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Test network speed without wasting disk
The above command will send 4GB of data from one host to the next over the network, without consuming any unnecessary disk on either the client nor the host. This is a quick and dirty way to benchmark network speed without wasting any time or disk space. Of course, change the byte size and count as necessary. This command also doesn't rely on any extra 3rd party utilities, as dd, ssh, cat, /dev/zero and /dev/null are installed on all major Unix-like operating systems.

Copy the text from the 3rd line to the 9th line into a new file with VI

Url Encode
Returns URL Encoded string from input ($1).

List total available upgrades from apt without upgrading the system
This let's you find out the total packages that have available upgrades. Usefull if you want to check or show the total available upgrades on your system.

netstat with group by (ip adress)
Same as the rest, but handle IPv6 short IPs. Also, sort in the order that you're probably looking for.

Center text in console with simple pipe like
Center the output text in max line length of buffered output pipe;

vim easter egg
inside vim try: :help 42 to get the meaning of life, the universe and everything !

Shows physically connected drives (SCSI or SATA)
This will show all physically connected SATA (and SCSI) drives on your system. This is particularly useful when troubleshooting hard disks.... or when a mount point seems to be missing.

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.

Remove embedded fonts from a pdf.
It's sometimes useful to strip the embedded fonts from a pdf, for importing into something like Inkscape. Be warned, this will increase the size of a pdf substantially. I tried this with only gs writing with -sDEVICE=pdfwrite but it doesn't seem to work, so I just pipe postscript output to ps2pdf for the same effect.


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