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useless load
check your load with top... Start more of these jobs to get an multi-core cpu busy...

Git fetch all remote branches

Use xdg-open to avoid hard coding browser commands
I rarely use the system menu to start applications. I use keyboard shortcuts instead. Keyboard shortcuts are convenient time savers. To configure the shortcuts I use gconf-editor or CompizConfig Settings Manager (if I have Compiz turned on). Lately I've been using Chromium as my browser. Since Chromium is under heavy development it occasionally becomes unusable and I have to switch back to Firefox. I was hard-coding the browser command in my keyboard shortcuts. This became problematic with frequent browser hopping. I now use the xdg-open command when defining my keyboard shortcuts. xdg-open opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application. In the metacity keybinging_commands I have xdg-open http://gmail.com where I used to have firefox http://gmail.com. Now when switching browsers I don't have to update each keyboard binding command I just change my default browser in Ubuntu by clicking through the menu: System / Preferences / Preferred Applications / Web Browser. xdg-open is more convenient for this browser hopper.

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.

seconds since epoch to ISO timestamp
No need to use perl, awk, nor /usr/bin/date -- bash's "printf" builtin will do it.

Create QR codes from a URL.
like 7300, but doesn't clutter your working directory with old qr.*.png files. This will get the QR barcode, and send it right into ImageMagick's 'display' tool. Usage is the same as 7300; just call this function followed by the URL: $ qrurl http://xkcd.com

Start dd and show progress every X seconds
Adjust "sleep X" to your needs. *NOTE: First sleep is required because bash doesn't have a "post-test" syntax (do XXX while).

Forget remembered path locations of previously ran commands
i.e.: Useful if you add ~/bin to your $PATH and you want to override locations of previously ran commands and you don't want to log out and log back in to be able to use them.

Binary digits Matrix effect
Silly Perl variant.

host - DNS lookup utility
host is a simple utility for performing DNS lookups. It is normally used to convert names to IP addresses and vice versa. When no arguments or options are given, host prints a short summary of its command line arguments and options.


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