I’ve been so busy in the last little while I’ve not had a chance to post the recent techmails that have gone up, so here goes:
Cloud-based RSS reading with Google Reader and Liferea looks at using Liferea as a client for Google Reader. The nice thing about using Google Reader is you can use the web UI, or standalone clients (like Liferea) on whichever operating system you happen to be using.
Regular expressions for everyone: The basics takes a look at some of the basics of using regular expressions. I have a love/hate relationship with regexps, but they are so useful, so here’s a quick primer on some basics you can use with tools like grep or when writing configuration directives (i.e. in Apache).
Easy Gmail reading with mutt looks at using mutt to read your Google Mail (Gmail) and how it can be done effectively using nothing more than mutt itself. It even looks at mimicking some of the keybindings used in the web UI.
Get website metrics with AWStats looks at using the AWStats program to get a detailed view of who, how, and when people are visiting your web site, with a quick primer on how to get it setup.
Drive and partition backups with dd looks at using the dd tool to backup entire drives or specific partitions, and how to restore them.
Get text-mode calendar and TODO lists with Calcurse is an introduction to a neat little tool called Calcurse, a text-mode calendar with TODO list capabilities. For the text UI purist, Calcurse is really neat. It’s not perfect, but it’s quite good and (to me) is certainly better than using a flat text file.