How to use a Mac to create a Linux Live USB Stick and Boot it

Ok, let’s say you are just about to take the plunge and install Linux on your nice shiny Mac but before then you want to test drive how it really…

How to use Apple’s iMessage in Linux (sort of)

This tip requires Jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad, so if you don’t want to Jailbreak then look away now. Jailbreaking is a method of expanding the iPhone beyond it’s parameters…

How to tar (compress) files up, excluding certain files or directories

If you’ve ever been making a backup of an entire Linux system, or maybe just a number of folders but there were certain folders or files that you didn’t want…

Using Google Drive from the Linux Command Line

GDrive Gdrive is a command line tool which manages, uploads, downloads, deletes and shares files on Google Drive. You can download the tool from Github at https://github.com/prasmussen/gdrive. Unfortunately it does not support…

How to use Alpine to use iCloud/GMail email from the command line

Some times you are in an ssh session, administering a machine, it’s a slow link, or it’s just not practical to have a shiny graphical email program up and running.…

Review: Download Managers for Linux

Recently I needed to download a bunch of large files from HTTP sources. Downloading via a web browser is notoriously bad at doing this. How many times have you downloaded…

How to read and write to Windows NTFS drives as any user

So you have a Windows hard drive using the NTFS partition type. The good news is that most Linux distributions these days can read and write to it automatically without…

Multi-Tasking at the command line with screenie

The use of the tool screen is well documented throughout the Internet, however it’s third-party accomplice is not. Screenie is a front-end to screen. Why Do I want to know…

Using Vim Scripts to determine whether to set 80 chars word wrap

Here’s a little quick tip for those of you out there that use the ViM text editor. The following is from my personal ~/.vimrc file, it is used to set…

How to play classic adventure games on Linux

Were you ever a fan of those retro computer games like Beneath a Steel Sky, Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion and those Sierra Titles like Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest and…