Wednesday, 26 September 2012

Quickly create new empty files on Gnome (Nautilus) desktops

I don't know if you, like me, use the Desktop as a place for urgent notes. I do, and a lot!

I create empty files and rename it with the note I want to write in it and dispose of them easily deleting them whenever I don't want the note to appear.

Unfortunately the way to create those files is not one of the nicest, if you are in a rush: right-click on Desktop, find Create Document and click on it, find Empty file and click on it.

That is why I found a quicker way using the keyboard:

- Right click on Desktop
- Press D and then Return

And you have a new empty file ready to be written!

Sunday, 16 September 2012

The Matrix effect

It has been a while since last time I wrote a blog post. I planned ahead of myself and wrote a bunch of posts in early July, which filled the whole of summer schedule very well.

I had a nice summer, by the way, and I am about to begin my new occupation (PhD) which I am sure will take a lot of my free time. I know I tend to be very optimist (or I used to) and I would tell myself: "I can keep my schedule, at the end it is just one post a week".
But, even if it does not seem like it, I noticed that it takes a lot of time to write a good, well documented and effective (targeting the right audience and being coherent in difficulty) Linux post. And, on a side note, I consider myself a perfectionist and I generally like to go deep into stuff, so that does not help when I try to cut back on the time.

I decided to be more realistic this time, and I am apologizing in advance if I will not respect my weekly schedule. I will keep sure to write at least every fortnight, also because I would miss it otherwise. I also have another blog to maintain (see in contacts), so I am trying to split the time spent on them equally.

I have a treat for you, now. Open up that terminal of yours and run this string:

echo -e "\e[1;40m" ; clear ; while :; do echo $LINES $COLUMNS $(( $RANDOM % $COLUMNS)) $(( $RANDOM % 72 )) ;sleep 0.05; done|gawk '{ letters="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789@#$%^&*()"; c=$4; letter=substr(letters,c,1);a[$3]=0;for (x in a) {o=a[x];a[x]=a[x]+1; printf "\033[%s;%sH\033[2;32m%s",o,x,letter; printf "\033[%s;%sH\033[1;37m%s\033[0;0H",a[x],x,letter;if (a[x] >= $1) { a[x]=0; } }}'

Cool uh? If it does not work, make sure you have gawk installed.
I will leave you with that and see you next time.