Computer Tricks
Category archives for Computer Tricks
Today’s Linux Command Line Lesson: counting files
Posted by Greg Laden on August 17, 2009 Type: ls | wc -l The output is an approximation of how many files are in the current directory.
Flash Cookies: How to get rid of them and keep them away
Posted by Greg Laden on August 15, 2009 You know about cookies … the little bits of data that your operating system, your browser, and the Military Industrial Complex conspire to leave on your hard drive for purposes of marketing and mass social control and stuff. Cookies are actually quite wonderful because they allow your interactions with the web to be smarter. But…
The Command Line Part 3: Underlying Power
Posted by Greg Laden on August 12, 2009 This is a continuation of a discussion of the role of the command line in both the functionality and the culture of the three main operating systems used today general purpose desktop computers: Linux, and the other two. Today’s toic: Underlying power.
May the force (of the command line) be with you
Posted by Greg Laden on August 11, 2009 This is the second part of a series of posts on the Power of the Command Line. (The first post was: The Command Line in Linux, Mac OSX and Windows) The lesson of today’s post is: Don’t be a chump, learn to love the command line!
The Command Line in Linux, Mac OSX and Windows
Posted by Greg Laden on August 10, 2009 This is the first in a series of posts on just what the title says: The command line. The main point will be this: Stop worrying about the command line.
Today’s Linux One-Liner
Posted by Greg Laden on August 6, 2009 Try this: ps -eo user,pcpu,pid,cmd | sort -r -k2 | head -6 What the heck does that do?
How to be more keyboardy: Update
Posted by Greg Laden on June 29, 2009 Being more keyboardy is good. The mouse is good, too. But if you can do more things with the keyboard, those things will usually happen faster and with less mucking around. Also, it is very, very cool to sit there and go “tap tap tap” and have stuff happen on the screen without the mouse.…
How to grep a PDF file (Linux)
Posted by Greg Laden on June 14, 2009 OK, I’m going to do this without looking. It will be something like pdftotext foo | grep whatever, right? Let’s watch and see…. Well, close enough. Note that that was not being done on a Debian system. For Debian (like Ubuntu) you would use apt to install the tools. apt-get install poppler-utils
Linux tip: GUI ssh/ftp
Posted by Greg Laden on May 24, 2009 ftp is for transferring files over networks, and ssh is for doing that plus more. These are pretty easy to use command line tools, but there is a program in Gnome that provides an excellent GUI interface for them. gFTP: To comment on this post, please visit this open thread on my old blogs. The…
Aliases for your Linux command
Posted by Greg Laden on May 23, 2009 The example Sean gives us here is probably kind of dumb. One of the more useful aliases is for people trained on another system who want things like “dir” to give you a directly lesson (so you set dir to be an alias of ls, with whatever options you like).
Using the Bash complete Command
Posted by Greg Laden on May 22, 2009 This is mundane but important. A word on the command line. I recently read a critique of Linux written by some pinhead from Russia explaining in detail why Linux was not “desktop ready.” Which is laughable. Anyway, Dweeb claimed that one of the reasons that Linux was not desktop ready is that it is not…
Command line magic: csv file processing
Posted by Greg Laden on May 11, 2009 Is he doing this from memory or is he looking it up as he goes along?
Redirecting Output
Posted by Greg Laden on May 9, 2009 Sean Powers’ tip of the day: Thank you Sean. now, can we do a better job that Sean did and come up with some actual uses for this ability?
How to make your wireless card work in a laptop
Posted by Greg Laden on April 28, 2009 Are you having trouble getting your wireless networking to work? Well, good luck with that. It can be difficult. Here, I provide you with one tip that you will not find in most troubleshooting documents but that is absolutely essential. Thisw may be the thing you need to do to make your wireless connection work.…
What is your disk usage?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 10, 2009 In Linux, if you want to find out what your disk usage is by directory, in order to see what the heck is filling up your hard drive, try this at the command prompt:
How to turn off tooltips in Gnome
Posted by Greg Laden on April 6, 2009 Tool tips (a.k.a. tooltips) are those annoying, usually mostly yellow flyouts that appear as your mouse moves over various parts of a GUI. Although tooltips violate one of the Fundamental Rules (don’t do shit if I don’t click you you) they may actually be useful to some people either when an application, desktop, or system…
ping traceroute
Posted by Greg Laden on April 4, 2009 Very funny, sean. I’m talking about the simu-bot.
As usual, quotes save the day in bash. And more.
Posted by Greg Laden on March 31, 2009 If you try to sudo your way through a command with pipes and/or redirects, part of the sequence of commands may be producing sudo-read/writeable streams of data or data objects, which the other parts of the sequence can’t use because they were spawned by your shell and not root. The solution is to embed the…
How to make a symbolic link
Posted by Greg Laden on March 28, 2009 in Linux
grep
Posted by Greg Laden on March 16, 2009 grep Now, for your assignment, write a bash one liner or short script that finds and kills any process associated with Firefox.
Print Screen
Posted by Greg Laden on March 7, 2009 In the old days, it was often easier, and indeed made sense, to just print the screen. I once set up a system that ate data off of some rather esoteric machines, store it, analyze it, and make a screen of data and a screen with a graph on it. PrtScr. PrtScr. Tape the data…
HTML Code Cheat Sheet
Posted by Greg Laden on February 5, 2009 As you know, you can’t just type anything into a blog or other HTML document. Some symbols need to be typed in in ‘code’ in order to make them come out right. But what is the code for, for instance, a lesser than sign, or one of those funny foreign letters, or the symbols from…
Autostarting Programs in KDE 4 (Linux)
Posted by Greg Laden on January 31, 2009 Blogger Dot Com Recent Comment Widget
Posted by Greg Laden on January 28, 2009 Free for you from Almost Diamonds. Click here for the free widget!
Don’t be a minion of Satan
Posted by Greg Laden on January 26, 2009 … But if you must, here’s how. How to make Microsoft formats the default when working with OpenOffice.com.
What happens when a long-time Linux user is pushed back into Windows?
Posted by Greg Laden on January 24, 2009 He starts a blog called Linux in Exile. This is a must read blog. It addresses the fundamental nature of evil. And it’s a new blog. Have a look, lend support, and enjoy, because eventually, Agents from the Dark Side will probably come and take him away. (Although, I understand the blog writer had some…
How to make the internet slightly less annoying
Posted by Greg Laden on December 30, 2008 Have a look at this video: While you are looking at it, pass your mouse cursor over it and notice the appearance of a search box at the top of the video. This search box violates the prime directive: Shit you do not ask for should not happen. There is an increasing number of such…
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