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Use socat to emulate an SMTP mail SERVER
Lots of scripts show you how to use socat to send an email to an SMTP server; this command actually emulates an SMTP server! It assumes the client is only sending to one recipient, and it's not at all smart, but it'll capture the email into a log file and the client will stop retrying. I used this to diagnose what emails were being sent by cron and subsequently discarded, but you can use it for all sorts of things.

Jump to line X in file in Nano.
Starts the cursor on line X of file foo. Useful for longer files in which it takes a long time to scroll. If X is greater than the number of lines in file foo, it will go to the last existing line.

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 days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

How to trim a video using ffmpeg
Will trim the video to 4 seconds starting from the beginning. The -vcodec , -acodec options are required so that ffmpeg knows in what video/audio format you want for the new video.

Edit video by cutting the part you like without transcoding.
Examples: The following will take frames starting at 15.2 seconds for a total of 45.9 seconds: $ mencoder -ss 15.2 -endpos 30.7 -oac copy -ovc copy mymovie.avi -o myeditedmovie.avi Keep in mind -endpos is the total time, i.e. the output video in this is 3 minutes 3 seconds in length: $ mencoder -ss 1 minute -endpos 2 minutes 3 seconds -oac copy -ovc copy mymovie.avi -o myeditedmovie.avi

Brute force discover
Show the number of failed tries of login per account. If the user does not exist it is marked with *.

Run bash on top of a vi session (saved or not saved), run multiple commands, instead of one at a time with :!(bashcommand), type exit and [enter] to get back to where you left off in vi.
Helps when I'm editing a script and want to double check some commands without having to exit out of vi multiple times or having to use another terminal session.

Text message on wallpaper
Display some text on the wallpaper especially warning messages

Takes and displays screenshot of Android phone over adb.
Dependencies on phone: adb access, screencap command, base64 command. Dependencies on computer: adb, sed, base64, display (from imagemagick, but can substitute other image viewer which reads from stdin). This should work around adb stupidies (i.e. that it replaces \n with \r\n) with base64.


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