Commands by supervacuo (1)

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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.

Create multiple mp4 files using avidemux
Convert multiple files using avidemux. Version updated (thanks to the guys who helped me giving me hints about how to improve the command). Works with files whose name contains blank characters. One of the reasons why I love open source: everyone can take something "done" and improve it to make it better! If u have suggestions, please let me know.

grep compressed log files without extracting
accomplishes the same thing without unzipping the whole file, and while i have never seen a log.tar.gz file that was a binary, i will concede that it might happen, so add the -a in there: $zgrep -ia "string" log.tar.gz it's still shorter/easier to type...

Stop or Start (Restart) a Windows service from a Linux machine
Control (stop, start, restart) a Windows Service from a Linux machine which has the `net` command (provided by samba).

use mplayer to watch Apple Movie Trailer instead of quicktime player
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/ just copy the .mov link and use mplayer to stream

Find out how old a web page is
I used to use the Firefox "View page info" feature a lot to determine how stale the web page I was looking at was. Now that I use mostly Chrome I miss that feature, so here is a command line alternative using wget. The -S says to display the server response, the --spider says to not download any files/pages, just fetch the header. The output goes to stderr, so to grep it you use 2>&1 to combine the stderr stream with stdout, the pipe that to grep for Last-Modified. You can use curl instead if you have it installed, like this: $ curl --head -s http://osswin.sourceforge.net | grep Mod

Copy ssh keys to user@host to enable password-less ssh logins.
To generate the keys use the command ssh-keygen

Copy a file structure without files
Taken from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum40/1310.htm

First pass dvd rip... The set of commands was too long, so I had to separate them into two.
This set of commands will rip a dvd title using a 2 pass mencoder xvid encode. It will provide a great quality rip. It will rip as close to 700MB as possible. (note the bitrate of -700000) Enjoy!

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