Over the past few months I’ve ended up, for reasons out of my control, becoming much more of a digital nomad than I had planned for.

I’ll write more about that in a bit I’m sure, but right now I wanted to share with you a very specific tip that came in use for me.

To track time spent working on client work, I use the linux utility hamster. There are web based ones of course, but this was simple and does exactly what I wanted to do, but the downside is that it was one computer only.

This wasn’t a problem for the most part, since I almost always worked using my home desktop machine. However, I’m now spending much more time on client site, or otherwise on my (rather old and in need of an upgrade) laptop. This meant I would always remember to keep my tracker updated, and it also made generating invoices were a problem.

Luckily, Hamster uses a simple file to store it’s tracking data, so all that was required was to find a way of sharing it. I already had an ownCloud server (if you want to use NSA file storage, you can use Dropbox if you like), so all I had to do was move the hamster db directory, and then symbolically link to it on all my machines, as so:

On your main machine (the one with the most up to date db)…

cd ~/.local/share
mv hamster-applet ~/ownCloud/
ln -s ~/ownCloud/hamster-applet

Let ownCloud sync up, and then on your client machines…

cd ~/.local/share
mv hamster-applet hamster-applet-orig
ln -s ~/ownCloud/hamster-applet

If you’re using Dropbox, obviously change the path name accordingly.

Hope you find this as useful as I have!