Switching from Windows to Linux can seem a daunting task. Hell switching from any OS to any OS can seem daunting and invoke fear and frustration into anyone. This post is my attempt to minimize both the fear and frustration.

There are several things you will need to do in order to make a smooth transition from Windows to Linux. Many of these steps are equally important and of course importance changes based on individual taste / needs, so the order of steps presented here are simply my recomendation.

First a really quick Perl tutorial.

What is Perl?

Perl is a great language for almost anything. The syntax is consice and Perl makes simple things simple and makes hard things possible or so the motto goes.
Perl is one of the best languages there is for manipulating text and also makes an excellent glue language because Perl allows you to choose your quote opperater, supports here documents, and has built in regular expressions.  Perl also has a bad reputation for looking like line noise for the same reasons listed above.

On linux there are several methods to backup remote files across a network.

Method 1: SCP (Secure Copy)

SCP is basically RCP with password support. This method is good for copying files or directories recursively so long as you do not need to use an include or exclude list. As far as I can tell SCP does not have support for exclude list. Still, the syntax is very easy to remeber making scp an easy way to securely copy files across a network.

I just got a new I-Phone a couple of days ago, so I haven't had a chance to play with it to much.

I have an older G3 Mac running OSX 10.3, but primarily run Linux. I also have a desktop running Windows XP, but primarily use that as a dumb client and login to my Linux systems via NX from http://www.nomachine.com.

First you need to be able to login to your N800 as root. just install the openssh package and it will ask for new root pass you have to ssh root@localhost to get root on the N800 Now, from your linux box, lets say you want to backup your n800 to /backups/n800/ from a terminal type

mkdir backups/n800

now login to your n800 Make sure you are not connected to the n800 via USB

ssh root@n800ip

where n800ip is the ip address of your n800 I didn't have any luck with rsynch or scp because of looped symlinks so use the tar across network method

tar -cf
  

Most CVS gui's like Cervisia and Tortoise have this built in.
Doing this from a terminal is a little more difficult.
Unfortunately you have to check out the module before you can get information about it (really?)

mp3split is an awesome command line utility to split long audio files using silence detection.
It takes some playing around with to get used to all the options, but it is extremely powerful.

Finally, A pay per download service that doesn't require a proprietary player. The new Amazon Unbox service, which is still in beta, allows you to watch pay-per-download movies directly in your browser. The only requirement is Adobe Flash 9 and a fast internet connection. This means that Linux users now have a legal alternative to downloading torrents.

This is a simple tutorial on how to create a ruber stamp effect like
the one pictured below in Gimp.

Recently I volunteered to record video for the DrupalCamp Seattle 2008. It quickly dawned on me that to record 10 hours of video, bring it home and capture it to disk and then compress it would take 30+ hours. Also, that wouldn't be anywhere close to live and they were hoping to post the video as soon as possible. Since I am only running Linux on my laptops now, I decided to see what could be accomplished via command line tools in Linux. I quickly stumbled on ffmpeg and dvgrab. DVgrab can capture raw dv from firewire and has features for detecting scenes when capturing from tape.