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Do you ever find yourself running a command, pressing the up-arrow, then [Enter], then the up-arrow, then [Enter], then the up-arrow.... this is a great exercise that will get your fingers used to typing random odd key sequences without your eyes paying attention, but otherwise it's a complete waste of time. A command I have come to love helps me point my OCD tendencies to other pointless tasks while running commands over and over for me. Introducing 'watch', because Linux Just Does That.

For those cases where converting from Base64 encoded data to a hexadecimal output similar to what you get from other utilities this script may simplify your life. The script takes input and decodes it finally converting it to hex output for use in other applications.

In computing there are two terms which are often confused: encoding and enciphering. One of them, with 'cipher' in its name, usually best refers to something that is cryptographically enciphered which means it was mathematically mangled in a fashion that the result, regardless of the input, is fairly random, patternless nonsense to the un-key-assisted eye. The other term refers to simply changing data from one form to another at is basic level. One type of encoding is 'base64' encoding, which is used through many areas of computing and can be explained much more-simply than most cryptographic cipher functions (in my opinion). This article is to show how, on many levels, Linux Just Does That.

For a while now I have taken for granted the marvelous functionality commonly referred-to as "workspaces" in the X window system. Anybody using a graphical interface with X already probably has this functionality present by default and in many distributions the feature of multiple workspaces is even enabled by default The idea behind this article is to show how efficiency in the GUI can be improved using this feature and the ease of adopting the technology to suit your needs out of the box, because Linux Just Does That.

Sometimes I find myself wondering how big an installed RPM's files really are. Use a simple script to do all of the calculating of file sizes, plus see how to recreate the RPM from the system where the package is installed in the latest addition to Linux Just Does That.

Last week I was asked if there was a way to start an application at the command line and later come back to it from somewhere else. Normally in Linux/Unix (*nix) it is possible to 'background' a process and then return to it later on but that's only if you are still in the same session where the process was sent to the background. This is useful to have something run while you do other things but reconnecting to this session cannot be done with just the shell. Thankfully 'screen' is on Linux systems by default (all of them I've used anyway) and as a result, Linux Just Does That.