Author: cobra_admin

There are a number of ways to convert CDs into MP3s in Ubuntu. For me, the best choice is Sound Juicer because of it’s filename flexibility and ability to deal with compilations. Setting it all up is also very simple. Only two packages are required from the repository. They can be installed with the following …

Ever jumped onto an Ubuntu server somewhere without knowing which operating system version it’s running? You can find this out with one simple command: lsb_release -a This will provide output like: Distributor ID: UbuntuDescription: Ubuntu 9.10Release: 9.10Codename: karmic

Sometimes in a terminal you want to strip out the first line of output from a command. For example, you may want to generate a list of users which have tasks running using the ps command. This command puts a header at the top of the output. You can remove this header by piping the …

The Amazon Kindle is a great little device which stores it’s documents unencrypted and unhidden on it’s hard drive, just like you would on your PC. This means you can add and remove documents as though it was a USB drive. It’s that easy. But on Ubuntu when you plug it in, nothing happens. The …

In unix, you can pass output from one program to another using the pipe symbol (|). Unfortunately, it only pipes the output from stdout (cout). You can pass the output from both stdout and stderr (cerr) by adding 2>&1 to the end of the command before the pipe, where 1 is the file descriptor for stdout and …

Japanese, like many other Asian languages, is written using a variety of symbols which are not found in the standard ASCII table. Fortunately, you can include these symbols in LaTeX documents using the CJK package. In ubuntu this can be installed via the sudo apt-get install latex-cjk-japanese command. I’m not sure about Windows, Mac or …

There are various reasons you may want to set your IP address to be static, one of these being to reduce boot time by removing DHCP discovery. Doing this in Linux is quite straight forward. If you want to make your current IP address your static address, you can find the details in a few …

With Docker, you can specify the command to run inside the container on the command line. But what if you want to run multiple commands? You can’t escape the && syntax, or wrap the command in quotes, as Docker won’t recognise it. The trick here is to use sh -c ” For example, to run …