Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.

When using a slow connection such as via a mobile phone, even a command line prompt via ssh can be slow to type on at times.

The ‘rlwrap’ command works around the fact that each character sometimes take a long time to be echoed back to your client, by allowing you to prepare the line ( Read more... )

Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.

The file ~/.bashrc can contain a definition of the variable PS1 which is used to determine the prompt used on a command line. Normally this would display the username, hostname, working directory and is often modified to include additional information such as the time of day the ( Read more... )

Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.

OS X has no ‘rename’ command which can be used on some Linux distributions to apple a perl regular expression to modify the name of a file, so I cooked-up this line instead to change m4v filenames to mp4:

for i in *.m4v ; do mv "$i" "`echo $i | sed 's/m4v/mp4/'`" ; done

The three ( Read more... )

Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.

A few applications I’ve encountered recently:

• Rember: GUI-based memory test tool
• AppleJack: text-mode disk maintenance
• DiskWave: measure disk space usage by files and directories
• BetterTouchTool - add gesture actions for touchpad, magic mouse and more

Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.

Sometimes when files are downloaded by automated download scripts, or just saved directly from a website, the filenames contain ASCII characters encoded with the percentage symbol, e.g.:

This%20filename%20contains%20spaces.html

Whilst this is considered bad practice, it is sometimes ( Read more... )

Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.

shell -$SHELL

Add the above line to your ~/.screenrc, this will make screen start-up using a login shell which will load your ~/.bash_profile.

Thanks to Robbie on stackoverflow.com for this one.

Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.

So, today’s APOD is particularly awesome and got me thinking about how to automate downloading the image to my desktop background once a day. I imagine the regexp here is a hideous hack, but it works (for today’s html); I shall have to look into this further tomorrow.

In summary:
1) ( Read more... )

Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.

I put a 1.5 TB SATA disk into an external USB enclosure to use my Eee as a media server, and it runs great with fuppes from my PS3, but when leaving the machine running for several hours, it would result in the disk not being accessible.

Apr 18 10:10:28 ubuntu-eee kernel: [183391. ( Read more... )

Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.

There are many posts online regarding the fact that you can allow Mac OS X’s built-in backup software, Time Machine, to backup to an NFS volume, but what is not mentioned on many of these pages is the fact the format of the sparsebundle has changed, so an additional step is necessary ( Read more... )

Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.

Here are some useful sites I found when looking up keyboard shortcuts for my Macbook:

• Keyboard shortcuts
• Boot Camp installation instructions
• Lifehacker guide to switching to a Mac

I have considered triple-booting my Mac with Ubuntu and Windows, but I gather this is quite difficult; the ( Read more... )