PawEng

The gHacks blog has a post about the 5 Things Linux does better than Windows. Reading it got me thinking about a situation I had recently. I had close to 40 thousand text files, and I needed a list of all unique files. I wouldn’t even know how to attach that problem in Windows. With [...]

VLC Media Player version 0.9.9 has been released. It is mainly a bug-fix release. VLC is a free and open source cross-platform media play. It supports a large number of multimedia formats, and it can stream sound and video between computers. VLC is one of my favorite media players. I especially like how it can [...]

Many Linux / Unix programs create temporary files with names like “#file#” or “file~”. If a program crashes, you may be left with “core” files. These files serve a purpose, but quite often it is useful to remove them. I have been using the script below for a decade or more to keep my directories [...]

Now that computers have become so powerful, it is possible to simultaneously run multiple operating systems on a single computer. I like to use Windows as my main operation system, but sometimes I need access to a Linux system. Dual-booting Windows an Linux is possible, but often I want to juggle back and forth between [...]

So you use Gmail as your main email account? But what happens if you get locked out of Gmail? What if you can’t access your email? That is a pretty serious situation in today’s world where more and more things happen online. This is where Gmail Backup comes in. It is a tool for backing [...]

Scott Klarr has collected a huge number of cheat sheets for everything from programming to Photoshop. They are organized in groups, and some groups like the Linux / Unix group contain more than 70 cheat sheets. The groups include: C, C++, C# Gimp Windows Networking Linux / Unix Designer color charts Vi & Vim Emacs [...]

Slashdot asked their readers to write about useful tricks for Unix, Vim, and Emacs. It makes for some interesting reading. (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks? (Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks? (Stupid) Useful Emacs Tricks? Update on 11/10/2008: Slashdot posted another one: (Useful) Stupid Regex Tricks?

TrueCrypt is free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. It provides transparent on-the-fly encryption. You can create and mount encrypted drives — either as separate files or entire partitions. TrueCrypt uses AES-256, Serpent, and Twofish encryption. TrueCrypt has the ability to create encrypted volumes inside one another. Since a [...]

A digital camera’s sensor has a more limited dynamic range than the human eye. This means that if you expose a photo for the bright areas, the camera may not “see” details in the dark area that your eye can see. Likewise, if you expose a photo for the shadows, the camera may not “see” [...]

Version 3.0 of the free, multi-platform, multi-language office package OpenOffice.org has been released. The release has been long awaited. The OpenOffice.org website is so busy that only a bare minimum download page is available due to overloaded servers. I have been using previous versions of OpenOffice.org for a while, and I look forward to trying [...]