Tricks

  • Make xterm show UTF-8 LANG=utf-8 export $LANG locale
  • When going to machines that don't understand utf-8 but do latin1 (iso-5589-1), invoke xterm as: xterm -en iso-5589-1
  • Making Gmail use fixed text format (Firefox)
    On file ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/chrome/userChrome.ccs
    Add the lines:

    /* GMail fixed-width font: see http://3cx.org/item/34 */
    div.msg div.mb { font-family: monospace !important; font-size: 12px !important; }
    textarea.tb { font-family: monospace !important; font-size: 12px !important; }
    td.ct { font-family: monospace !important; font-size: 12px !important; }
  • Making videos out of png figures
    mogrify -format jpg -quality 90 *.png
    mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf fps=3:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -oac copy -o output.avi -ffourcc DX5
    from: http://dawes.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/animating-png-files/

  • Create a list of installed packages Make the list:
    dpkg --get-selections > installed-software
    Use the list:
    dpkg --set-selections < installed-software
    dselect
  • See the USB (and other) devices info and power consumptio:
    cat /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/product
    cat /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/bMaxPower