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…

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…

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,…

KING Art's point-and-click adventure, The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, is a beautiful game. But you might have a hard time seeing much of the game properly if you ran into the problem I did - a wonky, improper fullscreen resolution that meant I couldn't even browse the settings menu and actually…