Even if you know how to compile software from source code, you often end up with an application that your system doesn't technically know exists. That can mean duplicated apps, file issues, and removal problems—unless you use the checkinstall command. More »
The Super User forums has a collection of tips and paste-able commands for Mac OS X’s Terminal that are, by turns, brilliant, funny, and obscure but great. Suggestions include quickly checking what apps are eating your memory (top -o vsize), run a Spotlight-style search from the command line (mdfind), and a clever little script that one user put together to trick his wife into thinking a MacBook has overheated and needs to be shut down—so he can grab it back. [Super User via Daring Fireball] More »
Mac only: There are a lot of ways to troubleshoot your Mac, but if your problem is so serious that you can’t load the GUI (or if you don’t have your installation disc), AppleJack can troubleshoot it right from the command line. More »
Linux/Mac OS X: Command-line utility Autojump learns your most commonly used folders, and makes switching between them an easy task, requiring you to enter only part of the directory path to switch between them. More »
Operating system – Mac OS – Mac OS X – Open source – filesystem
With the right commands, you can turn your favorite command-line text editor into a distraction-free Google Docs app, add new events to Google Calendar, upload images to Picasa or video to YouTube, backup your Google data, and more. Here’s how it works. More »
Google – GoogleCL – Picasa – Command-line interface – Google Docs
Having a ball playing around with the just-released GoogleCL tool, which offers command line access to Google Calendar, contacts, Docs, Picasa, Blogger, and YouTube. With Python-based GoogleCL installed, you can do things such as list today’s events on your GCal right in the terminal, like so:
$ google calendar today title Coffee with Michael and Samir Dozing off Lunch at Flingers
Instant use case: Add echo "Next 24 hours:";google calendar today title to your ~/.bash_profile file to see what you’ve got scheduled for the day when you launch a new Terminal window. Some more GoogleCL fun inside.
If you just type google at the command line, you launch an interactive terminal that lets you try all the various commands. In the interactive terminal, type command-name help to see its options, like help calendar.
Each command has several parameters that aren’t immediately apparent. For example, in calendar, you can omit the long and hairy event URL by using the title parameter. You can list events for a particular day using the data parameter (--date 2010-06-16), and you can get events from a particular calendar and by keyword search term.
For example, to see all my trips to NYC on my TripIt calendar, I’d use the command:
$ google calendar list --cal TripIt --query NYC
Remember the beauty of the command line: you can easily chain commands together with the pipe, so you can sed, awk, and grep output to your heart’s content, and then write it to a file if needed, using >. Before I discovered the title parameter on the calendar command, I was planning to use sed to filter out the calendar URLs from the output. (Thanks to lightening-fast sed and awk experts on Twitter, I was prepared to do just that.)
What I’d love to do is create a Todo.txt CLI add-on that inserts an event on your Google Calendar when you add a task with a due date. Here’s the discussion about that going on now on the Todo.txt CLI mailing list. It’s pretty much a no-brainer.
While I’ve mostly only played with calendar, the Docs access is pretty useful, too. With it, you could easily schedule cron’ed backups of your Google Docs, or push data into a new doc on a regular basis. Same deal with Picasa and YouTube. I like the idea of cron’ing a job that backs up my Google contacts to a CSV file on my local computer weekly, too. I don’t see myself ever blogging from the command line, but it’s neat that you can.
How are you using GoogleCL? Post your favorite command combos in the comments.
Windows only: SSH client KiTTY adds dozens of new features to the PuTTY terminal client software, including a launcher, transparency, send-to-tray, and it even rolls up the windows into the title bar with a hotkey. More »
Windows only: Explorer plug-in Link Shell Extension creates symbolic links easily through the context menu—very useful for those without command-line geek skills. More »
If you’re not planning on getting into 3D gaming on your G1 or MyTouch 3G, and you’ve rooted your phone with the CyanogenMod ROM, you can get more memory performance from your Android handset with one hacker’s custom firmware.
The Absolutely Android blog posted a host of firmware images that can be quickly flashed onto a phone running nearly any recent version of the CyanogenMod firmware. Not sure which version you’re running? Hit the menu key on your home screen, head to Settings, scroll down to About phone, then scroll down to the “Mod version” section and note the number there, down to the last decimal point. You’ll then need to download the corresponding image from the blog, run a single terminal command, and then reboot.
You’ll need a decent terminal emulator and root access to flash the image onto your phone; the post offers up a download-able, installable APK file of the Better Terminal Emulator Magic, but you can just as easily download it from the Market—or just use the Terminal Emulator included with the Cyanogen ROM, or a free app like ConnectBot. However you pull off the command, the image will free up 10 MB of RAM, normally dedicated to 3D graphics, and hand it over to the general system.
It's a fair trade-off for the more business-minded Android user looking for a bit more snappy response from their phone—which we've seen, in light amounts, in our own test. Before taking on such a task, of course, be sure to back up your phone firmware.
