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shows history of logins on the server
perfect on a crashed system where you can't use commands like last. for investigation purposes wtmp file can be copied over to a different server and read with utmpdump

start a vnc server session to connect to a gdm login screen

Facebook Email Scraper
(Apparently it is too long so I put it in sample output, I hope that is OK.) Run the long command (or put it in your .bashrc) in sample output then run: $ fbemailscraper YourFBEmail Password Voila! Your contacts' emails will appear. Facebook seems to have gotten rid of the picture encoding of emails and replaced it with a text based version making it easy to scrape! Needs curl to run and it was made pretty quickly so there might be bugs.

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

converts a directory full of source tarballs into a bzr repository so you can compare different versions easily

Show URL/text in clipboard as QR code
Copy a URL (or Thai text, or whatever) and hit the keyboard shortcut for this fu to display it as a QR code. It's an "air gapped" way to send stuff to your phone [unlike google chart API etc.] as long as you watch out for cameras ;). dependencies [sudo apt-get install]: qrencode xclip xloadimage

Convert (almost) any video file into webm format for online html5 streaming
If you're using the experimental vorbis encoder (homebrew version of libffmpeg)

Sort output by column
(separator = $IFS)

Monitor progress of a command
Pipe viewer is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion. Source: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him


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