Sometimes when you're watching online videos on youtube or other sites, you want to save some of them for later offline playback. You've probably heard of Firefox extensions like DownloadHeloper that can do this, but sometimes you may only have a bare version of Firefox, or perhaps a different browser, one that doesn't have a plugin for doing this. Using the tip below, you can save videos no matter what browser you're using.

Most of us default to wget, curl, netcat and others when in need of network data from the commandline, not knowing, or perhaps forgetting, that bash often provides the support that we need using redirection from /dev/proto/host/port.

The bash function presented here normalizes path names. By normalize I mean it removes unneeded /./ and ../dir sequences. For example, ../d1/./d2/../f1 normalized would be ../d1/f1.

According to its developers Guitarix is a monaural amplifier designed for creating the distorted sounds typical of thrash, heavy metal, blues, and other rock guitar styles. In fact, Guitarix is capable of much more than distortion sounds. In this article I'll remove the software speaker grill and pull out the virtual chassis to take a closer look at the sonic possibilities of this "simple mono amplifier".

The command deborphan can be used to check for unnecessary (orphaned) packages. By default deborphan searches for orphaned libraries, but you can have it search for other types of packages also: data packages, dev packages, etc. by specifying one of its many --guess-* command line options.

Four years ago, I wrote an article about OpenOffice.org writer called "Fielding Questions, Part 2 - Cross References and User-Defined Fields." I regularly receive mail about it, but these days I have to preface each reply by explaining that the article is obsolete. Repeating the explanation gets old quickly, so I decided that an update is necessary.

You can use the dd and nc commands for exact disk mirroring from one server to another. The following commands send data from Server1 to Server2:

Studio Dave is set up for personal audio production, but video capabilities are on the horizon. Digital video cameras are inexpensive and typically non-problematic with Linux, there are compelling professional reasons to get into video (Web-based tutorials are high on the list), and besides, it's just fun to play with video on the computer. Now the fun level has jumped up a few notches with version 1.0.0pre1 of LiVES, a video editing system for Linux.

Do you have a linux server without a keyboard or monitor? Need to administer the server on-site but don't want to lug over a monitor and keyboard (or kvm)? Then setup the server to output the console to a serial port and use screen/minicom (Hyperterminal or putty in Windows) to console into the server over a serial cable.