Microsoft has used two different starting points on the calendar for calculating dates in different versions of their Excel spreadsheet program. Really. Microsoft explains the difference here. One version used 1 January 1900 for serial day numbering, the other used 1 January 1904. Of course, up to…

In a 2-article series here on The Linux Rain last May (part 1 and part2) I described how I used AWK to clean up rainfall data for my home town in Tasmania. The result was a file called rain3 with rainfall totals for each of the 36525 days from 1 January 1916 to 31 December 2015: In this article I…

If you've ever wondered how to put your Linux machine to sleep from the command line, here's a quick tip how. Now, you may ask, why? Why, when one can just often browse to the shutdown menu or suspend icon in your favourite desktop environment and click with the mouse? Because we can! Plus, there's…

I often sort lists on the command line and get the frequencies of listed items with the command chain sort | uniq -c. For example, suppose I have a list of "brown" surnames in a file called demo: OK, so there are 7 Brauns in the list, 3 Brouns, and so on. But notice the indentation of…

If you want to know the local time around the world, Linux has options ranging from plain to gorgeous. The plainest one is the tzselect command, which offers choices in a terminal that lead you to the local time in a single region. Middling-pretty is gworldclock, a little GUI window that can be…

It's pretty easy to see which fields are empty in the tab-separated table demo (below). The 2nd and 4th field, Col2 and Col4, have no visible characters at all in the rows below the header line: That was simple, but what if the table is huge, with lots of fields and records? Eyeballing for fields…

The image below shows a small, demonstration PDF: When I highlight the text in the PDF, only the paragraphs and their internal spaces go to the X, or primary clipboard: When I middle-click-paste from the primary clipboard into a text editor, each line of text in the PDF appears on a new line,…

Popped in a DVD on your Linux box and started playing the disc directly, only to encounter weird playback issues such as stuttering, skipping or even flat-out stopping? It's a strange, hard to explain issue, but the fix is often quite simple. I believe this is mostly with encrypted, copy-protected…

I have a script that compiles and sorts museum collection data. One of the data fields is for museum registration codes, and a plain sort doesn't understand that humans expect "KS.99", for example, to come before "KS.100": My script instead uses the magic "-V" option…

A few years ago I acquired an HP Chromebook 11, which I talked about in an article on this site at that time. I talked about how I ran Linux software side-by-side with Chrome OS thanks to the likes of Crouton. Since then, the machine has had some basic use, and rather ironically, used as an offline…