Governments around the world are hacking into any computer that they can find. They are not just targeting large companies, but any computer that has information that they can sell. Is there anything ...
A friend recently asked me to create Secure Vehicle Storage, and it reminded me that somewhere along the way, people were convinced that having a web site means paying somebody forever. You pay for th ...
In my previous article about creating a "mountable" disk image in GNU/Linux, I explained how to create a file that effectively mimics the functionality of a disk: I explained how to create a file whic ...
In this article I will explain how to create a file that works like a USB drive -- without the "physical" side of a USB disk. The advantage of making such a file is that you can make it encrypted; as ...
Think of a phone directory listing with a lot of Browns followed by some Brownes, Brownings and Brownleys. Is there a simple way to identify the places in the sorted list where Brown changes to Browne ...
Since discovering AWK last year I've been using it regularly with tables of data. It seems like everything I do with those tables is faster and easier with AWK on the command line than the same jobs w ...
One of the special problems with managing a multimedia project (versus a text-based software project), is that there are often links to external data files which can get broken when you try to move th ...
In a previous article I introduced the idea of modifying text between copy and paste in Linux, using a 'CoPa' script based on the `xclip` utility. Please refer to that article for the basic ideas. Her ...
/tmp is a vital ingredient of any Unix-like OS. If your /tmp is too small, but you only discover that fact when you are in the middle of a crucial task, is all lost? Or is there a way to avoid the wor ...
This is an odd story. It began about 10 years ago, when I needed a database, then it moved back 30 years, and now I don't need one. Confused? I promise to explain, and also to demonstrate some surpris ...
This article describes a simple but useful hack: putting an `xclip` script between copy and paste. I call it 'CoPa scripting'.
Have you ever wanted to split a spreadsheet into several spreadsheets according to the contents of a particular field? For example, you might have a music tracks spreadsheet with an 'artist name' fiel ...
Some webpages contain email links. If you right-click on the link in most Web browsers, a menu appears that lets you copy the email address to the clipboard (first screenshot). You can then paste the ...
LibreOffice only knows how to spell a few scientific names, and the more scientific names you use in a Writer document, the more your pages fill up with squiggly red underlining – indicating misspelle ...
If I see a color on my computer screen that I'd like to use somewhere else, I want to know that color's hexadecimal code. Conversely, if I see a color's hex code, I want to know what that coded color ...
I recently wanted to export my email address book from Sylpheed email client and import it into my Gmail account. Unfortunately, Gmail wants to import contact lists as CSV files, and there isn't an ex ...
When you build or update a website, it's a good idea to check that all the links on your webpages are OK. An excellent tool for doing this under Linux is the aptly named _linkchecker_, a GPL-licensed, ...
My wife has a huge collection of Scottish country dancing music on her Linux laptop – more than 2000 dance tracks. Details of all tracks are recorded in an _OpenOffice Calc_ spreadsheet. She asked me, ...
I'm used to thinking of region codes as an unmitigated evil, but they do serve one useful purpose: they divide DVD editions up so that any given regional edition has fewer languages to support. It's u ...
Nowadays, we mostly interact with our computers using a Graphical User Interface. The operating system as a whole uses several elements of the GUI to make the user experience more human-like. Can user ...