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.

The easiest way to crop a border from an image is to rotate the image as you chop. It’s pretty much the same way you would cut a border from a piece of paper using a pair of scissors unless you were ambidextrous and even then wouldn’t it be faster to just rotate the picture rather than changing scissor hands.

I needed a batch converter to turn non-xml style Excel spreadsheets (all the older versions) into delimited text files. If you run it without supplying a sheet name, it will list all the sheets available. You can also optionally define a delimiter to use instead of the default comma. So here’s my code along with part of the xlrd module which I tweaked a little.

There’s no need to unmount it or mount read-only before adding the journal. If you operate on a mounted file system, the journal gets created on a regular inode. Upon your next boot, the journal will be moved to the hidden inode. You can’t modify or remove the .journal file either, so don’t even worry about that.

For those of you still loading your digital camera’s images into MSPAINT or paying hard earned $$$ for some crappy program just to shrink the size and quality to get normal file sizes that display easily and upload faster to your favorite photo sites:
Do it in 1 freaking command …

For those of you still loading your digital camera’s images into MSPAINT or paying hard earned $$$ for some crappy program just to shrink the size and quality to get normal file sizes that display easily and upload faster to your favorite photo sites: Do it in 3 seconds in cygwin, andlinux, or native linux!!!

No matter what flavor of linux distribution you’re using, the default grub bootloader background image is probably pretty generic. Or, maybe you just want to personalize it. Since your system isn’t booted very far, your toolset is rather limited, so there are strict requirements for the image.