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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.

Stream (almost) any music track in mplayer
Just give it an artist and/or song at the end of the command as shown.

Insert the last argument of the previous command
for example if you did a: $ ls -la /bin/ls then $ ls !$ is equivalent to doing a $ ls /bin/ls

Create an audio test CD of sine waves from 1 to 99 Hz
This command creates and burns a gapless audio CD with 99 tracks. Each track is a 30 second sine wave, the first is 1 Hz, the second 2 Hz, and so on, up to 99 Hz. This is useful for testing audio systems (how low can your bass go?) and for creating the constant vibrations needed to make non-Newtonian fluids (like cornstarch and water) crawl around. Note, this temporarily creates 500MB of .cdda files in the current directory. If you don't use the "rm" at the end of the command, you can burn more disks using $ cdrdao write cdrdao.toc Prerequisites: a blank CD-R in /dev/cdrw, sox (http://sox.sourceforge.net/), and cdrdao (http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/). I'm also assuming a recent version of bash for the brace expansion (which just looks nicer than using seq(1), but isn't necessary).

Find the biggest files on your hard drive

See your current RAM frequency
man dmidecode [look for type]

Change display resolution
-s must be a valid resolution. You can get a list of valid (and supported) resolutions via `xrandr`.

List all symbolic links in current directory that matches regexp
Perl alternative to list symlinks with a clumsy regexp filter: place the regex instead of he example 'libxml' and end it with a wildchar to see the results (previous cd on dir). Is it possible change the '-l' test for '-d' and it will search for directories. [Same applies for -x and -X. See $(perldoc -f -x) for more tests]. I use it quite often when dealing with shared libraries...

Repeatedly purge orphaned packages on Debian-like Linuxes
Upgraded Debian/Ubuntu/etc. systems may have a number of "orphaned" packages which are just taking up space, which can be found with the "deborphan" command. While you could just do "dpkg --purge $(deborphan)", the act of purging orphans will often create more orphans. This command will get them all in one shot.

Create a single PDF from multiple images with ImageMagick
Given some images (jpg or other supported formats) in input, you obtain a single PDF file with an image for every page.


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