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Rename files in batch

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Calculate N!
Same as the seq/bc solution but without bc.

Send an http HEAD request w/curl

Pretty Print a simple csv in the command line
Will handle pretty much all types of CSV Files. The ^M character is typed on the command line using Ctrl-V Ctrl-M and can be replaced with any character that does not appear inside the CSV. Tips for simpler CSV files: * If newlines are not placed within a csv cell then you can replace `map(repr, r)` with r

Easily scp a file back to the host you're connecting from
Place in .bashrc and invoke like this: "mecp /path/to/file", and it will copy the specified file(s) back to the desktop of the host you're ssh'ing in from. To easily upload a file from the host you're ssh'ing in from use this: ucp (){ scp ${SSH_CLIENT%% *}:Desktop/upload/* .; }

Pronounce an English word using Merriam-Webster.com
Looks up a word on merriam-webster.com, does a screen scrape for the FIRST audio pronunciation and plays it. USAGE: Put this one-liner into a shell script (e.g., ~/bin/pronounce) and run it from the command line giving it the word to say: $ pronounce lek If the word isn't found in merriam-webster, no audio is played and the script returns an error value. However, M-W is a fairly complete dictionary (better than howjsay.com which won't let you hear how to pronounce naughty words). ASSUMPTIONS: GNU's sed (which supports -r for extended regular expressions) and Linux's aplay. Aplay can be replaced by any program that can play .WAV files from stdin. KNOWN BUGS: only the FIRST pronunciation is played, which is problematic if you wanted a particular form (plural, adjectival, etc) of the word. For example, if you run this: $ pronounce onomatopoetic you'll hear a voice saying "onomatopoeia". Playing the correct form of the word is possible, but doing so might make the screen scraper even more fragile than it already is. (The slightest change to the format of m-w.com could break it).

Updates your no-ip.org account with curl

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

floating point operations in shell scripts
-l auto-selects many more digits (but you can round/truncate in your head, right) plus it loads a few math functions like sin().


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