Taking screenshot in firefox.

Couple of days back, I was trying to take screenshot with Firefox. As usual I started out with searching for plugins which could take a screen shot for the whole page and not just the visible portion of the page. Installed couple of them, some did not work. Finally I found something called Development Bar.

So, here is a simple way to take a screenshot. Press “Shift+F12”. This will bring up a bar in the bottom of the firefox window. To take a screenshot, type:

NIce backgrounds with Fedora with Yearly calnedar

Here is something that you can try

sudo yum install yearcalendar-backgrounds

This will install 3 wallpapers with yearly calendars. There is no interesting background in the calendar but then you get the clarity since there is no background. The calendars are quite nice by the way.

dnsmasq – use with Network Manager.

Well if you have not heard about dnsmasq:

Dnsmasq is lightweight, easy to configure DNS forwarder and DHCP server.
It is designed to provide DNS and, optionally, DHCP, to a small network.
It can serve the names of local machines which are not in the global
DNS. The DHCP server integrates with the DNS server and allows machines
with DHCP-allocated addresses to appear in the DNS with names configured
either in each host or in a central configuration file. Dnsmasq supports
static and dynamic DHCP leases and BOOTP for network booting of diskless
machines.

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lightweight pdf viewer – zathura.

Zathura is a lightweight viewer for pdf which works on plugins. Here is shor description :

Zathura is a highly configurable and functional PDF viewer based on the Poppler
rendering library and the GTK+ toolkit. The idea behind zathura is an
application that provides a minimalist and space saving interface as well as
an easy usage that mainly focuses on keyboard interaction.

But the viewer will not work unless you install the plugins to display the correct plugin. So, if you want to use it for any real purposes then you will have to install the appropriate plugin as well, so here is what you need to do:

dnstop – top like utility for Fedora and other *nix

For installation :

sudo yum install dnstop

And now some description:

dnstop is a libpcap application (ala tcpdump) that displays various
tables of DNS traffic on your network.

dnstop supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

To help find especially undesirable DNS queries, dnstop provides a
number of filters.

dnstop can either read packets from the live capture device, or from a
tcpdump savefile.

Couple of days back, I realized there was too much network activity on my
system, although I was not doing anything. Fired up wireshark and to my
astonishment, there was too much of DNS traffic on the network. But the
problem was analyzing the data in wireshark and this is where dnstop came
into light. It helped me narrow down the issue within minutes and problems
resolved.

poor mans watch, watch for solaris

Here is a simple script that you can use as watch in Solaris as well.

watch()
{
    #Poor man's watch
    while (true)
    do
        clear
        $*
        sleep 2;
    done
}

Disable a few cores when you want to save power.

If you have a lot of CPU power and working on battery. If you do not need that much of power and would like to rather save some battery power by disabling some cpus then you can use the below script. This script disables cpus from 4 to 7. You can change the number in the for loop. You would need the sudo to be setup or remove sudo and run the script as root. The script will show you the currently active cpu’s before and after disabling the CPU’s.