Five useful command one liners
24 December 2008
In this post I explain five useful commands I have used recently.
My God, it's Full of XML
22 September 2008
You may find yourself in the situation that you are given a pile of XML documents, possibly broken, and it is up to you to make sense of them. This post explains some tools that can form your first-aid kit for dealing with problem XML documents.
Three more tips - use keybindings, scripts and SSH without passwords
29 April 2008
In this post I look at how to use readline keybindings that are useful in many contexts. I then look at how to SSH without passwords. Lastly, I talk about making a script directory in your home directory so you can quickly add new scripts to your system path.
Five Tips for Easter
22 March 2008
Happy Easter everyone, I don't have enough chocolate eggs for you all, so instead, here are five tips.
Advanced Unix Groups
20 March 2008
Imagine we want to have some files, where one group of users can read and write to them them, while another group of users can only read them. How do we achieve this using basic Unix permissions?
Ten Steps for attending a keysigning party
07 September 2007
*A key signing party can be an event of its own, or it might be at a user group meeting, or at a conference, or at a workplace. The idea is to increase the 'web of trust' and thus strengthen the system as a whole, as well as making your own key more trusted. Alex Willmer explains what you need to do to participate in a key signing party, using GNU Privacy Guard. *
How to backup your DVDs
05 September 2007
I have an office-style chair next to my desk, it has five little wheels at the bottom. I was sitting in it today and heard a gentle crunch noise coming from somewhere. It turned out that I had accidentally ran over a DVD and cracked it.
I had recently bought a small pile of new DVDs, and they were sitting on my desk in their shrink-wrap. The cracked DVD made me decide to keep backups, so I started with them. I am using the dvdbackup utility. The idea is not to rip the DVD to a MPEG or whatever but to backup the whole DVD to disk, the resulting files can be burned back to a new DVD with mkisofs if I get another broken DVD.
Using your Digital camera on the Command Line
31 August 2007
In this post I talk about how to use your digital camera at the command line,
Ditch the Bitch with Bash History
07 August 2007
I just read a long and heart-wrenching story about Mark Felder, a Gentoo Linux user whose long-time live-in girlfriend successively cheated on him with someone she caught with from a school reunion. The proof was in ~/.bash_history.
Command the Web - an ELinks tutorial
25 July 2007
Command-line browsing is not always the best approach; e.g. for flickr or a webcomic, it is the wrong approach of course.
However, for most things command line browsing works well. The system requirements are very low indeed. It is fast and secure; web pages have a consistent look and there are no flashing adverts, pop up windows or other web annoyances.
Ogg Theora to Vorbis: Video File to Audio File
22 July 2007
A lot of free software type people and events are starting to use the Ogg Theora format when putting their videos online. However, I personally often like to listen to podcasts when my eyes are busy but my ears are free. Ditching the video, i.e. the ability to see the person standing there itching themselves, is often not a great loss.
So if you download a video in Ogg Theora format, you should be able to stick it on your rockbox or other portable ogg player and listen to it on the go. However, that is a significant waste of space on your limited flash drive. A more sensible approach is to strip out the sound only and get a smaller file.
Three quick one-line bash tricks
16 July 2007
This weekend I tried to go the whole time without any caffeine drinks, a feat that I would not recommend. Needless to say, I am very much looking forward to my cup of tea tomorrow morning. I am too sleepy to write a diatribe today, so here are three commands I have used recently.
Starting the Command Line in 2007?
01 July 2007
In the last post, I was responding to a question from a commenter called Gregory, however before his question he gave an interesting disclaimer:
> The trouble is that beyond knowing what a path is and a dozen or so DOS commands I have little actual knowledge of command code symbology and syntax for any OS, let alone something like Linux.
Mutt and Emacs cheatsheets
17 April 2007
As mentioned in yesterday's post, I am putting some of my more structured notes online as cheatsheets. The first obvious candidates for cheatsheets are the computer programs that I use and their keybindings. So here is my cheatsheet page.
The first two cheatsheets are for Mutt and Emacs. I have been using these cheatsheets myself for a few weeks, so hopefully I have ironed out most major mistakes, so feel free to use them and feed back any problems or missing commands. I will update them over time as I use them, and publish new ones on different topics. I have released them under the General Public Licence, so feel to print them, share them, modify them and so on.
Emacs key Commands - Conveyor-Belt Sushi
25 March 2007
Guide to Emacs Key-bindings
The normal Emacs convention is that Control is represented by the large C. The small c is the 'c key', i.e. the third letter of the alphabet. So C-y means to press Control and the 'y key' at the same time.
History of Emacs and XEmacs
25 March 2007
Last time we looked how to get Emacs. Before you get bogged down in information, open Emacs and type into the box. See how far you can get without reading anything.
Emacs and Emacsen
Installing Emacs
24 March 2007
Although I have mentioned it in passing, I cannot believe I have got this far without covering Emacs, I covered Nano and Vim two years ago!
Emacs is the one of the two main text editors that I use daily, (gedit being the other one). I do everything in plain text when possible, only going to a Word Processor if I need footnotes or something.
Emacs Series
23 March 2007
This series is about Emacs, one of the major text editors in use today, and for the last 30 years!
Automate Emerge with Bash
06 March 2007
I am a big fan of abstracting everything, and having computers do as much as possible for me. Steve Long has been working with bash and emerge and has come up with a little program called igli-update.
This script is a bash wrapper for emerge that aims to make it more convenient to keep your Gentoo Linux system up to date, and is especially useful at helping you survive long emerges as it will keep retrying failed packages until there are none left that will compile. It will then create a list of failed packages at the end. It also attempts to consider GCC upgrades as well as filtering emerge output to only show the more useful information.
Converting HTML to Text
06 March 2007
html2text is a little command-line program that is available in many Linux distros including Gentoo and Ubuntu. As you might expect, it converts HTML to txt format.
To convert an html file to text, you can use:
