Let's not beat around the bush, Layers of Fear is a horror title slash walking simulator that you'll probably either love or hate. Well actually, that's not totally true, because if you're like me, you'll find the game to be an enjoyable, fairly intelligent and psychological (also psychedelic)…

Back in March 2015 I blogged about a track-changes script that reports the edits made to a tab-separated data table. The script actually generates two reports: a plain text version and a fancy HTML version. A slightly improved version of that script is on my data-cleaning website here. The script…

If you're a gamer, you probably find your computer's default CPU scaling (usually the "balanced" or "powersave" setting) is more than sufficient the majority of the time, but just occasionally, a game will run at its best when the CPU is set to maximum frequency all the time,…

Each of the two file managers I use — Thunar and Xfe — allows me to open a terminal in a selected directory. In Thunar, I right-click on a directory and choose Open Terminal Here, and in Xfe I use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + t. In both cases, though, the terminal window opens right on top of the fil…

So, way, way back in ancient times (well, May of this year) I wrote of a little distribution called Void Linux, which you can see here. Basically, I thought it was pretty swell. A few months on and nothing much has changed. And that is a good thing! It's been a while since I've posted anything on…

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're running an AMD graphics card with Mesa (open source) drivers and tried playing the great RPG Divinity: Original Sin, chances are you simply ran into a crash upon launching the game. Thankfully, the community comes to the rescue and there is a work around. Here's how. To be perfectly…

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…