Today’s Linux/Unix bash shell script is probably not the last follow up to the growing stable of scripts we’ve written to mine the knowledge on tap online. Today’s info is grabbed from WeatherBug.com. If you missed any of the others scripts we’ve jammed out, you can still find them in our older bash script posts to spew out famous quotations on pretty much any subject, do encylopedia lookups, access the online Thesaurus, translate between different languages and, of course, the use the online dictionary. This time we’re going to take a crack at getting online weather updates, using zip codes. If you check out the GET variables, you’ll notice that the scope is the WORLD, but it doesn’t seem to work well with foreign identifiers. Of course, I haven’t tried all that hard to get it to work – setting me up for a post on the upgrade

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KDE’s Konqueror is as multifunctional as a Swiss Army knife. It works as both a file manager and a Web browser, and you can enhance it even further by adding new commands to its repertoire by means of service menus. The new commands appear in Konqueror’s context menu when you right-click a file. Here’s how to create service menus, and some specific commands that you might want to use in them.

Handy little how-to for you folks, Baldy

Do-it-yourself Konqueror commands

What’s Flickr doing to you now?

Pondering a possible purchase at the hands of Microsoft? Threatening to add more features like support 90-second video clips? Withholding those free doughnuts you were promised?

Sounds like now might be a good time to make a backup of you Flickr images. Actually, even without the paranoia of a Microsoft takeover or further improvements to the photo sharing site’s functionality, now is always a good time to make a backup — just in case.

Okay maybe it is not that darn bad but the idea os doing a back-up is never out of the question folks, and you all know how much I like the Flickr and the ease of uploading to it is,Baldy

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With fires, thefts, and natural disasters it is a good idea to have a home inventory. In this video I am going to show you how to inventory your house using a digital camera and F-Spot on a Linux desktop.

 

Creating a Home Inventory with F-Spot (video)

Producing a video podcast entirely on Linux is not only possible but fairly easy to do. This article outlines the steps you can take to make a video podcast entirely on Linux, as I do.

Creating a podcast takes three steps:
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Webcams are everywhere these days: they’re standard on a lot of laptops, LCD monitors are starting to incorporate them, and decent standalone USB webcams can be had for less than $40. In this two-part series we’ll set up a Webcam on Linux, and then use it to perform a number of amazing and fun tasks.

 

Tutorial: Webcams in Linux, Part 1

I tend to hammer my Ubuntu laptop. Running a website like Tectonic means I am constantly installing new applications to try them out. Many of which I later have to remove or lie forgotten on the hard disk until I start to wonder where the +40GB of free hard disk space went to. And when that happens I tend to back up the essentials – email, documents and website backups – format my hard disk and install a clean version of Ubuntu. Doing this every few months means that a few times a year I get to really consider what the most important applications on my desktop are.

Five must-have apps for a new Linux install

If you’ve ever tried to create or edit a Web page, you know that getting the little details just right can sometimes take a long time. Here are a few Firefox extensions you can add to your toolbox that will help you measure images, align objects on your page, and capture colors quickly and easily.

Design better Web pages with Firefox extensions

So you just set up a Linux-compatible webcam. You’ve tested it with Kopete, and you can send images on MSN and Yahoo! Now what? Here are some fun things you can try.

Finally some more uses for webcams outside of porn shots, not that,that is bad but a couple of these sound like fun, Baldy

Five fun ways to use a Linux webcam

Here is a great article and how-to and SSH and Forwarding and since a couple of folks have asked about both I thought I could kill two birds at the same time. Here is the opening from the website;

SSH, or the Secure SHell, is a powerful unix tool that allows you to securely connect to a remote computer, whether it be across a local network, or over the internet. You may have used it once or twice, but don’t understand what all the fuss is about. Did you know that you can use it not only as a remote command line, but also to run graphical applications (for example, Firefox) remoteley? Or that you can also use it to access your Linux computer from a Windows machine? This article will discuss the uses of SSH, and explain how to setup an SSH server on your Ubuntu computer, enable X11 (graphical) forwarding, as well as how to access your Linux computer from anywhere in the world, from any computer.

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