Diwali lighiying with cheap ping-pong balls.

If you need some cheap and novel ambient lighting for your next party, you’re only a box of ping-pong balls and a string of lights away from solving your lighting worries.

Instructables user AdvancedMischief needed some novel lighting and was impressed with the diffusing power of the simple ping-pong ball:

At some point last semester I realized that ping pong balls make great diffusers and look really cool when they are glowing. Next we concluded that a hundred glowing ping pong balls would look even cooler. It was at about this point I decided that my apartment was in dire need of some ping pong ball lights.

Using column to format a directory listing

<span style="color: #000000;">Using column to format a directory listing
<span style="color: #000000;">$ (printf "PERMISSIONS LINKS OWNER GROUP SIZE MONTH DAY HH:MM PROG-NAME
<span style="color: #000000;">\n" \ ; ls -l | sed 1d) | column -t
<span style="color: #000000;">Using column to format a directory listing

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<span style="color: #000000;"> * View all commands by unixmonkey1299

<span style="color: #000000;">commandlinefu.com

On screen display of a command

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delay: 2d On screen display of a command. $ date|osd_cat This is very useful if you need to show someone some text from a distance. (Like someone standing over your shoulder…)

I&#8217;d recommend aliasing it to something like:

alias osd_cat=&#8221;osd_cat -o 400 -s 8 -c blue -d 60 -f osd_cat -f -*-bitstream vera sans-*-*-*–200-*-*-*-*-*-*-*&#8221;

xosd is the utility that provides osd_cat.

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root shell auditing and syslog entry for all commands of shell

A lot of times there is a need to log all the messages and the output of the shell to the file or syslog. Sometimes I need that for some user too. script command can be used to do this but then sometimes you cannot tell the user the session is logged or you can ask the user to run this command and it should be automatically done. And sometimes there is a need put the output in the syslog so that the root user has more control and also mail for syslog is sufficient to be analyzed rather than looking for other files. Finally I found this :

Tag2Find – Tag Your Windows Files with Web-like Tags

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Tagging is something your pipsqueak pigtailed sister did with you when you were in your tweens. That kind of ceaseless trailing was pesky. The Web 2.0 version though saves us a lot of bother.

Tagging is commonplace around blogs and websites. We all agree that it’s a speedy way to scour out a web resource; nearly single click in its utility. We are so used to it that we perhaps miss it as a feature in Windows.

Get list of git repositories from command line.

Earlier I had posted a small blog on teamgit. The problem still is that you have to manually go to the git.kernel.org page and get the list of the repo&#8217;s that you can download. How about a command line to get the same. Here&#8217;s one:

wget -O – http://git.kernel.org |grep &#8221;class=.list.&#8221; |grep -v title|awk -F&#8217;>&#8217; '{print $3}&#8217;|sed &#8217;s/<\/a//&#8217;

Output will be like this:<div id="_mcePaste" style="position: absolute; left: -10000px; top: 0px; width: 1px; height: 1px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden;">linux/kernel/git/ghaskins/linux-2.6-hacks.git