If you do embedded programming you're probably familiar with Motorola S-Records. This following script takes a MAC Address and outputs S-Record data.

If you work with the command line you've most likely used hexdump or od to dump binary files, but what do you do if you have a hex dump of something and you want to create the binary version of the data? Assuming your needs aren't too complex, the answer may be xxd. You can use xxd to dump binary files just like hexdump and od, but you can also use it to do the reverse: turn a hex dump back into binary.

Bash brace expansion is used to generate stings at the command line or in a shell script. The syntax for brace expansion consists of either a sequence specification or a comma separated list of items inside curly braces "{}". A sequence consists of a starting and ending item separated by two periods "..".

If your life is like mine, it's probably more complicated than it should be. There's that full time job, social events, and vacations to say nothing of various side businesses and their associated deadlines. The kids have Cub Scouts, soccer, and baseball. Since we homeschool, we have science club, field trips and play dates. And it seems that everyone we know has 2 email

Hardware manufacturers often don't release specifications of their products to the open source community, so programs like ndiswrapper become necessary. This video demonstrates how to use Windows wireless drivers in Linux using ndiswrapper.

At it's most basic level, Wuala is an online storage service. Like other services it aims to allow you to access your files from anywhere, even if your home or office computer is turned off. You can store any file in your Wuala 'drive' and they can be any size (up to your storage limit, of course).

In addition to the fairly common forms of input/output redirection the shell recognizes something called process substitution. Although not documented as a form of input/output redirection, its syntax and its effects are similar.

Incessant status updates to your cell phone from the command line? Sure, with a little help from curl and Twitter.

If you use the shell you surely know about redirection: # echo 'hello world' >output # cat <output The first line writes "hello world" to the file "output", the second reads it back and writes it to standard output (normally the terminal).

The first time I played with Zenity, I recognized several potential uses for it. While I'm pretty comfortable with interacting with computers with a command line interface, I know many people are not. Zenity creates GUI widgets from a simple command line and can be used from any shell script.

If somebody accidentally drops a critical table in MySQL, the application no longer works. The solution to this problem is to utilize the (open source) Zmanda Recovery Manager.

One of the items on the Geek Ranch agenda is a weather station. While we don't have one yet, we have learned a bit about weather stations and Linux. First, why don't we have one? Well, there is no electricity at the Geek Ranch site yet for starters. But, more important, there is no Internet connection. So, let's just call this research.

If you like the latest and greatest version of everything and you use an RPM based system you probably want to learn how to create RPMs. You don't have to, you can just download the latest source and compile and install it in /usr/local. This of course leaves your system in a state where your RPM database does not accurately reflect what is installed on your system. Again, this will work, but building RPMs isn't (usually at least) that difficult.

This tip shows how to add logging to your PHP script and how to add configuration so you have basic, configurable logging. The PHP script requires two PEAR packages, Log and Config. To use the code in shown in this tip, you'll need to PEAR installed along with PHP and you'll need to install both the Log and the Config PEAR packages. To install the two packages type:

Lots of times it's extremely frustrating or time consuming to run an xterm on a remote host just to fork your programs from that remote machine. Why not just run your window manager there even though you're not on its console? The window manager is just another X application, after all, isn't it? Fire off your local X server xinit /usr/bin/xterm -- :1 &

Typing characters that are not standard in English can be done quite easily in [Ubuntu] Linux without any modifications. In most situations, you can do this by using the Character Map utility included in your system, which can be found at Applications > Accessories > Character Map. Upon running Character Map, a window will appear.

You can create a neat logo from the Linux command line: $ convert -size 800x120 xc:white -font Times-Roman -pointsize 100 -fill gray -annotate +20+80 'Linux is cool!' -fill black -annotate +23+83 'Linux is cool!' -trim +repage logo.png And, the following command should display the result: $ qiv logo.png

VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is a professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.