Once again I have to copy tons of files to a USB stick, and it's way too slow. It's a known effect on Linux systems. Why filemanagers cannot recognize that, I don't know. It's be enough to copy files one by one (queuing) instead of starting all those operation all at once. It also happens on the com...

Towards the end (points 4. and 5.) this article has instructions on how to encrypt/decrypt any string. It might come in handy when e.g. checking your Email with curl, because one wouldn't want the password in plain text either on the command line or in some file. Here's a slightly refined version: o...

I sometimes use a shortcut to quickly translate snippets of highlighted text, via google translate. I hate to admit it, but it does this best. It auto-detects the input language and defaults to english for output, which is what I need in most cases. There's a few applications for translating text sn...

You want to see how your Linux system reacts to a certain peripheral being plugged in (smartphone, monitor, USB stick etc.). dmesg can provide that information, but one needs to separate that from previous messages. Here's how: Make sure the device in question is unplugged. Open a terminal, maximis...

I feel the need to migrate all my github stuff to somewhere else. Because Microsoft is buying Github. Gitlab does not seem to be that much different. In the end, I chose two providers: framagit.org and notabug.org - just to be on the safe side. The migration itself happened via web interface and isn...

Inspired by a forum thread Make a choice of which shell you use, that's the "#/bin/..." at the top: dash: very small & fast but limited. you will have to use more external commands to accomplish things. bash: bulkier, takes longer to load, maybe slightly slower, but: you can accomplish much m...

The man command uses a pager, that is responsible for pagination, but also search and highlight. If your pager is less, you can search man pages with /search string. It will then highlight the search results, and they can be traversed with n/N. The highlighting helps to find the search string, but i...

There's this one command whose output you need to look at again and again. It's a long list of short words and whizzes by too fast and using your terminal's scroll function is cumbersome. Of course there's more or less, but that is cumbersome, too! Searching the web for a solution only leeds to more...