Animated aquariums are nice and all, but how about an animated ascii art aquarium? Bonus points for embedding your aquarium into your desktop!

It doesn’t get much easier than this. However, you must add routes for static files such as style sheets and images. These are things that you may take for granted if you’re used to relying on standalone web servers.

If you’ve ever run into a dreaded configure problem such as C compiler cannot create executables, and gotten lost in a tangle of glibc/cc/g++ packages, you might find that building source rpms using Mock turns a multi-step process into a breezy single step. Build source rpms using mock which builds inside a chroot. This lets you compile 32-bit on 64-bit without a problem. Check out mock configurations in etc. You may have preconfigured configurations for your Linux distribution.

Presented like a children’s book, this fancy little site is wonderfully presented. If you want to know the basics about the web and its history, check out this little interactive book.

ver wish you could test your code on a machine that’s not connected to teh interwebs and doesn’t have python installed? I like portable applications for many reasons, mainly because they just work.

One of the first things I noticed about Chrome was the lack of the special page “about:config”. I used it extensively in Firefox to tweak settings. Google Chrome does have a few special pages. Here are some hidden features I’ve run across.

If you’re running Fedora or RedHat and you download the plugin required from Google to make voice calls from inside gmail, you’ll need to convert it to an RPM before you can use it. Alien will convert RPMs to Debian .deb packages and vice versa. Download and unpack. You don’t even need to compile or install to use it.

ImageMagick falls short here. You can convert between the different pixel formats, and you can convert a vector file to a bitmap type, but it doesn’t convert pixels to vectors. Inkscape can convert pixmap to vectors. There’s also an online tool called Vector Magic.

With the power of rsync, it’s quite easy to accidentally erase, overwrite, or otherwise destroy your data with one slip of the keys. Even if you supply the right switches, you might leave off a slash or put one where it doesn’t belong.

To turn them back on, try holding your ALT key and click somewhere on the screen. This should restore access to them again. Or try closing Firefox and try restarting it in safe mode. This will work if you’ve also added plugins or extensions that are giving you grief.