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Requires figlet. Other than that, this should be portable enough across all the Bourne-compatible shells (sh, bash, ksh, zsh, etc).
Produces a massive number using figlet that counts down the number of seconds for any given minute interval. For example, here's a 4-minute timer:
$ i=$((4*60)); while [ $i -gt 0 ]; do clear; echo $i | figlet; sleep 1; i=$(($i-1)); done;
And a 1-minute timer:
$ i=$((1*60)); while [ $i -gt 0 ]; do clear; echo $i | figlet; sleep 1; i=$(($i-1)); done;
Useful if you need to add another key and you using pem files (typical in AWS EC2 Instances).
If you use it in EC2 instances, remember that password authentication is disabled, so you have to use the first key generated when you generated the instance
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"
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.
This command will transcode a MythTV recording. The target device is a Google Nexus One mobile phone. My recordings are from a HDHomerun with Over The Air content. Plays back nicely on the N1.
In certain cases you mighy need to monitor the server load caused by certain process. For example HTTP, while stress testing apache using ab (apache benchmark) you may want to monitor the server status,load, # of spawned HTTP processes, # of established connections, # of connections in close wait state, apache memory footprint etc.
Note:
1) Replace 'wonder' with any word you looking the meaning for in the above example
2) Need to install these packages:
wordnet & wordnet-base (latter should be automatically installed because of dependency)
3) Combined size of packages is about 30MB on my old ubuntu system (I find it worth it)
Online games have pretty good lag compensation nowadays, Sometimes though, you really want to get some warning about your latency, e.g. while playing Diablo III in Hardcore mode, so you know when to carefully quit the game b/c your flatmate started downloading all his torrents at once.
This is done on Darwin. On Linux/*nix you would need to find another suitable command instead of `say` to spell out your latency. And I used fping because it's a little bit easier to get the latency value needed. Something similar with our regular ping command could look like this:
$ while :; do a=$(ping -c1 google.com | grep -o 'time.*' | cut -d\= -f2 | cut -d\ -f1 | cut -b1-4); [[ $a > 40 ]] && say "ping is $a"; sleep 3; done
