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Redirect incoming traffic to SSH, from a port of your choosing
Stuck behind a restrictive firewall at work, but really jonesing to putty home to your linux box for some colossal cave? Goodness knows I was...but the firewall at work blocked all outbound connections except for ports 80 and 443. (Those were wide open for outbound connections.) So now I putty over port 443 and have my linux box redirect it to port 22 (the SSH port) before it routes it internally. So, my specific command would be: $iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 22 Note that I use -A to append this command to the end of the chain. You could replace that with -I to insert it at the beginning (or at a specific rulenum). My linux box is running slackware, with a kernel from circa 2001. Hopefully the mechanics of iptables haven't changed since then. The command is untested under any other distros or less outdated kernels. Of course, the command should be easy enough to adapt to whatever service on your linux box you're trying to reach by changing the numbers (and possibly changing tcp to udp, or whatever). Between putty and psftp, however, I'm good to go for hours of time-killing.

encode HTML entities
Encodes HTML entities from input (file or stdin) so it's possible to directly past the result to a blog or HTML source file.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Get IP address from domain
I'm not sure how reliable this command is, but it works for my needs. Here's also a variant using grep. nslookup www.example.com | grep "^Address: " | awk '{print $2}'

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Find out current working directory of a process

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.

Change gnome-shell wallpaper

Print the IP address and the Mac address in the same line
Print the IP address and the Mac address in the same line


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