One of the great features of Boxee is that it can scan your local media collection and retrieves artwork and information from IMDb.com. It does this by doing regular expression matching on each file name to determine what movie, album, or TV episode it is. If you have a collection that is not well named [...]

Strangely enough there is no way to directly extract the contents of an .rpm package using the rpm (RPM Package Manager) tool. This feature can come in handy for example if you need to access a single file in a package but you don’t want to install it on your system. Fortunately there is a [...]

In many cases it can be helpful to access text from within a PDF file but accomplishing this can be next to impossible. Luckily in Linux there is a command line program called pdftotext which is included with the xpdf package. This first step is making sure that the xpdf package is installed. In Ubuntu [...]

Screen may be the most useful Linux applications when it comes to getting things done through the terminal. This custom screenrc configuration file will provide you with a permanent caption line at the bottom of each window. This caption line will enable you to easily keep track of each terminal window and provide other helpful [...]

The file command identifies the type or format of a file. It is a very handy command that can show you how to approach a file when the format is unknown. There are a variety of tests that it uses to determine its type, these tests include a filesystem test, magic number test, and language [...]