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Chrome sucks

burn an ISO image to writable CD
Does life get much easier? Read up about wodim for an understanding of its origins in relation to the older `cdrecord` utility

live ssh network throughput test
connects to host via ssh and displays the live transfer speed, directing all transferred data to /dev/null needs pv installed Debian: 'apt-get install pv' Fedora: 'yum install pv' (may need the 'extras' repository enabled)

backup a directory in a timestamped tar.gz
creates a tar.gz with a name like: backup20090410_173053.tar.gz of a given directory. this file was made 10 April 2009 at 5:30:53pm see date's man page to customize the timestamp format

bulk rename files with sed, one-liner
Far from my favorite, but works in sh and with an old sed that doesn't support '-E'

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Safe Delete
remove file that has sensitive info safely. Overwrites it 33 times with zeros

convert ascii string to hex
You can use "decode()" in a similar manner: $ python -c 'print "68656c6c6f".decode("hex")'

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Gets the english pronunciation of a phrase
Usage examples: say hello say "hello world" say hello+world


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