Linux

This is a new section about image-manipulation programs for Linux, including GIMP, Inkscape, ImageMagick and more!

I found an interesting ascii aquarium screensaver for Linux terminals called Asciiquarium.

Here is a great trick for compressing and backing-up your entire Web site with one Linux command:

This tutorial shows how to bulk download YouTube videos on Linux and then convert the FLV files to MPG video and MP3 audio files.

My contract with T-Mobile is up soon and I've been looking around for a new cell phone service provider. I have a Palm T|X and a Nokia cell phone, but I'm hoping that my next mobile device will combine a PDA and a phone into one device. Here are some results of my research.

Web designers often link to index.html in directories throughout a Web site — or even worse, only partially throughout a Web site. If you are dealing with a static HTML site, it should be fairly easy to fix with this recipe.

I was using Cygwin for a script that incorporated a Ruby one-liner in it. I was having trouble because I kept getting the error message No such file to load -- ubygems (LoadError).

The answer to the Ruby/Cygwin problem is here.

You can check the year that a domain was registered with the following command:

whois example.com | grep -i 'creat' | head -n1 | grep -o '[[:digit:]]{4}'

The above line does the following:

1. The whois command gets the WHOIS record for the domain example.com.
2. The grep command extracts the line that says Creation date or Creation. The -i option means to search case-insensitively.
3. head -n1 returns just the first line that matches, otherwise you may end up with two lines matching.
4. The final grep -o extract just the 4 digits on the line — that should give you the year that the domain was registered.

You can extract the exact day with the following command:

whois example.com | grep -i 'creat' | head -n1 | \
egrep -o '[[:digit:]]{2}-[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,10}-[[:digit:]]{4}'

It works in a similar manner to the first example, but uses a regular expression to extract the full date.

You can also run this on a list of domains in a text file by reading each line of the file.

I went to the mall today to find a sturdier laptop bag. I've had my current laptop bag for fewer than three months and it's already falling apart.

I couldn't find a decent laptop bag, so I took a walk through the software section of the store. Here are some photos, taken with my cell phone:

You can quickly scrape Web pages in a rough manner with the Lynx Browser and grep (and other tools that will be explained in the near future). Lynx is able to dump the contents of Web pages in two ways: only the text of the page, or the entire HTML source of the page.