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tell if a port is in use
if you don't do --numeric-ports, netstat will try to resolve them to names

get cookies from firefox
useful to use after with the --load-cookies option of wget

zsh suffix to inform you about long command ending
make, find and a lot of other programs can take a lot of time. And can do not. Supppose you write a long, complicated command and wonder if it will be done in 3 seconds or 20 minutes. Just add "R" (without quotes) suffix to it and you can do other things: zsh will inform you when you can see the results. You can replace zenity with other X Window dialogs program.

Command line calculator
This function defines a command line calculator that handles everything pythons math module can handle, e.g. trigonometric functions, sqrt, log, erf, ... (see http://docs.python.org/library/math.html). It even knows about the constants pi and e.

Extract title from HTML files
not the best, uses 4 pipes!

Keep from having to adjust your volume constantly
Run this in the directory you store your music in. mp3gain and vorbisgain applies the ReplayGain normalization routine to mp3 and ogg files (respectively) in a reversible way. ReplayGain uses psychoacoustic analysis to make all files sound about the same loudness, so you don't get knocked out of your chair by loud songs after cranking up the volume on quieter ones.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Streaming HTML5 video to icecast server using dvgrab, ffmpeg2theora and oggfwd
Streaming HTML5 compatible video (Ogg Theora video with Vorbis sound) to an Icecast server using dvgrab, ffmpeg2theora and oggfwd. In this example I'm merging stereo sound to mono (-c 1), saving the original dv for later higher quality on-demand video (tee dvstream.dv), saving the theora stream for immediate on-demand video, and publishing the stream in Xiph's stream directory (-p and the name and description). The URL of the video will be (depending on your server) http://my.icecastserver.com/stream.ogv which will play in newer Firefox, Chrome and Opera web browsers. Cortado (a Java player) can easily be used for IE. Note also that I'm using port 80, which is not the default port for Icecast, this is to avoid restrictive firewalls. Also note that ffmpeg2theora 0.25 and will heed the bitrates much better than former versions because of using libtheora 1.1 or newer.

Blue Matrix
Same as original, but works in bash

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.


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