Not sure what you mean with "Netflix not working natively" but on Linux you just need either Chromium or a recent version of Firefox (maybe not the ERS version) and enable it to play DRM content. It just works.
I used FreshBooks.com when I freelanced a few years ago and I think it contained all the features you want and it was pretty inexpensive (~10 USD per month) and invoices/receipts looked very professional and allows setting different currencies for each client (eg. if you work remotely for different international clients).
I follow all of them via RSS. In English: Hacker News, InfoQ, Planet Clojure, O'Reilly Radar (and ocasionally listen their podcast in SoundCloud), Ars Technica, The Server Side. I save some episodes of some podcasts which I find interesting (eg. The Cognicast) but takes me a long time to catch up.
I also follow some tech blogs in Spanish: Microsiervos, Fayerwayer, Manzana Mecanica, Hipertextual, Genciencia.
Also, if you don't have the OS or the hardware to run some of the most recent, interesting demos, you can watch them via this YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/user/annikras
This. Don't wait until everything is perfect. If your side project does a barely minimum to be usable, just release it somewhere (if it's an open source project) or deploy it and send a message for other people to try it.
Other people's feedback is a huge factor in being motivated.
I was on a remote position for several years, maintaining code written by several other developers over the course of 10 years, poorly written and no spec in sight. I sincerely tried to move it forward to current standards, one bit at a time. It improved a bit for a while but from the distance it was a mess and I doubt some of the improvements will ever get deployed.
I went to a lot of stress during that period, but on the other hand it felt comfortable, sharing only a few hours of the day to touchbase gave me freedom to organize the time with the family, there were not many challenges other than managing a big ball of mud, and the hourly rate was much better than my colleagues did working on-site.
On the other hand, there was no prospect of new challenges, or technologies or salary, this was a small business. I did some side projects recently and it gave me confidence to move forward: there were many other companies willing to work remotely with newer technologies and with a better rate.
The show is still on air in Chile in one of the largest TV channels. I'm in my late 30s and I remember the show was rather old already when I was a kid :-)
Now seeing the show with the eyes of an adult feels like a portrait of a much simpler but much poorer era. El Chavo (mexican slang for "the kid") was a boy who slept inside a barrel in the shared patio of a slum ("la vecindad") where most of the action happens. With plenty of physical humor, El Chavo was frequently hit in the head as a punishment in the show, specially by Don Ramón, a character which would never find a job and was always hiding from the landlord.
It's the kind of show it would never pass if it were to be filmed on this date, but we grew up watching it and learning to love it, in the same way we loved racist cartoons by the Warner Bros. or those old episodes where the Flintstones were heavy smokers.
I've written applications using Java, Groovy, Clojure and Scala (in that order) and after Clojure, coding Scala felt specially horrible (yet another syntax to learn! ++: \ ~> and so on...).
Maybe Clojure feels odd for a few hours when coming from C-like syntax, but it becomes so obvious later on. I remember I felt terrified by the parens because I had not written anything serious in it.
I created a free mini-book (in Spanish) about development and packaging of desktop applications for Ubuntu, including examples in C, Python, C# (using Mono) and Java. It's outdated now, probably easy to update to cover some of the latest changes.
Also, long ago I used to download files which were too large to be transfered to another PC over the network, some even didn't fit the USB thumb drives I had at hand; so I created this desktop app which splits large files into smaller volumes, which you can copy around easier and then use the same program to join the pieces and get the original file.
I was very happy to receive requests from other people who contributed with traslations to the UI messages.
It's written in Python (not very elegantly) and I haven't touched it in ages:
Finally, another small project: a plugin for the gEdit text editor which shows the git branch of the file being edited (if any). It should still work in the most recent GNOME desktops, but I do most of my editing in other text editors now.
You can motivate or coerce your team mates to improve their skills so they all benefit. You can even ask your team leader/boss to be the lead of an initiative at your place to use better tools or technologies so that the productivity will increase. If you get an OK you'll even have an opportunity to spend some paid time doing something which will keep you sharp and improve your daily experience.
If you think you can't get the above to work or that you're way beyond the skills of your team, look for another job with better conditions.
I agree specially with #5. One of the aspects I was at fault for a long time was avoiding conflict and saying "OK" to all requests at work. There will be many times in which you will be asked non-sense or completely wrong tasks and you're completely entitled to say NO. Speak why something is not well planned or conceived or just plain wrong. Just by saying NO you'll cut a lot of crap you shouldn't accept.