Hackszine.com

Linux Commands You've Never Used

2007-02-25T08:30:50Z


# lsof | grep TCP
portmap    2587   rpc  4u   IPv4     5544  TCP *:sunrpc (LISTEN)
rpc.statd  2606  root  6u   IPv4     5585  TCP *:668 (LISTEN)
sshd       2788  root  3u   IPv6     5991  TCP *:ssh (LISTEN)
sendmail   2843  root  4u   IPv4     6160  TCP badhd:smtp (LISTEN)
vsftpd     9337  root  3u   IPv4    34949  TCP *:ftp (LISTEN)
cupsd     16459  root  0u   IPv4    41061  TCP badhd:ipp (LISTEN)

Here's a short list of useful Linux shell programs, many of which you may have never known about. I've got a new favorite shell command, lsof (shown above), which displays information on every open file handle. - Link.

If I could add one to the list, it'd have to be the short and sweet command line search and replace using perl:

perl -pi -e 's/searchpattern/replacewith/g' *.html

Do you have a favorite command line secret? Please share it in the comments.

Stop receiving junk mail, almost

2007-02-24T15:39:59Z

KXAN.com has a list of address and some tips on getting rid of junk mail - (pictured here, another option, from Redpac.com - use their business reply mails to send them back their own junk mail...) -

This is the Postal Service Statement:
The Postal Service must deliver all properly posted mail. You can, however, reduce the amount of advertising mail you receive by contacting the following organizations to request removal of your name from mailing lists:

Mail Preference Service
Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 282
Carmel, NY 10512-0282

Trans Union LLC
Name Removal Option
P.O. Box 505
Woodlyn, PA 19094-0505

Experian Consumer Services
901 W. Bond Street
Lincoln, NE 68521-3694

Equifax Inc.
Name Removal Option
P.O. Box 740241
Atlanta, GA 30374-0241

Up to 90 percent of mailing lists are accessed by this process. Registrants generally note a decrease of unsolicited mail one to three months after their names are listed. Since some customers may receive mail under various names, include alternative names or spellings to ensure that the advertiser's mail is stopped.

In summary, by law we must deliver ALL mail that has been paid for - including your private personal mail and that of businesses and organizations.

Sick Of Junk Mail? We Can Help - [via] Link.

More:
U.S. Laws on Direct Mail - Link.

Intelligent Snooze Button Agent

2007-02-24T08:10:06Z

Have you ever gotten to work early due to light traffic and wished you'd slept in a bit later? Or maybe you've left on time, but arrived late because of a traffic jam? Greg McCarroll is working on the second iteration of a wired alarm clock that adjusts your wake-up time depending on traffic conditions.

Greg writes,

The original idea was simply to take the data I could access via the live departure boards feature of our railway network's website, which contained information about train departure times and all too often delays and apply it to the wake-up time of an "alarm clock".

Ever since, I've been wondering how I could apply my alarm clock hack to my daily drive and when I recently discovered the TFL Traffic Alerts Service I knew how to reawaken the project. Basically I intend to build a journey time predictor based on the following data,

The amount, proximity and severity of traffic alerts to my daily route.
Wheter or not it's a school holiday or not.
The day of the week (I have a pet theory that people start earlier on a Monday and slowly get later towards the friday).

A screen scraping agent, LEGO snooze button interface, airport express wake-up tunes, getting to sleep in, and never being late to work again. I love it.

Links:

Play Atari 2600 Games on Your Pocket PC or Smartphone

2007-02-23T18:22:29Z

Stella for Windows CE recently added support for some of the newer Windows Mobile smartphones, including QVGA devices like the T-Mobile Dash. This screencast shows how to set it up. - Link to video download.

Related:

Stella: "A multi-platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator" - Link
Buy the Rainbow Invaders Cartridge - Link
Rainbow Invaders - Link
Retro Gaming Hacks - Link

Skitch It

2007-02-23T17:52:33Z

Plasq, the company that brought us the fun and useful Comic Life that now ships with all new Macs, recently released a new product in private beta. Skitch is:

a refreshingly simple application that lets you easily resize your photos, jot down a quick sketch, take a lightning fast screen capture and share images online...

This looks like a lot of fun. I tried registering for their mailing list but encountered some trouble with their captcha. Anyone have any personal experiences to report? I can't wait to get my hands on it.

(Via Merlin, who appears to be one of the early beta testers)

Choose Your Own Product Placement

2007-02-23T17:33:52Z

Josh Paul, author of Digital Video Hacks, has created a pretty amazing product placement experiment:

While viewing, pay attention to the table; there will be a box of cereal on it (or not). The box of cereal can be changed by using the links below. After changing a placement, simply restart the video from the beginning.

The video is also clickable, so when a product is on screen, clicking on it leads to an appropriate web site.

Related:

Digital Video Hacks

Unclutter Your Desk

2007-02-23T08:11:54Z

Here's a great way to rid your desk of device clutter. Take everything but the monitor, keyboard, and mouse and zip-tie it all to the underside. - Link.

OUTDRA.WS - The most useful DIY post-it note

2007-02-22T23:09:18Z

Christopher writes -

I came up with this self-organizing post-it note that you can print on your home computer. It's helped me immensely, and I've received so many compliments, that I decided to make it available for free online.
If you're like me, you live your life on post-its. Everything from grocery lists, to new ideas, to super important phone numbers that I should never, ever lose. It means that when I'm looking for that super important number, I have to look through every other post-it to find the one I want.

ENTER THE OVERnote

The OVERnote is something I came up with to help me navigate this paper sea. Now my notes are self-catagorizing and I can find things at a glance.

OUTDRA.WS - Link.

AirPower - find places to plug in when you travel

2007-02-22T21:04:56Z

Jeff has a great power Wiki for when you travel and need to juice up your laptop -

This wiki is dedicated to helping you find power while travelling at airports around the globe. We also have a Flickr group to share photos - http://www.flickr.com/groups/airpower/ please link back to this Wiki if you post a photo.

AirPower Home - [via] Link.

Pictured here, power @ the N gate in SETAC by Travelin' Librarian.

Google Apps

2007-02-22T16:00:35Z

Google apps now have a fee version (well, free until April 30th) -- for $50 / year - the 10GB mail option is worth it for a lot of people I bet... Also, check this out -

The 99.9% uptime guarantee for Gmail is offered to organizations using Google Apps Premier Edition.

Google Apps - Link.

Related:

Google goes after Microsoft with software suite - Link.
A Google Package Challenges Microsoft - Link.
Google to launch business software - Link.

The terms of use is like 20 pages, I'm going to try and read it later.

Bootstrap Education

2007-02-22T09:34:16Z

I received an email today from an electrical engineering student who is looking for resources that could help expedite a hacker's education, especially with regard to computer science and operating systems. I know I've been on the other side of that email on several occasions. Strangely enough, it's usually been in search of E.E. resources.

To answer the immediate question, it seems that the greatest network and operating systems education must begin with a copy of Slackware, a three day weekend, and a bunch of Mountain Dew. Who can say where it ends, but I'm pretty sure it begins there.

This got me to thinking about bootstrap education in general, though. Of course, there's MIT's Open Courseware project, which has produced a wealth of publicly accessible course material on almost every imaginable topic. I'm definately excited for a world that can foster armchair astrophysicists and bioengineers, but I don't know that we're there yet.

What do you think? Are there particular fields of study that tend to be compatible with a bootstrap, self-guided education? What are the ideal study paths for tomorrow's hackers? Please share your thoughts and resources in the comments!

Coffee and global warming

2007-02-21T22:38:19Z

It's official coffee is the solution to, and cause of, every problem... National Geographic -

It's hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks--replacing the ubiquitous beer--facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee--or Diet Coke or Red Bull--to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn't exist.

Slurped in black coffee or sipped in green tea, gulped down in a soda or knocked back in a headache pill, caffeine is the world's most popular psychoactive drug - [TreeHugger points to global warming...] Link to National Geographic article...

Track Down Runaway Mac Apps

2007-02-20T03:02:55Z

Recently, there's been a lot of feedback and internal discussion around the topic of Powerbook Fever. Phil's post about using smcFanControl to cool you Mac down solves part of the problem, but Mac OS X in a Nutshell co-author Chris Stone suggests that overheating is often times the result of a runaway process:

Sounds like it's hung up on some process. What does 'top -u' show? The top line of processes there should show what's chewing up the CPU and causing the fan to stay on. Rebooting would of course clear that up, but if it starts happening again, check with "top".

It turns out that a runaway application will not only heat up your laptop, but sometimes even prevent it from sleeping correctly. Those of you that know your way around the command line know where to go from here: just open a terminal window and type top -u.

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE 1047 meanapp 99.3% 0:31.09 1 13 16 176K 560K 468K 26.6M 1049 top 14.6% 0:03.55 1 18 20 1.14M 612K 1.61M 26.9M 213 Terminal 0.6% 8:01.23 14 182 239 5.18M- 19.3M- 28.4M- 246M- 282 Safari 0.5% 2:03:22 12 393 2297 218M 81.9M 277M 833M

If you see an application that's consuming 99% CPU, such as 'meanapp' in the above example, it's probably the cause of your overheating and laptop sleep issues. Scribble down the process ID of the app (in this case 1047), type "q" to exit top, and force the application to quit by typing kill -9 1047, where 1047 is the troublesome process ID.

If this becomes a regular issue, track down the application that's consistently causing you problems. Chances are it's a third party application or driver that could use an upgrade.

Virtual PC 2007 Released; Why Won't It Use My WiFi Card?

2007-02-20T01:30:56Z

Microsoft just released Virtual PC 2007, which brings full support for Windows Vista as a guest and host operating system. If you have a wired and wireless connection in your computer, you might find that Virtual PC has ignored the wireless card during setup, but complains loudly about not being able to use that connection when you run a virtual machine.

To solve this problem, get to the network connection properties. In Vista, you can right-click on the network icon in the notification area, select Network and Sharing Center, then select Manage Network Connections. In the window that appears, find your wireless network connection, right-click on it, then choose properties. Check the box labeled Virtual Machine Network Services, and click OK:

Related

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 - Link
Virtual Machine Additions for Linux - Link
VMWare Workstation 6.0 Beta (with Vista host Support) - Link

Cool off your Macbook with smcFanControl

2007-02-19T13:34:56Z

Previously Dale had mentioned his Macbook was getting hot, here's a tool to manually control the fan to cool that puppy down...

Let's you set the minimum speed for each fan individually.
Adjust fan speed until the Macbook(Pro) is finally comfortable on your legs again
Auto apply mode to set the new fan-speeds after a restart
Sourcecode included! Extend it and change it to your needs

smcFanControl - Link.

More:
Updated version, smcFanControl 2.0 - Link.