Quick Tip: convert images at the command line with ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a very mature tool. It’s been around for donkeys years and it even acts as the silent ‘back end’ to some of the best GUI-based image manipulation software.…

View your log files in colour and in an easy to read format

This is a wonderful tutorial from the guys over at lintut.com to show how to navigate your way through log files easily. Log files are notoriously difficult to read because…

How to Mount Windows or Samba Shares Permanently

This howto describes how to mount Windows CIFS (SMB) shares permanently. The shares might be hosted on a Windows computer/server, or on a Linux/UNIX server running Samba. This document also…

Monitoring network bandwidth, CPU and memory effectively

Here is a bunch of handy tips for today that will likely remain in your armoury forever. As a Linux sysadmin it’s sometimes difficult to visualise just what is causing…

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…