Today I'm looking at something a little different. Rarely (or ever?) do I take a look at static website generators on here, but mkws is a bit of a special case. mkws is a static site generator (SSG) created by Adrian Emil Grigore, written in nothing but the good old shell. No, not BASH, but sh.…

Eyes hurting at night from the glare of your screen? Perhaps it's even affecting your sleep? Then maybe you should give Redshift a try, a program similar to Twilight on Android and inspired by the likes of f.lux. If you've heard of either Twilight or f.lux, you'll probably know what these sorts of…

If you have a Fitbit fitness device and wish to sync your device using the wireless dongle on your Linux machine, the good news is it is possible with the Bluetooth-based Fitbit devices, thanks to a small Python utility called Galileo. Note: you will need a bit of terminal-foo, but to be honest, I…

It took me a fair while to get comfortable with the ISO 8601 date format. After so many years of using DD MMM YYYY, my old eyes and brain had some trouble understanding YYYY-MM-DD. Finally something clicked, and I now read 'ISOdates' easily and I really appreciate their advantages. The biggest…

Feeling like something different, I recently bought a HP Chromebook 11. In this article I give my impressions on the device itself and also some Linux-specific goodness thanks to something caled Crouton, plus a few thoughts on working in the "cloud". As someone who uses a typical…

In 2003 a strange paragraph made the rounds on email. It read: Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a…

In a 2014 Linux Rain article I describe a fast 'points plotter' for Google Earth. First I copy a list of latitude/longitudes (lat/lons) from a spreadsheet to the clipboard, then I launch a shell script with a keyboard shortcut. The script builds a KML file from the copied list and opens the KML for…

In this article I explain one way to group data items with AWK arrays. The code is a little mysterious but the results are impressive, especially in my second example! Case 1: Cricket stats The table 'runs' is tab-separated and lists the 86 national team cricket players who scored (or have so far…

I often look something up in Wikipedia when reading non-browser documents, like PDFs, ODTs and emails. I wanted to have a little desktop window for those look-ups - somewhere I could check Wikipedia without opening a browser and without leaving the document I'm reading. This article describes how I…

In a plain-text table, the first or header line usually contains the names of the fields. In this article I've pulled together a variety of ways to add and delete a header, and also how to do things with the rest of the table while leaving the header intact as the first line in the file. Add a…