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Weather on the Command line
Get your weather from a weather station just blocks from your home. Go to http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/ and find a weather station near you. Click on a temperature bubble for that area. When the window pops up, click on hypertext link with the station ID, then on the bottom right of the page, click on the Current Conditions XML. Thats your link! Good luck!

BackTrack Repos
Add the BackTrack repositories to your Debian based GNU/Linux distribution. Thanks to http://it-john.com/home/technology/linux-technology/add-back-track-4-repo-to-ubuntu/

Follow a new friend on twitter
replace username, password, and nameofnewfriend with proper values. Remember to escape things like ! or & in your password

Safe Russian Roulette (only echo, don't delete files)
Shows "Bang!" in a chance of 1 out of 6, like in the original game with the gun (spin every round). Otherwise, echoes "Click...". If feeling brave you can also do: $[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && echo 'Bang!' && a really killer command || echo 'Click...'

Get International Space Station sighting information for your city
This command outputs a table of sighting opportunities for the International Space Station. Find the URL for your city here: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Using vim to save and run your python script.
This will save and execute your python script every time your press the F5 function key. It can also be added to your .vimrc: autocmd BufRead *.py nmap :w^M:!python % NOTE: the ^M is not just caret-M, it can be created by type: ctrl-v ctrl-m

beep when a server goes offline
pings a server once per second, and beeps when the server is unreachable. Basically the opposite of: $ ping -a server-or-ip.com which would beep when a server IS reachable. You could also substitute beep with any command, which makes this a powerful alternative to ping -a: $ while true; do [ "$(ping -c1W1w1 server-or-ip.com 2>/dev/null | awk '/received/ {print $4}')" = 1 ] && date || echo 'server is down!'; sleep 1; done which would output the date and time every sec until the ping failed, in which case it would echo. Notes: Requires beep package. May need to run as root (beep uses the system speaker) Tested on Ubuntu which doesn't have beep out of the box... $ sudo apt-get install beep

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.

Update dyndns.org with your external IP.
This is great if you are behind a router that does not support dynamic dns updates! Example: AT&T u-verse gateway... Put this in a script and run it as a cron job.


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