Unix Timestamp Conversion

I use unix timestamps to store dates in databases because I find it an easy way to do maths with the dates.

One drawback of course is that I can’t tell what a date is by just looking at the number so I was trying to find a calculator app which would do the conversion. Although there are bound to be loads I couldn’t find one which would allow me to quickly highlight a number and convert it to a date for me.

So, in a typical UNIX way I strung together the gnome clipboard handler and the gnome-osd-client with a bit of shell and now I can get a quick on screen date display of any text I highlight with a single keystroke.