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Sysadmin day date of any given year
Calculate the date of Sysadmin day (last Friday of July) of any given year

exclude a column with cut
Show all columns except 5th. This might help you save some typing if you are trying to exclude some columns from the output.

List your largest installed packages (on Debian/Ubuntu)

Console clock -- within screen
Configures screen to always display the clock in the last line (has to be configured only once). After that you not only have got the possibility to detach sessions and run them in background, but also have got a nice clock permanently on your screen.

Convert a MOV captured from a digital camera to a smaller AVI
Convert those .mov files that your digital camera makes to .avi Adjust the bitrate (-b) to get the appropriate file size. A larger bitrate produces a larger (higher quality) .avi file and smaller bitrate produces a smaller (lower quality) .avi file. Requires ffmpeg (see man page for details) (tested with canon camera MOV files) Other examples: $ffmpeg -i input.mov -sameq -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec pcm_u8 output.avi $ffmpeg -i input.mov -b 1024k -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec pcm_u8 output.avi

Capture screen and mic input using FFmpeg and ALSA
Yet another x11grab using ffmpeg. I also added mic input to the capturing video stream using alsa. Yet I need to find out how to capture audio which is currently playing.

Log the current memory statistics frequently to syslog
Uses logger in a while loop to log memory statistics frequently into the local syslog server.

Find out my Linux distribution name and version

Find the package that installed a command

sudo for launching gui apps in background
Need package: gksu Note: Launching gui app in background that needs sudo, won't work great with our old friendly style of launching: $ sudo gedit /etc/passwd & because this would put sudo in background ! Using gksudo as demonstrated, would popup a gui sudo window. May be this is a common knowledge, but not knowing this frustrated me during my newbie year.


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