1. If you never empty it, it grows and wastes valuable disk space
2. If you empty it frequently, you lose its buffer benefits for recovery. Plus, who likes frequently doing this highly manual task?
3. Finally, if like me, you get bored by this nonsense, you end up permanently bypassing the trash (with systematic Shift+Delete instead of Delete), which is of course very dangerous

Linux users, rejoice! Enter Autotrash. The name may sound a little scary, but this tiny command-line Python application is actually very friendly and fully solves the problems I just exposed. Its humble task is to selectively purge your trash based on certain criteria that you specify, like Deletion date, Remaining disk space, or Regular expressions.

Edit 2010/04/14: Windows users, Martin found a great app for you, read his followup article.

For example, you can tell Autotrash to delete files that have been in the trash for more than 7 days ago, and to ensure that at least 10GB remain available:

This means our three problems are solved:

1. The trash never gets too big
2. It always contains a reasonable recent backlog of deleted items, ready for the occasional recovery
3. Geeks like me can come back to sane Delete practices

The next question you’ll probably ask is: “Great, but I don’t want to have to run Autotrash manually, how do I setup a schedule?”. In typical GNU style, Autotrash doesn’t do that, and it’s okay because it’s not its job. To do the scheduling, I suggest that:

• Either you setup a cron task running every n hours
• Or, if you are as lazy as I am, you can simply add Autotrash to the Startup programs:
  
  In my case, I generally shut down my computer for the night, so launching Autotrash at startup is a satisfying “good enough” tradeoff.

The most straightforward way to install Autotrash on an Ubuntu machine is to use its PPA. Inside a terminal, enter:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bneijt/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install autotrash

Once the installation is done, open the manual page to see what it can do, and do your own setup:
man autotrash

Autotrash is free software licensed under the GPLv3, currently available as source or Ubuntu PPA. Special thanks to nekohayo who made me discover it.

Ronan is a geek and musician living in Montreal. He enjoys days when his hard drive doesn’t evaporate because of an accidental keystroke and rambles about software, music and life at flying molehill.

The service will display transparent information on top of the website that has been loaded visualizing how much of the website visitors see without having to scroll. This is done by displaying percentages on the screen and using colors to differentiate the different groups from each other.

A 98% rating for example means that 98% of all visitors of the website have their browser window open to the size or larger. It does also mean that 2% use a smaller size than the one displayed.

The service can provide the webmaster with important information about the site’s visitors as it can aid in optimizing specific elements on the website to increase their exposure to all visitors without them having to scroll to locate it.

Five, ten or even twenty percent of all visitors is a huge number on some sites. That’s a big number considering that some visitors tend to leave a website without scrolling the page they landed on.

To use Google Browser Size for a specific website enter the url of the website into the text form at the top. Please note that the service will not automatically align the website at the left browser border which might be necessary for sites that do not do that automatically to visualize the real percentages. A user with a 1920 monitor resolution will for instance see a different result for the same website than a user with a 1024 monitor resolution. It is therefor important to align the content to the left side of the screen.

This can be something profane like removing advertisement from websites or disabling comments but also clever additions that increase the usability of a website. You can download the latest version of Greasmonkey from Greasepot. Enough of the babbling, I’m proud to present 10 Greasemonkey scripts for the lazy, enjoy the read:

Googlestream – Never click Next or previous during Google searches again. The script automatically loads and displays the next batch of search results in the same window you are currently in. It loads them when you reach the bottom of the page.
RSS+Atom Feed Subscribe Button Generator – Some websites hide their RSS Feed buttons pretty well and it takes some time to find them. With this userscript the feed options will always be displayed in the upper left corner of the website. No more searching for those darn feed links.
Google Image Direct Links – this userscript links directly to the picture during Google image searches without having to visit the framed website first.
Flickr Photo Page Enhancer – adds links to different sizes directly, generates html code (to quickly copy and paste the html for a thumbnail link) and loads 20 most used tags.
Ebay Show only negative feedback – It takes sometimes pretty long to find the few negative or neutral comments that a user received on Ebay especially when he has thousands of auction comments. This userscript adds two new tabs: Complaints received and Complaints Left.
Technorati English Search Results – Technorati displays search results in all languages unless you choose a specific language in the drop down box before you search. With this userscript only English search results are shown.
Del.icio.us Autotag – When you save bookmarks on del.icio.us the tags from that link are automatically added to your bookmark.
Sourceforge Direct Links – Direct download links for files on Sourceforge plus the ability to choose a mirror from a certain continent.
Digg.com Mirrors – adds links to article mirrors in case the website goes down due to the digg effect. Links to duggmirror, Coral and Google Cache plus Waybackmachine.

Wow the list has 9 entries not 8, take the last one as a bonus if you like.