Geek Stuff category archive
Stop Stressing and Take the Bus 0
While Google fiddles about with its driverless car, Switzerland gets serious.
More at the link.
Make TWUUG Your LUG 0
Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Learn how to use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do.
It’s not hard; it’s just different.
What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.
Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.
Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.
When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, November 5.
Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)
Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)
Join the forums.
Geeking Out 0
Streaming music from KCEA in the Qmmp media player with the Project M visualization plugin in a PC-BSD Virtual Machine running in VirtualBox on Slackware –Current.
What If Someone Proposed a Bill and Nobody Noticed? 0
Everybody’s a narcissist.
“It is completely reprehensible that people were sitting there on [parliament’s] opening day and tweeting,” Kjærsgaard told BT.
Droning On 0
Mike Kelly’s buddy has bought a quadcopter and wants to take it out joyriding. Mike is not sanguine. Here’s a bit from his column.
A drone.
My friend, with laughter interrupting his words, went on to point out how much “fun” he was already having, flying his remote-controlled device up to 1,000 feet above ground and hovering over friends’ houses or cruising down various streets. He said he might even drop into someone’s back yard and snap some candid photographs before buzzing off, leaving everyone to wonder what had just taken place.
“Isn’t that illegal?” I asked.
“Not at all,” he said.
And that’s the problem.
Boys and their toys: a combination that unerringly eventually spells s-t-u-p-i-d.
Regular Expressions Make My Brain Hurt 0
If they also make your brain hurt, here’s a good tutorial.
If you are not sure what Regular Expressions (often called “regex”) are, they are a versatile tool for searching text for specific strings. You can search for strings with various permutations and qualifications.
Here’s an example, illustrating a search of the file /usr/doc/HTML/en/common/gpl-license for the any occurrence of a string including two characters followed by the characters “cept” (the -i means “ignore case”). The working directory was /usr/doc/HTML/en/common/, which is where the GNU Public License resides in Slackware –Current.
The text is choppy because the output of the command displays individual lines from the text file, rather than sentences:
$ grep -i "..cept" gpl-license
License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but
special exception, the source code distributed need not include except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not
prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by
Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and
make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals
FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN
Here’s some more searches I did during the tutorial:
grep "^[A-Z].*\.$" gpl-license <--Searches for all lines starting with capital letters or ending with periods.
egrep "(public license)" gpl-license <--Searches for all lines including the string "public license."
grep "^[A-Z]" gpl-license <--searches for all lines starting with capital letters.
These are very simple regex searches.
Here’s a complex regular expression string that I grabbed from a website. Note that it is just the search string, not prefaced by a search command:
\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,}\b
When I understand that, I will consider that I have achieved geekdom.
Yes, this is my idea of fun.
Facebook Frolics, No Place To Hide Dept. 0
The Zuckerborg is watching you, even if you’re not watching it. Also, forget about “Don’t be evil.”
Follow the link and then reconsider some of your computing choices.
Full Geek 0
I consider the coolest thing I did all day was to print a text file from the command line with the lp command.
See man lp for more.
Addendum:
I printed a file with lp over ssh today, Friday.
Use Linux. It just works.
Facebook Frolics 0
No, you cannot frolic in private and all the gobbledygook in the world won’t change that.
iJunker 0
Hear the latest about the Apple car.