YAD (Yet Another Dialog) creates GUI dialogs for data entry, user notification, etc. It was written by Victor Ananjevsky and is described as a fork of Zenity. In fact, it greatly extends Zenity and has a very large number of handy options. Here I explain how to build a multiple-item data entry form…

Trove is the National Library of Australia's online database. It contains almost 400 000 000 digital items, including Australian newspaper articles from 1803 to 1954. Trove's newspaper portal is particularly useful. You can view an entire digitised newspaper page, or select (or search for) an…

If you do a Web search for 'linux delete blank lines' you'll find lots of command-line advice. Some of the advice, though, only applies to special cases. Here I explain two elegant and general methods for finding and deleting any blank lines in a text file. As a sample text I'll use the 8-line file…

Geoscience Australia has a freely downloadable gazetteer of Australian placenames with more than 370 000 entries. The download is a .zip file (83 mb) containing a user guide together with placenames data in GML, KML and Microsoft Access (.mdb) formats. What I wanted from all that data was a simple…

Here's a BASH shell script that automatically logs the date and time I start my Iceweasel web browser, and the length of time I use it. I launch the script (and Iceweasel) with a keyboard shortcut, and close the script by closing Iceweasel. Click for full size The log file has entries in the form…

On Linux systems, numerous users often come across a program or process that locks-up. The user will usually kill the software if the system does not do it first. Users may be familiar with some of the kill commands and signals, but does anyone understand all of them? There are four common kill…

I work a lot with spreadsheet tables of points in the landscape. Each point has a latitude and a longitude, in decimal degrees. If I want to check where particular points are on the map, I could import the whole table into a GIS program and then select the points of interest. But that's way too…

I use 16 special characters fairly regularly. They sit on a launchable 'palette' on my desktop (first image). I select a character (second image), then paste the character with a middle-click into wherever it's needed: text editor, word processor, email, webpage form etc. The palette stays open and…

Is Xfce's default window manager (Xfwm4) getting you down? Not enough effects for your fancy? Or perhaps it's giving you that infamous screen tearing with the lack of OpenGL VSync? There's plenty of alternatives out there, but had you considered KDE's compositing window manager, KWin? It can be…

Have you found you forgot to create a Swap partition upon installing your favourite Linux distribution? Or simply have a nice layout of partitions on your hard drive that you do not wish to alter? Then let's instead create a "swap file" in Linux! Even if you're primarily from a Microsoft…