Lately I’ve been using Vim quite a bit to edit text files for my work. One of the things I wanted to do recently was to remove all of the comments from a text file in order to reduce its size prior to uploading it to the server over my relatively slow internet connection. In this post I’ll show how to remove lines that begin with a given character or character string using vi/Vim/gVim. Continue reading
In today’s post I’m going to show how to embed a text message into an image file. This type of messaging is known as steganography. Steganography is the practice of hiding secrets in such a way that only the intended message recipient would know to look for your hidden message.
In this basic form of secret messaging we’ll be adding text onto the end of a file. I’m going to use the following image of Tux for my example. Continue reading
If you’ve ever been a KDE user, you are probably familiar with the Amarok music player. Perhaps you prefer GNOME over KDE but you really prefer Amarok over the music players normally offered in GNOME. You could always go ahead and install Amarok, but it brings along a ton of KDE dependencies. Good news! There is a GTK+ alternative. Continue reading
Today I’m going to show you how to use the head and tail commands to view portions of text files. There are, of course, other commands that can be used to view text files. The cat command can be useful for viewing small text files while more and less can be good for larger files. But what if you’re only interested in just the beginning or the end of a file? That’s where head and tail come in. Continue reading
As smart phones are becoming more pervasive, 2D bar codes are starting to appear all over the place. The QR Code format is one of the most commonly used styles of these matrix bar codes. These QR Codes often contain a URL to send a smart phone user to a particular web site, but all kinds of textual information can be embedded in these codes.