Unless you’ve met me in person, you probably don’t know this but, I have over a thousand CD-ROMs. Up until recently, it wasn’t much of a problem since I could just remember which CD held what and where it was. But then I needed something from one of my misc-junk CDs. That showed me how much I really needed some kind of index for them. I put it off for months because I didn’t want to have to index all of my CDs by hand.
Today, I decided to look at it from a new angle and I realized something. Geeks are lazy and geeks have lots of CD-ROMs. Therefore, someone else should have already written a CD indexing program. It turned out that it was already installed as part of my default Mandrake Linux install.
GTKtalog is a Linux/*BSD-only CD-indexing marvel. Drop the disk in, click “Add CD” and it’s off. It even reads the metadata from music files (eg. ID3 tags) and dives into archives to index their contents.
With my books freshly cataloged and my CDs cataloging as I type, I’m feeling pretty good. Now all I need to do is find (or write) a way to keep track of a bookmarks list so massive and complex that a folder hierarchy is almost useless. (I have an idea for a database-based system but I don’t want to reinvent someone else’s wheel)
