Two weeks ago I decided to try an email client instead of the web email interface I've always been used to. There were a couple of reasons for this, one was that I wished to have a copy of my mail on one of my machines, as I don't trust Google (as I have an @gmail.com account) entirely to keep my mail safe, the second reason was so that I could read and write replies to emails while not connected to the Internet (this came about as I recently got a laptop, which could be used in places without an Internet connection).

Recently I came across the command Ctrl-R in the bash shell. It allows you to search and browse your bash history.

For instance you ssh into your server every day, in between each ssh you do a bunch of other things, this makes in impractical to use the Up arrow key to go through your history to find the command. Instead hit Ctrl-R, and start typing ss, it will search your bash history for the last time you used a command with ss in it:

(reverse-i-search)`ss': ssh foo.servername.com

You hit 'Enter' and the line will be executed.

While using Gtk+ based applications you can use the middle mouse button on the scrollbar to move directly to that point, instead of moving to the point a page at a time.

In the bash shell curly braces { and } are surprisingly useful things to reduce typing.

With the mkdir command they help you create trees of directories in one command. For instance:

BLAG 6000 came out last week. BLAG is the fully Free distribution of GNU/Linux based upon Fedora. The current release in based upon Fedor