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play audio stream and video stream in two different mplayer instances
Sometimes audio and video are not sync'ed. The factor 1.0884 is the quotient 48000/44100. One mplayer plays the audio file in the background, the other the video in the foreground. You can dump the audio file before with another commandlinefu

Find the package that installed a command

Watch for when your web server returns
If your web server is down, this command will periodically attempt to connect to it. If the output is blank, your server is not yet up. If you see HTML, your server is up. Obviously, you need to replace the Google URL with your web server URL... * 'watch' -- a command for re-executing a command and displaying the output * '-n 15' -- tells watch to redo the command every 15 seconds * 'curl' -- a handy utility for getting the source of a web page * '-s' -- tells curl to be silent about failing * '--connect-timeout 10' -- Try to connect for 10 seconds

Mac OS-X-> copy and paste things to and from the clipboard from the shell
Copies whatever is piped to the pbcopy command to the clipboard. pbpaste ... well pastes whats on the clipboard.

Generate soothing noise
Substitute 'brown' with 'pink' or 'white' according to your taste. I put this on my headphones when I'm working in an "open concept" office, where there are always three to five conversations going in earshot, or if I'm working somewhere it is "rude" of me to tell a person to turn off their cubicle radio.

Set CDPATH to ease navigation
CDPATH tells the cd command to look in this colon-separated list of directories for your destination. My preferred order are 1) the current directory, specified by the empty string between the = and the first colon, 2) the parent directory (so that I can cd lib instead of cd ../lib), 3) my home directory, and 4) my ~/projects directory.

Simple XML tag extract with sed
Limited, but useful construct to extract text embedded in XML tags. This will only work if bar is all on one line. If nobody posts an alternative for the multiline sed version, I'll figure it out later...

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Copy your SSH public key on a remote machine for passwordless login.
Should run on any system with ssh installed.

creating you're logging function for your script
You could also pipe to logger.


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