I just did my first tax stuff. Ger­many has this ELSTER sys­tem that has an open API, so in the­o­ry it would be pos­si­ble to get it go­ing on Lin­ux. But my sit­u­a­tion is that I lo­cal­ly only have an OS X iBook PPC, a PlayS­ta­tion 3, an OpenWRT Linksys router and a P800. So I could try to get it run­ning on one of those, or on my Lin­ux serv­er back in the old coun­try. Taxbird should be a nice ap­pli­ca­tion to do those tax­es, but it's a pret­ty com­pli­cat­ed graph­i­cal in­ter­face it's us­ing, and some se­ri­ous cryp­to sign­ing. So af­ter a lot of com­pil­ing from git and tar­balls I can run taxbird as an X Win­dow serv­er from my re­mote lin­ux serv­er on the lo­cal OS X X11 client. And hit the ap­ply but­ton that then suc­cess­ful­ly sends my signed data from the old coun­ty to the Geier. Nice.