mintCast 247 – Segments?

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Main Topic: Segments?!

  • We have put together a couple of new segments called “Toe the Line” and Wazzup!”. Leave a comment or send us an email to let us know what you think about them.
    • In “Toe the Line”, Rob talks about the power of the “date” command.
    • In “Wazzup!”, Rob talks about recent updates to Linux Mint.

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Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe and Isaac
Live Stream every other Sunday 2:00 p.m.(Central): mintcast.org/livestream

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Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). Podcast bumpers provided by Oscar.


9 Replies to “mintCast 247 – Segments?”

  1. not_Daniel

    I found an extremely useful command for date. You know when you fill out a stupid $20 mail-in rebate by snail mail and they tell you that you’ll get the rebate in “200 days time”? “date -d “200 days””[enter] -> “Sat Dec 17,” then say, “that’s amazing and very intuitive,” proceed to open up Thunderbird’s Lightning calendar, and set an appointment for 17 Dec and forget about it until such reminder alerts you when your check is due in the mail. That totally beats what I’ve previously done — going to wolfram alpha and input “today + 200 days”. Very nice.

    -Keyboard shortcut for terminal is ctrl+alt+t for Mint distro’s.
    -64-bit Unix epoch will be: “more than ten times the estimated age of the universe,” although I knew about this when Computerphile made a video on it several years ago: https://youtu.be/QJQ691PTKsA
    -In keeping with the unspoken Linux convention of recursive terms, I’d recommend a totally-lame segment called, “segment 2 != segment 1” — also known as “Segment 2NET1”. This segment should cover some more common commands to Linux in general like date, fold, sed (which is absolutely great btw), tail, etc. No need to go particularly diving, just pick out the most intuitive use-cases that you’d use with minimal typing. Very good learning tools.

    • not_Daniel

      Ok after listening again, I’m stupid. Instead of 2NET1, how about “Conky of the Week” featuring the latest config from around the web. I hope you guys take this one very deep. Hottest core temp, outside temp, current moon phase with not-stupid-looking moon pics, etc.

    • not_Daniel

      I also found out copying quotation marks from that post and pasting them into terminal apparently pastes the wrong quotation marks, they must a different unicode character than what the ” button is on your keyboard. I found out tick marks are better as they act the same way. See if the exact following works in your terminal: date -d ‘200 days’

      (the paste shortcut in terminal is: ctrl+shift+v)

      • not_Daniel

        Ok, I found copying tick marks from that post also doesn’t work. Just manually type the 2 tick marks using the ‘ key and it should work in terminal.

  2. Michael

    The yes command is not pointless. Like many things in Unix and Linux, it’s designed to assist in automating and scripting. The idea behind yes is to generate continuous output that you can pipe to another command or process. For example, if you need to script a command that asks a lot of interactive questions, and if the answer to those questions is always yes, then you just type “yes | command”. And of course if it’s no or anything else you can pass that as an argument to yes, as mentioned in the slide show[1].

    Rob also mentioned visudo, which he figured was useless, since it just appears to open the sudoers file in an editor (usually vi). In reality visudo is very important and on servers I administer, it’s the only way I allowed anyone to edit the sudoers file. The reason is that visudo doesn’t just open the sudoers file in the editor, but when you save and quit, visudo has sudo check the file for syntax errors and if it finds any, it throws you back to the editor to fix those errors. If you were to edit the sudoers file directly, say by doing “sudo vi /etc/sudoers”, and if you make a mistake and save and close the file, sudo will not work at all and on some distributions and OS’s without root passwords such as Ubuntu and OS X, you’ll be locked out of root until you go into single user mode and fix the problem. Ask me how I know this. 😉

    [1] I hate slideshows like those on Network World. They are nothing less than shameless attempts to drive up ad revenue.

  3. mikef90000

    May have mentioned this before, but Rob and Scott don’t seem to remember that you don’t need to add your username to the sudoers file to use sudo. Distros usually have a group set up for reasonable sudo permissions (fedora = wheel, debian = sudo). You just have to add yourself to that group (using root of course).

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