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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.

Image to color palette generator
Extract a color palette from a image useful for designers. Example usage: $extract-palette myawesomeimage.jpg 4 Where the first argument is the image you want to extract a palette from. The second argument is the number of colors you want. It may be the case where you want to change the search space. In that case, change the -resize argument to a bigger or smaller result. See the ImageMagick documentation for the -resize argument.

Automator Bash script to create Clean zips in MacOS Finder without __MACOSX metadata
Finder compresses to ZIP but always includes extraneous metadata files (__MACOSX and .DS_Store) files and folders that may confuse other programs. One alternative is creating them and then editing the ZIP. This can work standalone or in an automator script accepting multiple selections (files or folders) and creating one zip per argument/selected file without that metada.

Job Control
You're running a script, command, whatever.. You don't expect it to take long, now 5pm has rolled around and you're ready to go home... Wait, it's still running... You forgot to nohup it before running it... Suspend it, send it to the background, then disown it... The ouput wont go anywhere, but at least the command will still run...

Prettify an XML file
Like `tidy`, `xmllint` can be used to prettify XML files. The --nsclean option is also useful to remove redundant namespaces.

merge vob files to mpg

finding cr-lf files aka dos files with ^M characters
its useful to run dos2unix command later on them.

strips the first field of each line where the delimiter is the first ascii character

mkdir & cd into it as single command
The biggest advantage of this over the functions is that it is portable.

Complete TCP Handshake on a given host-port
Try to perform a fully TCP 3 way handshake on for a given host-port with a timeout of 1s.


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