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Look at your data as a greymap image.
Keep width to a power of 2 to see patterns emerge. 512 is good. So is 4096 for huge maps. PNM headers are super basic. http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbm.html

Commandline document conversion with Libreoffice
In this example, the docx gets converted to Open Document .odt format. For other formats, you'll need to specify the correct filter (Hint: see "Comments" link below for a nice list).

Ultimate current directory usage command
An NCurses version of the famous old 'du' unix command

resize all JPG images in folder and create new images (w/o overwriting)
Convert all jpegs in the current directory into ~1024*768 pixels and ~ 150 KBytes jpegs

The Chronic: run a command every N seconds in the background
Chronic Bash function: $ chronic 3600 time # Print the time in your shell every hour $ chronic 60 updatedb > /dev/null # update slocate every minute Note: use 'jobs' to list background tasks and fg/bg to take control of them.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Display your ${PATH}, one directory per line
This works in bash and zsh. You may also want to alias it, if you need to look at it often... $ alias lpath="echo \$PATH | tr : \\\\n" "\$PATH" to make sure to look at your current $PATH

Downsample mp3s to 128K
This will lower the quality of mp3 files, but is necessary to play them on some mobile devices.

analyze traffic remotely over ssh w/ wireshark
This captures traffic on a remote machine with tshark, sends the raw pcap data over the ssh link, and displays it in wireshark. Hitting ctrl+C will stop the capture and unfortunately close your wireshark window. This can be worked-around by passing -c # to tshark to only capture a certain # of packets, or redirecting the data through a named pipe rather than piping directly from ssh to wireshark. I recommend filtering as much as you can in the tshark command to conserve bandwidth. tshark can be replaced with tcpdump thusly: $ ssh root@example.com tcpdump -w - 'port !22' | wireshark -k -i -

put current directory in LAN quickly
This works on all versions of python 2.X. Tested on Linux and bundled python versions on Mac OSX and Solaris / UNIX Note: Serves globally on port 8000. Ctrl+c to stop. Don't start the server and leave it on a internet connected machine. :)


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