, we have submitted a feature suggestion: That since this system is tied into the user, it might be practical to associate a per-user time zone. Consider a law firm with a branch in New York, Houston and San Francisco. In this case, it would be useful for every Kimai user to have an associated time zone. Also, it is possible to create groups for users, and a suggestion for this issue could be to create a group for varying offices; of course, this would require multiple-group membership as an option, since one would still need to be in the accountant group, even if registered as part of the Houston group.
From the category of not-too-serious-but-nice-to-have, it should be mentioned that when you create a customer, there are no additional fields beside the customer’s name/identifier. We have submitted a feature request to make it possible to add more info on the clients in order to make it a lightweight CRM, partly because of the invoice feature.

Kimai will not let you work on the same project for several clients. While we will agree that this is not the most obvious combination, it has been done in situations where a cooperation agreement is place, and various clients will pay for different aspects of a project. Of course, this is something one can work around. This is not a project management system, but a time tracker with integrated reporting and invoicing.

Now, this can be defined at one level or the other. This is a webbased service, so I will talk foundations with the Content Management System. We could go into server specifics, but for now, all I will say is that the server is an Apache web server based on Debian Linux. This is also Free Software, and anyone is free to get it and use it. The reason not to go into it here is that server hosting – often Debian-based – is available at an affordable rate, and it is only under certain conditions requiring more control that self-hosting will make sense financially.

So, Content Management System – CMS. WordPress.

The WordPress is one of the most used systems for weblogs – which is the original intention – but over time, it has come to support a lot of other functions through plugins, and essentially, a content management system generally allows you to store data for many purposes, you have but to style the design in such a way that it fits into your workflow.

The point of a Content Management System is to make the route between author and website shorter. While it is not as difficult to make a website – not much more complicated than writing a document in a text processor – for a long time, it required you to either write the code in an editor application and open the file in a web browser to see how it worked; to write the text, you would have to code your formatting – italics, bold, links, line breaks and the like – into the text as you wrote it. Afterwards, to publish, you had to upload it to a site on the internet. This does not exactly make for intuitive fast-overview text writing, and the barrier to entry was still quite high. What a content management system does is to keep track of the layout of the website, in order to let you concentrate on the content itself – text, images et cetera – and the CMS will bother about link colors, font sizes and such settings.
Note that the modular nature of WordPress also makes it possible to embed external materials like a Youtube or Vimeo video.

WordPress has been set up in a modular fashion, so when you download a WordPress package, unpack it and upload it to your own site for installation – like I have uploaded the WP files to eicet.org – it is only the most basic setup you get. It does work as a website, you can log into it, write pages and blogpost, and people can add comments to what you have written. The user interface you use to enter text will be tucked away, and people will only see your site.

The WordPress administration interface allows for a lot of additional setup. This installation has been modified to create human-readable links – so it isn’t a timestamp or a random textstring or article publication number being used. In this case, WordPress will see that the article title is “WordPress” and will attempt to generate a link with a similar name. In this case, it succeeds one-to-one, so the address is www.writtenandread.net/wordpress. It is also possible to modify who will be allowed to post responses to entries.

The interface also allows the user to install plugins. In some cases, it is a minor extension – like allowing you to hide some posts from the index, if they are only intended for certain members or using Akismet to check the responses to your posts for spam. Yes, the spammers have found WordPress as well, and odds are they will find your site, too. The plugin can also be more extensive, like posting a contact form, an activity calendar, a poll or image gallery on the site, or even turning your site into a social network with BuddyPress. Until recently, you had to download and install these plugins separately, but now they can be installed directly throught the interface of your installation. A command centre indeed.

The above goes for plugins changing functionality, but the truth is that it can also be cosmetic – by choosing a theme. Themes will change the visual appearance of the page. For this site, a fairly simple theme was chosen to keep the focus on the text, but the artistic potential is immense. Compare, for instance, with the WordPress-based New York Times Blogs or Miller Rosenfalck.

As you see, a Content Management System allows a person who is less technical to run an advanced website, and even the more technically inclined will often find a CMS easier to use on a day-to-day basis.
So, WordPress is the face of our institute and works as the platform for our publications.
Now that this is covered, we will be moving on to other, more specialised features.

The thing is: When I started this website, the intention was to write about literature and history – what I had written and what I was reading.

As it turns out, after I moved to New York and started working for the Danish-American Chamber of Commerce and the law firm Miller Rosenfalck (NY), my focus has sort of drifted to other things. So I have written about software – which I often do – and in this case, I take it a bit further: A piece on business software.
Now, I have actually had a soft spot for this kind of thing for a long time. As is hardly a secret, I am a Free and open source software enthusiast. And ever since I got into working with accounting, I have been interested in the problematic watershed which is crowd-sourcing expertise for specialised applications, and specifically business apps. I doubt there are many who would have the audacity/plain ignorance to claim that Inkscape, Gimp and Blender aren’t impressive. But considering the areas of CAD and accounting are different beasts, and for different reasons. The CAD apps like the Autodesk programs – AutoCAD is the most well-known, I would guess – and SolidWorks – are developed as a highly specialised, closed process, and though one would assume there is a certain overlap between technologists in construction and IT, the community has yet to produce top of the line applications. One might also wonder why these applications have yet to even be ported to Linux and BSDs, considering the fact that they are less resource-demanding than the Windows platforms; but there is simply no expectation of sale. There are applications like the 2D QCAD and the rather impressive, though non-free VariCad, but the industry standard applications are simply not represented. Now, accounting… there are a lot of people who have yet to discover why accounting is sexy. Funny how people in love with the attention to detail that programming requires seem to glaze over when met(/confronted) with accounting tasks. And so, the gap between accounting and software development seems to be an even longer stretch than in the previous example. Again, applications exist, with their own limitations. Most used is probably Gnucash, in interface somewhat similar to Quicken. However, I actually find myself impressed with another system, namely Phreebooks.

Okay, so the above may have reinforced those who think that open source developers should keep a safety distance between coding and the naming of the applications, but this is actually very good.
Phreebooks is not an installable application – in the sense that it is a web application. This is not to say that there is anything preventing you from installing a web server on your desktop machine, but one of the reasons I was looking into this was so I could find something I could host on a web server – the infamous, yet ubiquitous concept of in the cloud – because data centers simply know more about keeping systems alive than I do. Also, I appreciate that a company which is not just a local operation can access the data from anywhere (no, I am not trying to set up an opportunity to do my work from a tropical island, but yes, I appreciate the fact that this would be possible).

The system is a basic double-entry account structure. During installation, you are offered the choice of a set of default accounts, and while this is not necessarily what you need, I found it useful to get an impression of the thoughts behind the setup.
While on the subject on installation: The Installation Guide simply lists PHP5 or higher & MySQL 4 or higher as dependencies – which means you should be able to run it off pretty much any Linux hosting service you can come across. As you go through the installation, you also enter basic information about your company, the fiscal year and the currency you will be using. You will have to create the MySQL database yourself, but after that, it is simply to enter the database credentials, and the installer will pick it up. As you finish the installer, you arrive at a login screen – which will take you to the main overview. Which is not much to look at, at first.

See? Wow. Well, it is simply the beginning. I will get into the categories you see listed there. All these are pull-down menus.
The Customers section allows you to – not just create and manage customers, but this has most of the dealings with the customers in general.
Besides customers, there is a wider CRM – Customer Relationship Management – system built in – PhreeCRM – which works as an extended address book with the contact information on people relevant to your business – to some depth, actually, including also things like Twitter and Facebook IDs and space for your own notes.
This is also the section where you can create quotes for your potential customers – and invoices. Phreebooks are clearly centered around a business selling a physical object; Quotes and invoices are created based on the inventory, and so far, I have yet to determine a way to sell goods which do not work like that – as in the membership we work with at the chamber of commerce or the billable hours we manage at the law firm. I mean, obviously I can start with adding a million of each to the inventory and selling from that pool, but it seems more logical there would be a type of good which would function differently. I am exploring this at the moment. After entering the data for the quote/invoice, Phreebooks can generate a PDF file of the invoice and let you download it – or email it directly from the system. Actually, it can pretty much create a PDF file of any form you might need to keep as a file or print.

The Vendors section once again gives you a clear impression that this is a buy-and-sell company – you can request a quote on every object in your inventory list and send it to the contacts you have created, so it is quite easy to manage these requests. It is even possible to set a preferred vendor for a product, which will be default in your quote request form. This is also the section where you place a Purchase order.
Both of these have a management interface where you can see the list of requested quotes and the purchase orders.

You can probably guess what the Inventory is. An interesting feature is that while you can add products, you can also add ‘assemblies’ – products which are a package of other products. The example is a computer, which is an assembly of hard drive, case, motherboard et cetera.
Curiously: While I am not particularly scared off by setup options and freedom choice, the fields available in the Inventory are pretty much open. There is a default selection of fields in the inventory for a product – Product numbers, descriptions, relevant accounts and so forth – but all this is editable! You can set up a field for any metadata you want to associate with the particular item. This is one of those functions which you probably don’t want to touch in the first run, but which will suddenly be a lifesaver at some point, you know? That is the gift of flexibility.
As I said at the beginning of the walkthrough: If you haven’t added items to your inventory, there is nothing you can do; it is all considered a closed circuit – as a true account set should – where values are transferred from one end to the other in the system of debits and credits.
Note, by the way, the History tab in the product view. This offers an overview of how the product is selling.

The Banking section is pretty much just dealing with the cost and income generated from the previous postings. It is for paying the bills, receiving payment, doing refunds – and it allows you to see the cashflow in the cash accounts.

The General Ledger lets you register  internal transfers. It is where you access and administer the chart of accounts, and there is a budget function which allows you to target the budget limitations on all accounts.

I was quite happy to see the Employees section, as I was hoping to be able to tie costs and earning into the employees. The section doesn’t exactly do that – it is mostly a question of being able to tag purchases, sales and the like to the person performing them. I did note, however, that it is possible to tie these employees to the users created with access to Phreebooks, which should make the user entering the transaction the default user getting the credit, so to speak, for the transaction.

Okay, so this was the regular user’s side of it. The rest is administration, but no less interesting for that.  The first user created has full access to everything as an admin-type account. But it is actually possible when creating a new user to completely define which features this user should have access to – and whether it should be read-only access or full access. The Tools section offers some options which not everyone should have access to – such as being able to delete the company in question – but also functions like setting the designated numbering scheme of invoices, transactions, payments, quote requests et cetera. It is quite elaborate, actually. This is also the section where it is possible to back up the transaction log. The ability to trim it should make Phreebooks more snappy. The Report function makes it possible to generate reports on any type of transaction – from invoicing and cash flow to expected arrival dates of items ordered by vendors. These reports go a long way towards creating an overview of what is actually happening in the operation – on a more approachable level.
An import/export function enables you to use an existing list of customers, vendors, employees etc. – or to make a copy for the sister company with a client/product overlap. This is a clever way of solving that.
Finally, the main tool: It can back up all data from the company accounts. This is obviously very important for safety, but also because it makes it easier to upgrade. I am currently stuck with older data on a CiviCRM installation which I can’t work out how to upgrade around… If one can extract a complete dataset, nuke the installation, install an updated version and import the old data – that can make you happy.

A Setup section will let you define tax rates and currencies – it is possible to work with several currencies, and Phreebooks has the ability to update the currency rates remotely, so you will have the correct exchange rate. Default rates are USD as the primary currency and Euros as secondary. So this section is more centered around the metadata of the transactions.

The last (okay, almost the last) thing I will get into is the Company section. This sets up the default values for the accounts – as in, which account should be default in dealing with which categories, how and when should taxation be applied, what are the basic credit limits – support for several branches, if you are doing accounts for a company with several locations, and how to work with several currencies in the account set.

There is just one more thing, and that is one thing which makes it all a little bit happier to work with. You remember the blank starting page I posted about in the beginning? There is actually an option to create a view profile, so the first you see could be a financial summery, open invoices – or intracompany links or personal notes to keep track of what you need to do.

In conclusion: I believe that Phreebooks could cover the needs of the two operations I am currently working with. The functionality is certainly there, so it would mostly be a question of the user setting up a sensible set of accounts.
I would personally love to see time tracking added to the mix, but this can obviously be covered by other tools like Taskcoach or the web-based Kimai and added as a product sold by the unit. It merely seems practical to me if the employees – who can be tied into Phreebooks user logins – could do billable time tracking as well.
The stylesheets – the color aspects of the design – are not particularly pleasant to look at. While it is definitely functional, it would be nice with a bit of fairly simple graphical overhaul.
The dynamic interface sometimes tries to make some slightly odd guesses as to what you are trying to do. For instance, if you are making an invoice and enter quantity and choose a product from the drop-down product menu, the invoice comment line is automatically filled out – or not, if there is no comment associated with the product – and the cursor moves to the next line. If it is automatically done, why have a specific comment field?
Having said that, I can only conclude it is a very potent package, and I am strongly considering it as a hosted accounting solution.

I am going to do some screenshots of the interface. The link will be arriving shortly.

The reason is that I hands-down completely beyond a shadow of a doubt prefer to use Claws Mail. And not a lot of people get that, since the default look of Claws Mail is… pretty terrible, to be honest (see this article from cyberciti.biz to see the default Claws layout). I find, however, that with a bit of cleanup, it is very good and even pleasant to look at; and it has some very good features to make use of. So this little piece is actually intended as a answer to people who ask me how I can use something as horrible as Claws. It is entirely my opinion, and if I am the only person in the world who has this right, I am also the only person in the world who knows that you  are wrong when you say I am.

Now: Maybe I should just show you the design I am going for, to make it clear:

This is simply a series of settings to be made, none of which are particularly advanced, but make a great difference.
I should also note that part of the reason I am doing this is that I have an aging Thinkpad which will do a resolution of 1024×768. This is adequate for a lot of things, but it means that an application like Thunderbird looks terrible nowadays, because the text spacing and the huge attachment field leave so little space for the actual message. As you see, this setup allows me to use all the information in the email, and though the font is a little smaller, it still allows for comfortable reading.

None of these concepts depend on each other, so the order is of minor importance. The easiest will probably just be to go through it as the options come in the Preferences panel. In other words, start with going to Configuration > Preferences.

• Receiving – These are sensible defaults to me, but I ask it to check email every 8 minutes. Obviously you can set this as you prefer. I don’t set it to check mail on startup, because I often just want to find a detail in an email, and the interface will get quite unresponsive when fetching mail. On the other hand, it fetches mail quite quickly compared to other mail clients.
• Sending – Never get into this much, except I ask it never to send return receipts. I hate people asking me for a receipt.
• Writing – I keep the default setup.
• Templates – Ah, now there is something for people to get into. I don’t actually use these – I use a signature, which is defined elsewhere – but you will note the Information button at the bottom, which offers a lot of data that could be entered into a template. I have occasionally fiddled with the reply template, because a well-structured reply makes it pleasant, but – this is up to you. Also, as with many other things, Claws will be able to make a user-input template and include information from external applications – which make the customization options quite extensive.
• Wrapping – I check them all and have it wrap at 72 characters – for when people have mail clients which will keep you text in one very long line, if you don’t make it wrap. So, that’s a wrap.
• Spell Checking - Well… I kill it. We have too different vocabularies. Actually, now that I am in the States and almost all my email is in English, I might turn it on, but in Danish, spell checking is cr… unsatisfactory.
• Text Options – Ah, now we get into the meat of it, visually. A lot of what you can see about the email can be defined here, in “Display headers in message view”. These can be quite extensive. I like to be able to see which client the email came from, for one thing. Here, you can also change the distance between the lines. I leave it at the default two pixels, but when I was using an 800×600 machine, I reduced it. And of course, I make it render HTML as text. While it is possible with one of the Claws Mail plugins – more on those later – to have the client render HTML, that is just so wrong in general, that I like to keep it text; and it does a very good job of extracting the text from the HTML.
• Image Viewer – I let it show images, and reduce them to make them sensible to look at. I allow printing, since I would never print an email unless the point was to get everything in there. Which happens a couple of times a year, so I don’t lose a lot.
• External programs – Guess how this works. I have set the very nice medit editor as my default, but I have never actually come across anything that opened in this editor, unless I ask Claws mail to use the external editor to compose emails.
• Colors – The Color Labels tab is very nice, it allows to set the colors to use, though I usually don’t; I do like the second tab, though, discretely named “Other” – this is where you can set the URL color and, for those who do a lot of newsgroups, colors indicating the quotation level. This can be a powertool for some people.
• Summaries - This is one of the places where the action is, when it comes to clearing up the interface. You see how there are three columns in Claws’ Folder list on the left? They take up quite a lot of space – but you can do it differently. So under “Display message number next to folder name”, choose “Unread and Total messages” and under “Displayed Columns”, press the “Edit” button. In the interface which comes up, remove all but “Folders” in the “Displayed” column.
  If you press OK at this stage and come back to the Claws interface, you can see how those very space-consuming fields have been replaced with a summary next to the folder name.
  A bit down the page is another thing which makes quite a bit of uncluttering difference: Date Format. It is set to display month, day, year, weekday, hour and minutes. If you take the weekday out here – which you usually won’t need when you go back anyway – you get a bit of extra space. Again, the “Information” button will tell you how to get the info you want shown. I use %d/%m-%y %H:%M – which would be a European notation, Americans would go %m/%d/%y %H:%M – this will will keep it neat.
  Here, you can also select which message lidt columns you would want to show. There is a ‘mark’ column and a ‘status’ column. I like to have these – to see what I have replied, forwarded etc. – but if that makes no difference to you, you can take them out. I usually put in the “Size” field as well, and for some that would be enough of an indicator to take out the “Attachment” field.
• Fonts – This is the other primary place which makes a big deal. In other clients, it is problematic to get it to reduce all the font sizes in the interface. Here, Claws will let you reduce the font size for Folder & Message lists and the message font itself. One of the main problems in the message list is how the data “sneaks up” on the next column. I set “Folder & Message Lists” to Sans 8 and “Message” to a monospaced font size 9 – monospaced because people sometimes drop in ASCII in the emails, and it will look terrible if the font is not Monospaced. I usually use Liberation for that.
  After doing this, you will probably want to adjust the width of the columns in the message list, but you should be able to get decent spacing.
• Themes - Here is where you get a major facelift – not so much in functionality, just prettier. You can get other themes on the Themes section of Claws-mail.org – I use the one called “elementary” to get some more contemporary icons. Download the tarball, untar it, press “Install new”, navigate to the theme folder and okay the selection – the theme will be installed. As you select it from the list, press “Use this”, and it will be your default afterwards. You will want to go back to the main screen to see how great a difference this actually makes!
• Toolbars & Other sections I don’t touch. I don’t remove any of the functions from the toolbars.
• I do, hovewer, change to icon view. In the main interface, I choose View > Show or Hide > Toolbar > Icons Only. Once more, that gives a bit more space to work with. Here, you can also remove column headings – in case you feel confident that you know that the column list is a column list, the date is the date et cetera. I suspect most people would.
• There is a search field between the message list and the messages. When you need it, you need it – and it is quite powerful – but when you don’t, you don’t. It can be folded up simply by pressing the folder with the magnifying glass. More space.
• One last thing, which you may notice, or you may not at first. After a while, the vertical scrollbar in the Folder column started annoying me – it is there regardless of whether it is needed or not. I quickly discovered that the frustration is not uncommon for setup fetichists or people with small screens (or those of us who are both), and that this is possible, though in a bizarrely difficult way (okay, not for BASH monkeys, but considering how many things can be done in the Claws interface, it seems strange that they have not included this).
  It seems one has to edit the settings file of Claws Mail manually. So one has to open ~/.claws-mail/clawsrc for editing and look for the line that says “folderview_vscrollbar_policy=0“. If you change the value to 1, it will automatically resize – and disappear if it is not needed.
  Now, there is one thing to be aware of about this: Claws will save the default setting if you make this change while it is still running! So you will want to shut Claws down, then edit the file. When you open the application again,  the scrollbar should be gone.

First, I should derail the entire thing by mentioning that I have actually already experienced one independence day celebration this year, and that was here in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn: The Norwegian independence day. Usually, the Scandinavians stick together here, but since the Norwegians got their independence from the Danes, I thought I would keep a low profile that day.

Right, back to the topic. What I actually wanted to say is that I find it remarkable that practically every household thing here is made outside of the US. So, the United States are celebrating the independence from the United Kingdom, but the States are in fact tremendously dependent on a lot of supplier countries.
This is remarkable in some ways. If, for one thing, we compare to the invasion of Iraq – something which people even now say is not about oil, but seriously: If it was an effort to stop a regime of oppression, then there is no end of questions to ask; I vould, for instance, ask: What about Yemen? A colorful place in Human Rights debates. Just a random question. And if we are talking about oppression, and getting into just the most superficial definition of that, I would think sweatshops would be somewhat relevant to discuss under that category. I do understand that China is a bit of a mouthful to be policing with military, but we have a very close tie with China. And for a place talking so much about democracy, human rights and freedom, you would wonder about all these Chinese products here. You know how people talk about voting with your feet, spending the dollar where it will buy the rights you are fighting for? I would say that someone speaking about rights and democracy wearing Chinese-made clothes are about as impressive as fur-wearing animal activists. And how many computers are actually made without a Chinese component?

Now, you could say that this is a resource issue, but it obviously is not. If, like me, you grew up in Denmark, a tiny country with few natural resources, this might be a partially valid argument, but this is the United States of America, and I doubt that there are any resources that could not be sourced here.
I mentioned the question on Identi.ca, and Jeff Ratcliff pointed me towards the MadeInUsa.org website. Actually, in the beginning I was thinking about doing a “US patriot product” type of marketing thing, and I see that some products like American Apparel go into that. But as I was looking into it, I gradually began wondering how much the US has actually sold off.
There are disclaimers on this one: I live in New York, which is obviously a place with a concentration of the country’s white-collar work, so there isn’t much in the way of physical production here, just some secondary and a lot of tertiary production. That may be skewing my impression.
Also, and this seems a bit silly, but: I may be taking the offical lingo too seriously. It seems reasonable that the patriotic statements are a stylized picture of the state of the nation, and going to war doesn’t work as well if you state that it is a war for practical purposes. The United States have been in a curious position in the last years after the 9/11 attack (no, I am not going to go into conspiracy theories; if this has your interest, watch the first Zeitgeist movie), because they had never been attacked directly, all the wars had been conducted off-continent. And so, 20th century-methods were applied to a 21st century challenge – a challenge called terrorism which, one might add, still has a considerably smaller loss of life than obesity and bad living conditions in countries like, say, China, Thailand and other places which make our daily products. Sweatshops are not there to further economic development, and anyone who says so is lying to someone.

Does all this make me sound like a hippie? I was a left-winger once,  but these things have lost their meaning as I got older. What I certainly can say is that the US is nothing remotely close to independent, and there is a lot of hipocrisy about the values behind policies and corporate actions. Perhaps there is just less hipocrisy in those who support predatory capitalism, since that is what happens when everybody turns a blind eye.

On a different note, a personal comment -
Talking about independence, it also seems relevant to talk about those you depend on, and those who depend on you!
I moved to the US in December, and I have come to appreciate it. I was looking for work for a long time, and this spring I finally got employed at the Danish-American Chamber of Commerce, an interesting networking group for companies interested in working and investing between the two countries, and recently also at Miller Rosenfalck NY, the New York branch of a London law firm specialised in internation law for American companies getting established in Europe and vice versa.

When we came here, I was registered as my wife’s dependent – a bit hard to swallow, as I left my job in Denmark to come here – but now I am earning money for the household as well, which is a tremendous relief to me. While I have no doubt that my wife’s job has been made easier by me being able to help with the house and our son – making the conecpt of the dependent a bit floating – it is good to balance it out.
My wife is pregnant again, and we are expecting a second child in december.
Considering the family and the independence one would have without it – and that is my personal thought today – there are some ways of giving up independence that make life better. Some people like to say that nobody owns them, but I do need my wife and my son, and I have an obligation to them that make me theirs, as they are mine.
It is the heart that binds.

So – happy 4th of July. Enjoy your independence and the places where you have given it up for something greater.